The owners of a burning backyard in the White Mountains finally have moved out of the danger zone, after two years of battling one of Arizona’s most expensive and least-publicized toxic disasters. Art and Lynn Shupe and two of their neighbors recently reached an out- of-court settlement with paper giant…
The local chapter of Little Criminals Who Luck Out was inadvertently started about four years ago. It works like this: You’re a fourteen- year-old kid who burglarizes a house and gets locked up in Adobe Mountain, a state prison for juveniles. After promising to be a good kid, you’re paroled…
During one of those postcollege years when young men flounder around not knowing what to do next, Allen had a job in a laundry. This was in Los Angeles. At the end of the day, Allen would add up long columns of figures–shirts and trousers, cleaned and pressed–and put a…
Did Jim Morrison meet his maker in a Paris bathtub in 1971? Or did the rock star really learn of a top-secret plan to kill him, causing him to fake his own death and forcing him to hide out in a Spanish monastery, where he actually died of natural causes…
My five-year-old son calls it “chicken pops,” as if it were a new poultry-flavored brand of breakfast cereal. But the truth is, chicken pox is worse than that. If you can imagine such horror. The nastiest aspect of this contagious kiddie disease is not that it makes your children look…
In 1989 Garth Brooks had a song called “Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old.” It was about a rodeo cowboy, and one of the lines went, “a worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux, lonely women and bad booze/Seem to be the only friends I’ve left at all.” Bill Taylor…
Where else would Hollywood go to shoot a movie titled The Vagrant? Phoenix, the setting for enough downbeat titles to program an all-existential film festival, is again playing host to makers of movieland magic and/or muck. The Vagrant came to town last week. Production trucks, lights, cameras, actors–even a few…
Gary Callahan never had time to name his yacht. Too bad. He might have called it “Lady Luck.” First, the bad luck: The veteran U.S. Border Patrol agent was accused of ripping off a cocaine smuggler and sending the drugs to Phoenix, where they were peddled by a Paradise Valley…
U.S. pilots flying Gulf War missions in Apache Attack Helicopters say they are tired of battling the enemy. But it’s not the Iraqi army that’s making them weary. The shooting war is over, and the opposing forces have been easily routed. The pilots’ primary adversary, they insist, is much more…
Yet Another Compelling True-Life Sci-Fi Docu-Drama in One Act The curtain rises. The time: 9 p.m. The place: the spectacularly messy bedroom of a five-year-old boy who is being tucked into bed. BOY: Dad, I’m gonna tell you a bedtime story tonight. Okay? MAN: Ooooh, good! What’s the name of…
The day before she resigned from the Arizona State Legislature last week, just an hour before she showed up at the Capitol for the second day of her ethics evidentiary hearings, Representative Sue Laybe was picking at a peach cobbler at the Golden Rule Cafe and recalling the afternoon when…
The terrible truth is that there can be no statute of limitations on moral crimes. Watch the final scene of the new film Guilty by Suspicion and you will understand. Robert De Niro strides from the hearing room of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He has refused to name friends…
Eleanor Schorr’s office at the Arizona State Capitol has such a grandmotherly ambiance that a visitor half expects to be served milk and cookies. A homemade quilt hangs on one wall, a bowl of fresh fruit and an iris adorn her coffee table, and photographs of her children and grandkids…
Separated by a sturdy little Plexiglas window but with a small slit in the wall so they could exchange paperwork, the two men stood in their little cubicles and argued. It was an uncomfortable situation, but Steven L. Brown was so angry he actually was glad he was not in…
The Kuwaitis were smiling and gesturing grandly as they led us to the bodies. Half a dozen reporters who had arrived in newly liberated Kuwait City the night before wanted to see evidence of the atrocities inflicted by the Iraqi army during its final, frantic hours of occupation. The locals…
These two guys sit down at a table in the basement of the Memorial Union at Arizona State University. They’re young, kind of geeky, probably freshmen. They pull McDonald’s hamburgers from paper sacks. It’s 12:30, lunchtime, Friday afternoon: Showtime for the Farce Side, ASU’s student-run comedy troupe. Loud rock music…
At her first court appearance after she became famous for a new reason, Senator Carolyn Walker enraged the public that had once adored her. She said hardly a word as she did so. Standing tall in a jewel-green suit, she allowed the wavy-haired Richard Gierloff to request that she be…
The haunted face of Bob Simon, once a self-assured and cocky CBS correspondent, tells us all we need to know about the senseless cruelty of war. Simon and the members of his television crew appeared on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. They had just been released by the Iraqi army,…
They finally elected Bill Veeck to baseball’s Hall of Fame. I don’t pretend to know how that honor would sit with him, though. Even though he was an owner most of his years in the game, Veeck was always considered an iconoclast. While most owners have always thought a baseball…
People keep asking me if I think Arizona’s two senators will get away with it. I tell them I don’t think so. Everyone tells me I’m wrong because by the time elections come around everyone will forget. But this time, I don’t think people will forget the strange alliance that…
The competition over who shall rule east Phoenix–its developers or its neighborhoods–is shifting into overdrive as the City Council prepares to vote this month on a hard-fought plan guiding future growth around the area’s commercial core at 24th Street and Camelback Road. As the council’s March 20 vote approaches, the…
Since there are more people outside the world’s prisons than within them, I guess it’s safe to assume that most child-rearing methods work, no matter how nutty they seem. But sometimes you wonder–like when you spend three days playing host to house guests from the What, Me Worry? School of…
