Morton Downey Jr. is at the vital center of a fascinating urban mystery. Downey claims he was attacked by skinheads in the men’s room of the San Francisco airport. He says they chopped off clumps of his hair and marked his face with swastikas. But there’s some doubt that Downey…
I used to look forward to my son’s birthday, but the event isn’t nearly as much fun as it once was. The lad is catching on. First birthdays are the best. One-year-olds have no idea what a birthday is, and no expectations means no disappointments. You don’t have to deck…
First of all, you must be lucky. I can never really understand what’s happening in a trial merely by reading newspaper accounts. For example, no matter how much I read about Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s trial, I remain a prisoner of the impression he made during the televised Iran-Contra hearings…
Just eight days ago, on April 25, Craig Malmstrom entered an Arizona State University classroom armed with a semi-automatic 9mm pistol. When he confronted three blacks who were giving a presentation to the class, Malmstrom had one bullet advanced into the chamber and the safety was off. He carried two…
In California, it’s a hazardous waste, but in Arizona, it’s a bargain. It’s used oil from industrial plants, car engines and a host of other sources, and it’s polluted with an alchemist’s nightmare of heavy metals and PCBs. California doesn’t want it. But trainload-size gaps in Arizona law have resulted…
One of these days Oliver North is probably going to be found guilty by that Washington jury. Once the verdict condemning the Marine war hero is reached, the battle to save him will begin in earnest. The outcry against sending North to jail will make the abortion demonstrations seem like…
When you see it for the very first time, steaming up from the table in front of you, Mexican food doesn’t look like something that was planned. A glop of brownishness sits by itself on this corner of the plate. Something doughy and tubular rests over here, covered with a…
There’s an obvious problem when you’re known as “the iron lady.” Everyone wants to see if you’re really as tough as you seem. Or if the title is more about bluster than guts. So far, the first woman speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives has shown she doesn’t blink…
For the third year in a row, a New Times writer has been named Arizona’s top print journalist. Deborah Laake won the Arizona Press Club’s Virg Hill Journalist of the Year Award at the club’s annual banquet on Saturday night. Staff writer Terry Greene was last year’s winner, and staff…
Ralph Milstead thinks heterosexual officers present the best public image for the Department of Public Safety. The opinion of the chief of the state police didn’t change with the embarrassing revelations that one of Arizona’s finest made a habit of stopping female motorists and demanding sex in exchange for overlooking…
On many weekday mornings, Acme Records publicist Wendy Harte sits in her suburban Los Angeles office and prepares press kits to get the word out to the media about semifamous rock bands with colorful names like E.I.E.I.O. and Thin White Rope. Sometimes, Harte says, she works so hard that she…
Last month, Phoenix shut down two more heavily used drinking-water wells in Maryvale, saying that they are suspected of sucking up more and more swill from an underground plume of TCE-contaminated groundwater. TCE, an industrial solvent, is a suspected carcinogen. Officials point out that the water from the most recently…
Land baron DENNIS DeCONCINI, already flushed with embarrassment over the looting of half a million bucks from his campaign treasury, is trying to steal a toilet from a union. The wealthy Democratic senator’s staffers in Tucson recently moved into new offices only to discover that they had to share a…
Margo Adams walks into the room. Suddenly, everybody starts acting like a man of the world. By now, you know Margo, I’m sure. Yes, THAT Margo. Penthouse magazine! Wade Boggs of the Boston Red Sox! Barbara Walters! Margo flounces into Alexilion the other day with B.J. Hunter on her arm…
The experts agree that mothers do not have a biological, psychological or natural advantage that automatically makes them better kiddie-caretakers than fathers. Obviously, the experts have never watched a guy change a diaper. There are many areas in which men excel. They grow superior mustaches. They can wear boxer shorts…
It was like a trip in a time tunnel. I stood near the fountain at Arizona State last Friday as students demonstrated against racism on the campus. The sun was hot enough to drive you into the pavement. The crowd wasn’t large. Given the obscene actions of the campus police,…
“They were being called niggers and coons, sure, but it wasn’t racial. It was just the basic tension of the fight. Just like if they were from Poland, you’d call them Polacks.” Nineteen-year-old Sean Hedgecock, accused by critics of starting a race riot at Arizona State University, sat in his…
While chatting with a new club member, the spry septuagenarian we’ll call Marge suddenly shakes her head as if objecting to a half-baked recipe for apple brown Betty or a particularly ill-advised knitting stitch. “No, no, NO!” she interjects, cutting off her colleague in mid-sentence. “Listen, that’s never going to…
If the clubfooted Terry Goddard administration is to blame for bungled dreams like Patriots Square (and it is), it also deserves a stirring tribute for the Mercado. This marvelous and near- kitschy jumble of shops, restaurants and offices going up across the street from Heritage Square promises to be the…
Like hanging on to an old dress in case it’s ever back in style, we keep returning to downtown Phoenix. Giving up on the old place seems a horrible admission that this city really doesn’t have a soul. One city council after another has promised a lively downtown, as young…
Unlike the crowds that amble through St. Peter’s Square, few people ever venture to downtown Phoenix’s grease-stained concrete piazza–the courtyard of the Phoenix Civic Plaza. In the summer, those inhospitable acres of cement stretching out from Symphony Hall are just too hot for human beings to endure. In the winter,…
Back in the days when Phoenix was little more than a supply depot for the calvary, a block of modest shops was built along dusty roads that one day would become the major thoroughfares of downtown Phoenix. As the original townsite, it was called Square One. Phoenix is now a…
