Say what you like about Van Buren, there’s no denying that a leisurely cruise down this crippled street is not without a certain horrific charm. Even beyond the dazzling side show of cheap whores, beyond the tanned, thin, tattooed, shirtless guys emerging from run-down courts and jaywalking into heavy traffic,…
Last month, Almitra Von Willcox left her San Diego home and went for a walk. And if all goes according to plan, the freelance photographer won’t return from her stroll until June 3, 2005–the date that the self-styled “Photo Gypsy” hopes to complete a ten-year trek around the world on…
In early June, Sheldon Weiner met with his employees at Family Archive Press, a Phoenix firm that published and telemarketed genealogy books. He said he wanted to respond to an anonymous note someone had dropped into a suggestion box. Tell Shelly to smile more, the note had said. This place…
Weasel Alert! As chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Jim Bruner cast the vote creating a sales tax that will fund a major league baseball stadium downtown. That move contributed to his being trounced in a bid for Congress last year, but don’t feel sorry for Jim. He…
On a cool night in early November, Muffin Shew left work at the Robinson’s department store in Paradise Valley Mall, like she always did, shortly after 9 p.m. She drove her big, old silver T-bird with the same sense of purpose with which she lived her life, barreling down the…
Cody Lundin, Primitive Guy, is ready to go. He is wearing no shoes in the parking lot of a Safeway store outside Prescott. This is a common thing for him, this not wearing shoes. He does not wear them at home, he does not wear them when he drives, he…
If crime and pestilence and natural disaster and the other perils of modern life make you want to stay at home with the doors and windows locked, think again. You’re not safe even there, as a Tempe family discovered when a plumber searching out a persistent water leak from a…
Given the opportunity last week to go head-to-head with Governor Fife Symington, Attorney General Grant Woods flinched. Not only did Woods pull his legal punches, refusing to seek criminal charges in his investigation of Project SLIM, the attorney general’s actions also raise serious questions about why Symington is being distanced…
Like organic tomatoes, natural peanut butter and tofu hot dogs, controversy has always been a hot commodity around Tempe’s Gentle Strength Co-op. Let someone suggest anything more substantive than “Have a nice day,” and you can be sure some disgruntled faction inside the member-owned cooperative will squawk that the organization…
The Rule Dave Alt faced the prisoner at Madison Street Jail. “You made a mistake, dude, a big, big mistake,” Alt told Jimmy Lee Luman in the fall of 1993. “You won’t beat her. Not in your dreams. You might beat the system. But she’s gonna haunt you until the…
Ignacio Alvaraz does not know much about the “cross-cultural two-nation vacations” being touted by the newly formed Center for Arizona-Sonora Regional Tourism Development. Then again, Alvaraz, a Yaqui Indian elder, didn’t travel to the United States from his native Mexico to sightsee. He came to inform fellow Yaquis in Arizona…
It’s Dumpster-diving paradise. And the best thing is you don’t have to dive into a smelly garbage can. Thanks to lax security by the state Department of Transportation, hundreds of condemned homes in the pathway of the Squaw Peak Parkway north of Shea Boulevard sit empty, vulnerable to anyone with…
A committee of criminal justice and mental health experts met regularly last year as the debate over Ardrey McFarland’s legal fate raged. The sessions did not always go smoothly. “There are so many angles on this,” says Superior Court Judge Robert Myers, who chaired the committee for a time. “We…
At Least It Wasn’t Larry Everyone knows GOP supermouth Newt Gingrich and his half-sister, Candace, are politically incompatible. An occasional mention of cyberspace aside, the House speaker generally supports his party’s ultraconservative wing. Candace, of course, is active in gay-rights issues and groups. Despite those differences, the Gingrich siblings had…
Steve Krafft, a reporter with Channel 10, asked last Friday if I’d print the Unabomber’s lengthy manuscript. This is the sort of question that’s supposed to stump journalists. There will be convention panels on this weighty matter all year long. Earlier in the week, the Unabomber had threatened to blow…
It didn’t take long for the investigation of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building to wind its way back to the nation’s 48th state. Within days, federal agents were swooping through Kingman, Mesa and even tiny Oatman, Arizona, in search of evidence and co-conspirators and anything else connected…
At least 13 times in the last 18 months, Department of Health Services investigators have found one or another of Steve Broe’s American Child Care Centers to have more children per adult caregiver than the law allows. And last fall, Craig Barton’s Camelback Desert School in north Scottsdale, which offers…
Another attempt to develop property in the historic Roosevelt neighborhood has been rejected. The proposed project was a new, expanded campus for Magnet Traditional School, the brightest star in the Phoenix Elementary School District, a school whose students score better on national tests than their district counterparts, and better than…
While workers begin the $1.7 million renovation of Governor Fife Symington’s office, the state’s historical landmark next door is going to hell in a handbasket. The Old Capitol Building, built in 1900, is in need of some care. There are holes in the domed ceiling where the plaster has fallen…
Not too long ago, an employee at the Arizona State Compensation Fund was questioned under oath during legal proceedings against the fund. Some of the questioning dealt with the work atmosphere inside State Fund headquarters. At one point, the questioning turned to The Firm, a film about a seemingly respectable…
Camille Kimball has a brand-new dog named Clara. She got it about a week ago to keep her company and to watch the central Phoenix home she bought a few months back. It is her first pet. She wants to teach it some tricks, and worries about whether she’ll be…
Lorne Shantz looks like a cop, even out of uniform. He’s so fresh-scrubbed he could have walked a beat in Mayberry, but instead he got a job as a patrol officer for the Arizona Department of Public Safety. In his 14 years with DPS, his worst offense was waiting a…
