The other day, quite by accident, I received a fascinating notice in the mail about Keith Turley. It was an alumni bulletin from Arizona State University, and it reported that Turley, the retired head of Arizona Public Service Company, had been granted an honorary doctor’s degree by the school. Dr…
These hectic days, all bargain-conscious holiday shoppers must, as a matter of faith, make their pilgrimage to I. Magnin. I. Magnin, the luxury department store that helps anchor Sam Grossman’s Biltmore Fashion Park, is going out of business. Everything in the store, remodeled only recently at a cost of millions,…
Dr. Brian Finkel is an outgoing bear of a man given to bursts of enthusiasm and outrage. Even though he has a long history of working with the press, on first meeting, he seems overeager to impress, to demonstrate that he is one of the good guys. After a while,…
Can You Spell “Sellout”? By Tom Fitzpatrick Jerry Rubin died last week. He was 56. Once a famous Vietnam War protester, Rubin was struck by a car near his affluent Los Angeles home and never regained consciousness. They said he was jaywalking. I remember him as a young man. With…
L.S. Shoen is a lonely, 78-year-old man who now lives in a small tract house outside Las Vegas. He is regarded by some as a business genius, responsible for building the billion-dollar U-Haul empire. He has fathered 12 children. Some hate him enough to have run him off from the…
Don’t go breaking my heart. Carla was singing along to the radio as she slid out of her jeans. It was April 16, 1991, and Carla, who was 14, was spending the night with her brother and sister at the apartment of their Sunday-school teacher, Douglas Gates. Gates was a…
Attorney Richard Gierloff admits he’s had some dogs for cases during his legal career. But until a black, male chow named Gunner trotted into his life, Gierloff had never defended an actual canine in a court of law. The tale of Gunner’s recent reprieve from a date with a Maricopa…
Charles Barkley strolled underneath the stands to the Phoenix Suns’ dressing room. Barkley appeared nervous. He was ill at ease. Like a rookie before his first big game, he seemed tentative. A sportswriter from a daily newspaper who covers Barkley regularly attempted to make small talk. He spoke innocently. But…
Congressman Newt Gingrich is one of those staunch Republican figures who has the courage to stand up for family values. In a cynical age, we are often too willing to snicker at such men. We do so at our own peril. They are the backbone of the Republican party, which…
Just a couple of miles north of Interstate 8, where the freeway cuts through some of southwest Arizona’s harshest desert, lies a narrow ribbon of riverfront property that is one of the most productive farming areas in the world. A relatively few farmers there–perhaps 125–like to brag that they can…
“Hempy Halloween,” proclaims the sticker plastered on the door of a conference room at the Hermosa Inn. Above the slogan is the image of a jaunty jack-o’-lantern with a joint dangling from its mouth. Elsewhere, a couple of children whose parents are attending the convention skateboard around the sidewalks of…
“I think that I shall never see/A tort lovely as a tree.” Or something like that. Bill and Sherri McDowell of Scottsdale probably wouldn’t find humor in that variation on the famous Joyce Kilmer line. After all, their lawyer has told a judge that the McDowells are suffering “irreparable harm”…
He’s been around. The veteran baseball writer has covered every World Series and every All-Star game since 1958. He is so highly regarded by his peers that he has already been inducted into the baseball-writers’ wing of the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. No one now covering baseball has such…
Attorney Steve Doncaster, an ardent cyclist, was pedaling home from work the other day. He was heading west on Washington Street from his office at Salt River Project when a car pulled out of a side street, crashing into Doncaster and his bike head-on. The driver fled. A Good Samaritan…
You might not be surprised to learn that Alex Gonzalez is an unhappy camper, considering he has spent much of the last four years in pawnshops. For the Arizona Pawnshop Association and its public-image-improvement efforts, the problem is that you might not be surprised; for Gonzalez, who has been fingerprinted…
David Wilbur Studli’s voice sounds disconnected and hollow, like he’s calling up from the bottom of a well. He speaks in short, nervous bursts of words that come quickly but still sound flat and murmurous. He is talking on a speaker phone from a room somewhere inside an Arizona state…
Everyone’s a Critic “I made some stupid mistakes,” Eddie Basha says matter-of-factly. Once again, “chubby grocer” is his full-time occupation. During a ten-minute phone interview Monday from Bashas’ Inc. headquarters, the vanquished Democratic gubernatorial nominee employs some brutal adjectives to summarize his performance against Fife Symington–like ignorant, unsophisticated and naive…
Bill Lowery has a police officer’s poker face and a flat and factual Jack Webb voice. “I’m not a police officer, but I talk to a lot of them,” he says. Lowery is a salesman, and he sells the future of police work in a box of circuits and silicon…
The police reports describing the South Mountain High School riot are written in the idiom of men apparently striving to emulate the literary style of a veteran sergeant. All drama is drained. The tone is monotonous. The repetition of phrases fogs the reader’s mind. But after you’ve read enough police…
When Roberto Frietz, now 39, was a student at South Mountain High School in the 1970s, a riot brought on by racial tensions broke out at the school. “I had no charges brought against me, because I wasn’t a participant,” Frietz recalls. “But I still remember what it was like…
There was a time when Bob Crane was even more famous than O.J. Simpson. But that was years ago, and our memories are short. Crane’s every movement was noted with a sort of breathless wonder by gossip columnists across the country. If Crane was seen in the company of a…
Tom Cutler walks through the corporate training room preparing for his evening sales meeting, pausing for a moment to fiddle with the flowers on the front table. The 33-year-old businessman is most at home here, surrounded by a buzz of new clients and suited sales folks. Cutler is no stranger…
