Say Cheezy! State legislator Sue Grace caught a familiar sight, glancing up from her microphone at a candidates’ forum last week. It was Becky Fenger. And her camera. A bit of history: Fenger, who unsuccessfully challeged Grace in September’s Republican primary for the House of Representatives seat in District 24,…
The chairs in the dirt yard are draped with children openly eyeing me. They are too young and innocent to bother masking their curiosity. When their mother talks, they are quiet. “I don’t raise my kids that the police are some kind of Officer Friendly. I tell these children the…
An hour before the game started, Richard Dumas was out on the court, chewing gum and blowing gingerly on his hands to warm them up. He was always one of the first players out of the dressing room. His hair was cut very short. His eyes always seemed so wide…
Fred Linch leans forward. He glances down at his favorite breakfast of bacon, eggs and a toasted bagel. He sits at an outdoor table at Scott’s Generations Delicatessen. If Linch stares straight ahead, he can see the entire shopping-center parking lot at Seventh Street and Missouri. At 6:30 in the…
Perhaps it’s only an illusion brought on by overfrequent moviegoing, but it sometimes seems as if good movies tend to arrive in swarms. One slogs through months of scrounging what merit one can find out of dull movies, and then suddenly there come, all within a few weeks’ time, Quiz…
The race to lead the nation’s eighth-largest city has been so quiet that Skip Rimsza was able to undergo and recover from triple-bypass surgery this summer without missing a beat on the campaign trail. Rimsza, who represented north-central Phoenix on the city council until March, when he resigned to run…
The steer and the guy on horseback seem to burst from the gate at exactly the same time, but if you know charreria and have trained your eye on the action, you’ve seen the anxious horse fidgeting in place at the door, the spring of the wooden gate, the charro…
“Here we go!” exclaims Phoenix Mayor Thelda Williams, cutting a yellow ribbon and watching it flutter to her feet. Ribbon cuttings come with the mayoral turf, but Williams’ wielding of the ceremonial scissors last Saturday at a north Phoenix manufacturing plant was spiced with irony. For the past six months,…
These are troubled times for University of Arizona astronomers. Their 15-year effort to build a $200 million, seven-telescope observatory atop Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona is in jeopardy. Environmentalists hope to prevail soon in a long and bitter battle to keep the project out of 470 acres of old-growth spruce…
Dick Mahoney is relaxed. His left leg rests over the arm of a chair in the living room of his Encanto Park home. Mahoney seems at ease with himself. He has no regrets over his hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Sam Coppersmith holds a margin…
Buddy Ryan is a better football coach and a better man than all his detractors rolled into one big, fat jellyroll. I predict Ryan will demonstrate his coaching mettle this Sunday when the Arizona Cardinals defeat the Minnesota Vikings at Sun Devil Stadium. The Cardinals will stomp the Vikings. With…
To many people, Dennis Lamothe would seem to pose an unacceptable risk. For starters, on this scorching Saturday morning, he is busy loading three solid-propellant motors inside his very large–two stories high, 350 pounds–homemade rocket. The motors are encased in shiny aluminum tubes. They weigh about 40 pounds each. Each…
In about one week, Kathy Smith will endure a bitter anniversary. Two years have passed since she was called before her bosses and fired from a lucrative job selling advertising for the Yellow Pages in Phoenix. Smith and another salesperson named Kimberly Seagraves were fired at about the same time…
The calls started rolling in early last Thursday morning. CIGNA employees were calling to say that someone had emptied the New Times rack outside their Seventh Street and McDowell office and tossed all the newspapers into a nearby Dumpster. The employees said they wanted to read New Times’ cover story,…
This Just In: Channel 3 News Spoils Emmys The production numbers! The acceptance speeches! The bad gowns and worse hairdos! With this kind of excitement in the air, it was easy to overlook a brief disclaimer at the beginning of ABC’s televised Emmy Awards ceremony explaining that Channel 3 viewers…
Upon her death in 1981, Academy Award-winning costume designer Edith Head left $4,000 for the care of her cats. In his will, W.C. Fields, the screen’s premier child-hater, expressed a desire to fund a nondenominational school for orphans. And in papers filed in probate court following the 1978 bludgeoning death…
When you walk through the front door of Buddy Ryan’s bar on Washington Street, the first thing that hits you is the huge trophy case on your right. There are no trophies. You have to win something to get a trophy. In case you haven’t noticed, Ryan’s team doesn’t do…
Rick DeGraw grins. He has good reason. “On election night at 11 o’clock,” Rick DeGraw says, “I got a call from Terry Goddard’s campaign. “Terry was then leading Eddie Basha by 1,600 votes. They ask me, ‘Do you guys want to concede?’ “`This is some kind of joke, isn’t it?’…
I had time to kill. So before last Saturday night’s Arizona State football game, I went to Fat Tuesday, one of those joints that have created a blight along Mill Avenue in Tempe. You know the kind of place. If you have a ticket stub, they will give you $1…
“I felt warmth when I first walked in here,” recalls Rose Ellen Rosier. “The house hugged me.” But nearly four years after she originally crossed the threshold of her spacious, $116,000 home in Glendale’s Independence Park subdivision, that embrace has turned into a stranglehold. Today the 59-year-old invalid feels she’s…
La Donna Sell was talking to her son when she set down the phone to answer the door. Suddenly, she fell to the floor, as one spasm after another surged through her body. Writhing in convulsions, she lost consciousness. She had been struck by a grand mal seizure. La Donna’s…
The Arizona Department of Weights and Measures is breaking the law and endangering the environment by refusing to test recycled oil that is burned as fuel by heavy industry, according to an official at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Service stations and other maintenance shops must pay disposal services…
