The cavalry came to the rescue on the afternoon of June 12, 1992. State inspectors handed a restraining order to Corliss Ford, operator of the Autumn Rest adult-care home in west Phoenix. The order, signed earlier that day by a Maricopa County judge, instructed Ford to remove the eight elderly…
Dean Brewer quickly crosses the Courtyard by Marriott parking lot, glancing repeatedly over his right shoulder toward the hotel lobby. “There’s a photographer in there,” he says nervously. “No photographs.” Brewer continues at a quick pace into an alley between two office buildings. He has a story to tell, but…
Department of Health Services inspection supervisor Cathy Rodriguez says the truth of her own mortality often hits her when she’s out in the field. “You’re looking at someone and you say to yourself, ‘That’s me 40 years from now,'” says Rodriguez. “This country does not realize what it’s facing. We’re…
Months after allegations of union corruption and favoritism first surfaced at the U S West Direct Yellow Pages sales office in Phoenix, investigations into the company and officers of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1269 are mushrooming. Three federal agencies have now been asked to probe various allegations…
Hillya Mooney’s voice on the telephone, so chipper, so sweetly cadenced, gave no hint of the story she would finally tell. “You wrote about me in your column,” said Hillya, pausing to allow words of acknowledgment to float back to her on the line. But I could not place her…
In a downtown Phoenix law office, filed along with hundreds of other documents, are four unique sheets of letter-size paper. They are the personal notes of Arizona State University President Lattie Coor–written in his own tall hand–of a meeting held on March 25 of this year. The curtain was falling…
It’s showtime, and the crowd is restless. Already on their feet, the fans wait impatiently for the band to begin, shifting and murmuring in the tightly packed aisles. The keyboard player belatedly steps to the microphone, squinting through the glare of the stage lights. “Are you ready to move?” he…
On the evening of December 6, Wendy Cracchiolo-Sheedy gave birth to a six-pound, 15-ounce baby girl, “who looks like an angel, teensy-tiny and perfect.” She named the child Antoinette Catherine Sheedy. It was a miracle of sorts, because just a year earlier, after a double miscarriage, several surgeries and expensive…
When he placed a romance ad in the Globe tabloid, Ed Goldwater says he was “just a lonely guy that wanted to meet a nice woman.” The Mesa chiropractor thought he’d found her in Mary “Kathy” Cook, a respiratory therapist living in Virginia. The two began a courtship by letter…
It was 10 a.m. Prosecutor Warren Granville had just concluded with the first part of his final argument. Granville had forcefully told the jury why it must find Jimmy Robison guilty. The lawyers in the crowded, 11th-floor courtroom of Judge Norman Hall nodded to each other. Granville’s argument had been…
Totally tiki! Radically rattan! Bombastically bamboo! Gloriously garish, even! But no matter how you looked at it (and over the years, millions of motorists, many coming to and from Sky Harbor International Airport, did), the landmark motel at the intersection of 24th Street and Van Buren was perfectly Polynesian. How…
Recently confirmed U.S. Attorney Janet Napolitano gets the biggest round of applause when dignitaries are introduced, but all eyes are on Cindy Resnick and Cathy Eden. The occasion, this December evening, is an opportunity to hear EMILY’s List founder Ellen Malcolm speak. Both Resnick and Eden, Democratic state legislators, are…
“I think I was like a little girl at Christmas,” Karan English says. With the McDowell Mountains behind her and a dozen rapt faces before her, English is sitting in the library of north Scottsdale’s Mountainside Middle School, telling the student council about her first year as Arizona’s first congresswoman…
Cinthia Gannett says she’s “still waiting for justice for my grandma.” She may not have to wait much longer. Sources say the state Attorney General’s Office is about to take a huge step toward Gannett’s goal of “justice” with criminal indictments against prominent Mesa attorney Wayne Legg and Webber Mackey,…
Here’s something to consider while you wonder whether your house lies in the path of the information highway: Earlier this year, Phoenix quietly amended its contract with Dimension Cable to drop language requiring the company to install a two-way industrial cable-TV network paralleling residential lines. Among the industrial network’s imagined…
Evan Mecham, Arizona’s only impeached governor, can’t make headlines these days, no matter how hard he tries. Four years ago, the ousted Republican governor announced plans to launch his own Phoenix newspaper, an “unbiased” publication to compete with the impertinent scribes who insisted on chronicling the financial and political quirks…
Fear never strikes out. Now even Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson deems it acceptable to boast on public television of a newly purchased rottweiler and home security system. Johnson explains: “We had a gentleman who was crawling in and out of our windows. He broke into our personal things. When arrested,…
Jerry Colangelo’s plan to build a glorious, open-air baseball stadium in downtown Phoenix has Norman King sitting somewhere in the infield. King, proprietor of King’s Onion House, is a 34-year-old farmer’s son who has run a produce operation in an almost-historic building at 425 East Jackson for seven years. He…
When he bought Phoenix Suns season tickets to give away to his customers, Brian James, general manager of a club called Houlihan’s, thought he was exhibiting business acumen and doing his part to back the Suns. But then James made the mistake of advertising his ticket-giveaway promotion. Suns management told…
Snowbirds! Arizona merchants love em, Arizona motorists hate em, Steve Benson lampoons em. Beyond that, they’re fairly unobtrusive to most Valley residents. But in Arizona’s hinterlands, snowbirds are a much bigger deal–economically, socially and, increasingly, politically. Consider the case of sparsely populated Mohave County–an area the size of Massachusetts with…
The owner of Le Girls–a nude juice bar at 5151 East Washington–faces fines and a possible prison sentence after pleading guilty to obscenity and liquor violations at a topless club in Kansas. The Kansas City, Kansas, club, Legs, has been ordered closed for at least two years, and its owners…
For years, the tall man drank alone. He would arrive before noon at the bar of his choice, with a tumbler brought from home in his hand. Placing it on the bar, he would stare down at the bartender from his six feet four inches until he caught the attention…
