The life of your average barroom sot is getting better. No, beer and whiskey have not become cheaper or any less debilitating. No, the long-term health benefits of cigarette smoke have not finally been revealed. Neither pool nor darts has been proven to be an IQ enhancer. Pickled eggs are…
“He is wrong and I am right,” the voice says. “Clearly, I am right and you are wrong, and you surely must know it,” comes the reply. Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah! Will they stick out their tongues? Pout or resort to spitballs? No, these attacks are not squabblings overheard in a schoolyard. Rather,…
Blame it on the holidays, the leftover eggnog or those sappy long-distance telephone commercials on TV, but I’ve been thinking about calling my father. It’s not like we chat at the beginning of every new year. Or at the beginning of every new decade. I haven’t seen or spoken to…
The caller wanted to talk to Peter Hester about death. Hester, a self-styled adventurer, amateur archaeologist and the most notorious of Arizona’s pot hunters–those who excavate long-abandoned Indian villages and burial sites for knowledge, fun and profit–is familiar with the subject. Digging from the ground what is left behind by…
Glen Christensen’s life came to its untimely end as the sun dawned on the hottest day ever recorded in the City of Phoenix. Christensen was asleep in his bedroom at the Fontanelle Supervisory Care Home when the building’s air-conditioning system broke down around 2 a.m. on June 26, 1990. A…
“Laissez les bon temps rouler!” Translation? “Let the good times roll!”–which just happens to be the official motto of Fat Tuesday, a New Orleans-style bar and restaurant in Tempe that promises customers a virtual Mardi Gras on Mill. But for the past three years, the Atlanta-based chain has unwittingly been…
Maricopa County’s “drug war” generals are taking aim at the local Asian community and want to use the unprecedented method of wiretapping fax transmissions. The federally funded high-tech blitz, which also would include a $70,000 surveillance van and equipment to intercept beeper messages and cellular-telephone conversations, would be conducted by…
We make the mistake of rooting for the underdog. Pretty soon, our hearts cloud our judgment. That’s why I felt so sure the other night that college basketball’s upset of the year was about to happen. I’d read the advance stories about Princeton’s basketball team in the New York Times…
I’ve been thinking of selling my son into the foreign slave market before he becomes a teenager. It is now clear I have no other choice. A confrontation with thirty moronic high school boys who want to beat one up during their lunch break at Burger King tends to solidify…
“When it came to a dead reporter,” John Harvey Adamson said, “they just put him in the ground and turned him over to the worms.” I was sitting in a small room with Adamson in the Arizona State Prison at Florence. He was in shackles that held his arms pinned…
We did not know what we would discover. We knew only that a singular monument to man’s industrious spirit, a dam, was altering the handiwork of God, the Grand Canyon. For six months, Kathleen Stanton roamed the West: From the rapids of the Colorado River beneath the towering walls of…
Phoenix school principal Camerino Lopez figured he had the perfect forum in which to express his surprising views on the chief threats to America’s youth. As Arizona’s only representative on the 26-member National Commission on Drug-Free Schools, Lopez was eager to get his new point of view out for public…
A top lieutenant in County Attorney Richard Romley’s drug war makes money from TASC, the private agency hired by Romley’s office to treat offenders in the vaunted Do Drugs/Do Time program. Romley’s office hired TASC in 1989–without competitive bidding–to run its “diversion” program, which treats first-time drug offenders. The County…
From coast to coast, from playground to barroom, an enfeebled whine rings out across the land. All together now: “I’ve fallen . . . and I can’t get up!” Yes, once again America has fallen for a line. “It’s the big joke around here,” reports an insider at Channel 12,…
Flocks of snowbirds hover once again on the Arizona horizon. Jetting through the skies or trundling across the mountains in Winnebagos and large, late-model sedans they come, fleeing the Midwest’s December chill to bask in the balmy warmth of our desert sunshine. The Chamber of Commerce tells us to love…
In the spring of 1987, when the antics of Governor Evan Mecham dominated the news, a combination of skillful salesmanship, tough new laws and blind luck was quietly propelling the state to the front lines of the budding national “war” on drugs. Nearly four years later, the drug war is…
In September, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office made headlines. Early that month, its lawyers won what it called a major battle in the state’s ongoing drug war by securing a judgment against reputed drug kingpin Isidro Ibarra Chaidez. The verdict allowed the state to confiscate $1.8 million in property and…
Hey, Mom and Dad! You’d better be good, you’d better not cry, you’d better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why . . . Santa Claus might drop down your chimney with a bagload of these honest-to-God, brand-name Idiot Kiddie Gifts From Hell, available at your friendly, local toy-store chain. Sugar…
On August 12, Louis Bernard Harper was sentenced to fifty years in prison. An unemployed black resident of South Phoenix, Harper had sold a single $20 rock of crack to undercover police officers. It was his first drug offense. The White House, as well as then- drug czar William Edward…
It was George Bush’s first nationwide address as president. When it was over and Bush finally put away the bag of “crack” cocaine, the network correspondents asked, “Just how do you wage a war against drugs–against the `casual users’?” “Go to Phoenix, folks. Take a look at what they’re doing…
Rather than write a formal criticism of the Arizona Republic under the regime of its new publisher John P. “Skippy” Zanotti, Tom Fitzpatrick has decided to allow Republic reporters to interview him as they would any other critic. Interviewers: Do you like the way the Republic looks these days? Fitz:…
The stands around the baseball diamond at University Park in downtown Phoenix are spotted with spectators but no one is playing ball at 10 a.m. on Friday. These people are just sitting, homeless. J.R. Murphy, a veteran of the streets himself, moves among the men stretched out on the grassy…
