The man was absorbed in vacuuming the gravel that graced the front yard of his house in Sun City when photographer Allen Dutton cruised past. Dutton was there to document life in the retirement community, and this improbable spectacle was more than he could resist. “How come it doesn’t pick…
It’s 2:05 p.m. on a Wednesday. We’re working the second-shift patrol out of Sun City Sheriff’s Posse headquarters. My partner’s name is Jack Goodrich. Moved out here from Omaha a few years ago after retiring from Union Pacific Railroad. Me? I’m a civilian just along for the ride. Things seem…
I was an illegal alien in Del Webb’s community of oldsters. For seven months in 1984 and 1985, I lived in a Sun City condominium owned by my parents. Because I was only 28 at the time, this was a problem. In fact, it was more than a problem, it…
Like most people, my only regular exposure to Sun City-ites is what I hear them say on talk radio. “Okay, next we go to Raymond in Sun City,” the host says. “Ray, thank you for calling.” What usually follows is five minutes of bitter invective aimed at politicians, liberals, lawyers,…
Some scenes cling to your mind. They are so powerful that they are impossible to block out. For me, there will always be that remarkable television footage of an enraged Evan Mecham pounding his little fist on the counter at the secretary of state’s office. “You have a Martin Luther…
So it’s shocking that Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies used stun guns on environmental protesters in little Mobile? And it floors you that Arizona’s elected officials and oxymoronic Department of Environmental Quality don’t always act in the best interests of the state’s citizens? That shouldn’t be news to anyone who has…
PRODUCTION: hit list measure includes five inches for an addition on Monday. Please save that amount of space. The day after Grand Canyon University fired basketball coach Bill Westphal April 5, he met with his team one last time. Westphal said some parting words and handed each player a copy…
Peering from beneath a thicket of false eyelashes, the ageless Acquanetta carefully scrutinizes a publicity photo of the four young women who call themselves the Aquanettas. “It’s been very strange,” admits the 69-year-old one-time horror movie starlet as she examines a cassette copy of the Aquanettas’ Love With the Proper…
This is what Pete Span believes. Two United States marshals went to the home of his elderly father in search of a fugitive. Without a warrant, the officers ransacked the house and roughed up the 74-year-old man. After leaving the father’s home, the marshals went to the Span family’s place…
She looked small and frail and bewildered. Her fashionably bobbed hair, like so many women wore in 1931, needed washing. Her dress and hose were soiled. Her gaunt cheeks showed her hunger. Her enormous eyes didn’t seem to focus. She cradled her left hand, a bullet still embedded, already gangrenous…
Max Lehman is packing. Boxes and bags filled with clay, paint and scraps of paper surround him on the wood floor, the remains of six months’ work. Lehman, 28, is one of five artists whose home is likely to be leveled for the further downtown development expected to be spurred…
Suntans, once the gift of Mother Nature and now a commodity purveyed under tanning lamps all over town, are about to be placed on a par with some kinds of drugs. Just as prescriptions for Valium are recorded by the corner pharmacist, the number of suntans a person can purchase…
Mo Udall may be the only Arizona politician, aside from the retrograde Bob Stump, who isn’t scrambling to define himself as an environmentalist these days. What with Earth Day, an “environmental” president and unprecedented public support, almost every politician is going about in environmentalist drag. Small wonder why. The New…
J. Fife Symington III grew up on a 500-acre estate in the blue-blood Maryland hunt country. There were neighbors with names like S. Bonsal White Jr. and Benjamin Howell Griswold IV. Symington went to Harvard. His father went to Princeton. The family owned a steel mill. Symington is a man…
Perhaps the most dramatic revelations to come out of the huge savings and loan disaster will come during the trial of Charles Keating. That trial, which will be heard here in Phoenix before U.S. District Court Judge Richard Bilby, still is probably a year away. But now the possibility of…
It seemed my son was just starting to get the hang of having a sister when he said, “Hey, dad. When Jessica gets a little older, I’m going to buy her a Barbie doll!” He promptly shattered the illusion by adding, “And then we can play `Barbie versus Godzilla’!” The…
James Devine picks up an empty Silver Bullet near the curb of a downtown Phoenix street. It’s 7:30 on an early-April morning. He crushes the can with his boot, and tosses it into his large plastic sack. The bag is almost filled from the previous afternoon’s work, but there’s always…
Doug Lynch was the best and the brightest that the ROTC program at Arizona State University had to offer in the early 1980s. For four consecutive semesters ending with the spring of 1984, he won election as the military program’s “outstanding cadet” and maintained its highest grade point average. Lynch’s…
This April Fools’ Day, Diana Wiley watched Tyrone Childs fall on his knees and collapse in a dusty, littered backyard in Ajo, Arizona. She remembers thinking the pistol that Pima County sheriff’s deputy Mark Penner fired at her lover must have had fake bullets. Why else would the .45- caliber…
Sometime back in 1960, a full decade before Earth Day I, a Texas-bred hausfrau rolled out of her bed in Hawaii, donned one of her trademark muumuus (which she fashioned from old shower curtains or cast-off bedspreads), parked herself in front of her typewriter and forever changed the way America…
Phoenix Councilmember Howard Adams has a thing about snakes, at least snakes in art. And when artist Luis Jimenez proposed to greet visitors arriving at Sky Harbor Airport with a gigantic image of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent of Aztec mythology, Adams practically had a meltdown. Adams didn’t care what the…
The Arizona Legislature has been widely criticized for not getting much done this session on important issues. Lawmakers have been meeting since January, seemingly with little positive result. What, people ask, are they doing down there? The best way to follow the action at the state house is by reading…
