They are tightening the noose on Bob Barnes’ long-shot campaign to become Arizona’s governor. On Tuesday, April 17, four Republican candidates have been invited to speak to the Lincoln Caucus at the west-side campus of Arizona State University. Barnes is the only candidate who’s been told he’s not welcome to…
Self-described teenage hoodlum Leigh Adelmann says his contact last year with the Jehovah’s Witnesses “turned me around and probably saved my life.” Now, the onetime punk is mad because his Intensive Probation officer won’t let him attend the sect’s meetings. “If I were a drug addict or an alcoholic,” says…
At twenty pounds, Air Major is a small dog. He is brown and has short hair and a nice wiggly tail. He barks at strangers before he warms up to them and licks their ankles. He is allowed to sleep on the couch, and even on his owner’s bed at…
In his seventies, Maurice “Biff” Niehaus of Cincinnati found an exciting new career. He had been a lawyer, then a state senator, then a judge. Last year, he became a “news distributor” of horror stories about his old chum Charlie Keating. The law of supply and demand was at work…
I live in a state where the official bird, the cactus wren, refuses to live in half the landscape. The official tree, the paloverde, appears leafless. The official necktie, the string bola, is so goofy most wives won’t let their husbands appear in one. Of the 400 richest people in…
City Sights ‘n’ Sounds, Phoenix’s noontime nod to the muses in Patriots Square, is under siege. By Oscar the Grouch. The daily one-hour serving of live music is the only regular, cheap cultural alternative to dirty-movie houses within miles of downtown. But someone in that swarm of high-rises surrounding the…
It’s early morning. Already, the phone is ringing. Bob Barnes, the most unrelenting of the Republican candidates for governor, is calling. “I’m preparing another position paper,” Barnes says tersely. “I’ll drop copies off at both your office and home today. I consider this to be an important document, one that…
If the Guinness Book of World Records has a category for Shortest Radio Talk-Show Appearance, I’m a shoo-in to make the next edition. In my role as New Times/KTAR-AM radio film critic, I was all set to go on Michael Dixon’s midday program to chat about the previous night’s Oscar-doling…
Maurice “Mickey” McDermott’s golf hat was pulled down over his forehead, but that couldn’t hide the laughter in his big Irish face. Down on his luck for years, the former Boston Red Sox pitcher had won $5.8 million in the Arizona lottery on February 7. McDermott, 62, sat on the…
At any time of day, the welcoming day rooms and lounges of Fellowship Towers are dotted with calm, cheerful people living out their retirements in secure, attractive surroundings. For nearly twenty years, the tall building at 222 East Indianola Avenue has opened its arms to hundreds of old men and…
It’s ten minutes until show time and the crowd pouring into the Royal Palms Inn’s dining room is eagerly awaiting the entrance of “The Dear That Made Milwaukee Famous.” Befitting the East Camelback resort’s reputation for “old-world elegance,” the largely geriatric audience is decked out in debonair, if slightly dated,…
The Arizona State Legislature has declared war on teenagers. A slew of bills introduced this session are aimed at eliminating the rights of nonadults to buy records, play loud music and drive cars. Capitol observers say they’ve never seen such an assault on youth’s right to self-indulgent self-expression. In a…
Yet Another Compelling True-Life Sci-Fi Docu-Drama in One Act (overheard from the next room) The curtain rises. The time: 9 p.m. The place: the spectacularly messy bedroom of a four-year-old boy, who is being tucked in by his spectacularly pregnant mother. BOY: Mom, will you read me a story? MOTHER:…
When the Babbitts abandoned Arizona to pursue the White House, they bequeathed Evan Mecham and Rose Mofford to those of us left behind. Not content with this questionable legacy, the Babbitts have once again taken to the road, most recently to midwive the birth of democracy in the unlikely precincts…
The disgusting smell jolted Darryleen Kelley last June 1 when she arrived for work at the Mesa Police Department. “I said to someone, `They must have found bugs as big as rats in here,'” recalls Kelley, an investigative assistant who had been with the East Valley department for a decade…
For doctors, there’s nothing like a pop medical malady to make the big bucks. Back in the Seventies, hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, was the fad of the day. Ten years later, many a physician got that second Benz as yuppies everywhere fell prey (or thought they did) to Epstein-Barr…
And now for the Super Bowl. Bill Bidwill, inept, incompetent and insensitive, is the single clear reason Arizona has “won” the Super Bowl for 1993. After two full seasons of play in Sun Devil Stadium, it was obvious to other National Football League owners that the Cardinals franchise was turning…
They said Phoenix was done. Over. A desert flash in the pan. Worse than Houston. You know who “they” are: the eastern media guys in their fey, little bow ties from Hart Schaffner & Marx. The Valley’s decline didn’t move off the front page of the national press until Donald…
Sam Steiger strolls behind the bar. The place is Penelope Parkenfarker’s sports bar on Cortez in Prescott. This isn’t Whiskey Row. That’s a much-bawdier area on Montezuma. Whiskey Row is two blocks away, fronts the Prescott County Courthouse and is anchored by heroic drinking emporiums like the Western Bar and…
Some stories are so rich they tell themselves. So picture chapter two of the Rose Mofford, Terry and Sam Goddard show. “Goddamn it, Rose,” Sam Goddard shouts into the telephone. “Who in the hell you been talking to?” “Wait a min . . . ,” the governor sputters. “How did…
This is the kind of family I married into. My wife has an aunt named Ha Ha. Actually, her name is Charlotte, but years ago, when my wife’s sister was just learning to talk, it came out “Ha Ha.” The tragic result: a bright, attractive woman has had to spend…
Now that there is a baseball future, writers across the country are peering into their highball glasses in hopes of seeing it. This is something they do every year. These somber prognostications are often hilarious, more often pathetic, hardly ever correct. Still, the writers scrawl. Following are my predictions for…
