Jerry Millison was overcome with anguish on the afternoon of May 12. “He wondered for a second just how screwed up he had to be before someone would help him,” a friend of Millison’s recalls. Millison, 41, had a history of mental illness, substance abuse and three suicide attempts. The…
By now, everyone knows that Governor J. Fife Symington III has legislative approval to remodel his offices, which inhabit the top two floors of the state’s Executive Tower. The $1.7 million project has drawn criticism from the usual suspects–particularly the media–who are complaining that the rehab is far too lavish,…
So Let’s Do Lunch, Mr. Nixon Raena Honan’s a self-described conservative Christian Republican who counts among her most-treasured possessions a photograph of herself flanked by U.S. Senator Jon Kyl and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. So why can’t she get an audience with Mr. Rightward Republican himself, Governor J. Fife Symington…
Seen from the street, the Valley’s most fabled restaurant doesn’t look like much, just a boxy, Pepto Bismol-colored building badly in need of a paint job. The only decoration is the sad-looking awning over the front door, an entrance that doesn’t get used much, anyway. On the roof is the…
The middle-aged clerk at the sundry shop touches her brown, feathered hair, gazing appreciatively at the bodies pushing into the main exhibit hall at Phoenix Civic Plaza for the National Rifle Association convention. “Lotta men in town, inn’t there?” Well, yeah. Lotta guys wearing tee shirts with slogans like “Political…
Language and the abstract thinking that makes it happen are foremost among the characteristics that make humans human. But linguists, anthropologists and psychologists cannot agree on the moment in man’s evolution when that characteristic appeared, or why. Last week, in an article published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences,…
At first glance, Lionel Dela Rosa’s lawsuit against Scottsdale Memorial Health Systems seems like just another ho-hum discrimination case filed by a grumpy former employee. But it isn’t. It is really about whether a Vietnam veteran’s sometimes disturbing behavior justifies workplace harassment by co-workers. Dela Rosa, a 60-year-old Hispanic Vietnam…
Last fall, when the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System awarded contracts to companies that would provide health-care services to the state’s poor, there were winners and losers–just as there are in any bidding process. It was the way AHCCCS picked the winners and losers, however, that raised eyebrows. The…
Flashes, 5-25 Proof: Fife’s Off His Gourd Someone sent in this photo, and even though we don’t know what the occasion was, The Flash believes it’s worth 1,000 words. We do know the picture shows our esteemed governor, J. Fife Symington III, with a bunch of vegetables. There are some…
Jawad Hashim raises his chin slightly, looking directly into the video camera recording his statement. Droves of lawyers hover. They all want to know just what Hashim did with several tens of millions of Arab dollars that disappeared more than a decade ago. It’s not the first time Hashim–a 57-year-old…
Eight years ago, nearly 1,000 west-side residents crowded into the Maryvale High School auditorium to accuse doctors from the Arizona Department of Health Services of ignoring what they saw as an alarming leukemia rate among Maryvale’s children. The 1987 meeting was held on a muggy July night. It was a…
Bryan Gilliam knows that crime doesn’t pay; the 20-year-old is serving a five-year sentence for car theft. Now he may be learning that truthfulness doesn’t pay, either. While incarcerated at Fort Grant, a minimum-security prison near Safford, Gilliam took training to become a legal assistant. That, combined with the fact…
Thanks to the recent surge in the economy, plain ol’ white paper is turning to gold. And the unprecedented demand for it seems to have taken the state bureaucracy by surprise, costing Arizona more than half a million dollars. When the economy began to turn a little more than a…
High above downtown Phoenix, Ulysses Sanchez sits in a borrowed office in an executive tower with a window that looks out on another executive tower. He’s nestled in a chair that’s not really his behind a desk with someone else’s name on it, surrounded by the believers. Like Sanchez, these…
Flashes, 5-18 Look Who’s Not Talking Last week, U.S. Senator John McCain was yapping about Janet Reno and Waco to that bastion of Gotham liberalism, The New Yorker. Which must have reporters at the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette scratching their heads. The Snowy Haired Senator won’t talk to their…
Moe Allen was a character. He was the kind of man whose girlfriends were invariably described as “floozies” and who drank a fifth of Seagram’s every day. He flew his own airplane. He fished for–what else?–bass. He’d spent a few years in prison for bad checks. Sometimes your bad habits…
Thirty-seven years ago, state and federal agriculture officials launched a massive attack on the pink bollworm, spraying the powerful insecticide DDT on 65,000 acres of Maricopa County cotton. From May 15 to July 19, 1958, about 500,000 pounds of DDT were applied in the county. It was just the first…
The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System has placed one employee on indefinite leave, apparently in response to revelations that the program had footed the health-care bill for people who had been dead for years. The suspended employee, Farrell Janssen, a 59-year-old computer programmer, says he was placed on administrative…
No Wonder He’s So Chipper Last Sunday, the Arizona Republic published “The Republic 100,” part of an annual special section identifying Arizona’s largest firms and blathering about the state’s fabulous business climate. Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., rated No. 40 on the list, boasting 2,486 employees. What the section didn’t tell you…
The heavy spraying of DDT and its impact on dairy herds is well-known to Arizona farmers, but not to the public. And a new law passed by the legislature may make it more difficult for the media to raise questions about the safety of the food supply. The so-called “veggie…
Some people believe that all manufacture, sale and use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) will be banned as of January 1, 1996–and that the world will instantly be without refrigeration. That’s not true. Here’s what is: Only the production of CFCs, also known by the trade name Freon and mainly used in…
Just how uptight were Americans about s-e-x in 1954? That year, squeaky clean Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” got blacklisted by ABC radio and television for containing “offensive lyrics.” Offensive? She was just singing in Italian, for crying out loud! Even Johnnie Ray, everybody’s favorite Hit Parade crybaby, had a record…
