Jerome Holtzman of the Chicago Tribune covered his first Arizona spring training season 35 years ago. He has been covering baseball ever since. He has been voted into baseball’s Hall of Fame and will be installed this summer. It is the highest honor that a baseball writer can receive. I…
Terry Goddard is getting a free ride in his campaign for governor. First of all, he is running virtually unopposed, so there is no one to question anything about his campaign. Second, he is the only fully subsidized candidate in the governor’s race. It is an amazing story because it…
Using a long-handled ladle, the chef flicks oil, seasonings, vegetables and meat into the metal pan. Flames leap up around the wok’s sides and lick the stove’s exhaust hood. Seconds later, an order of Kung Pao Chicken is steaming toward the dining room. As the restaurant’s only food preparer, chef…
Like Rottweilers, Pam Swift and Teri Johnson fight with a deep, dark instinct. Sometimes, you wonder why these two west Phoenix environmentalists don’t shut up. Other times, you can’t help but admire them for fighting battles somebody’s got to fight. One of them always seems to be on TV, marching…
The City of Phoenix knew it was buying a lemon when it condemned the Estes Landfill to make room for flood-control improvements along the Salt River in the early 1980s. The landfill, located on the riverbank east of Sky Harbor Airport, had been one of the very first toxic-waste sites…
Mabel Wambach is not exactly screaming for her MTV. At 83 years of age, Wambach really doesn’t scream anymore, and her closest experience to music videos is watching the bubbles every Saturday night on Lawrence Welk. Aside from Welk, she laments, “the local stations have become disgusting. There’s nothing good…
“Phoenix is a nice place to visit in winter,” Jerome Holtzman was saying, “but don’t expect to get a major league baseball team down there anytime soon.” Holtzman of the Chicago Tribune is the acknowledged dean of the country’s baseball writers. Regarded as among the most knowledgeable and best connected…
The last I heard about Harry Garbus was that he was serving his second term in federal prison and had tried to escape. And then, the other day, I picked up the phone. It was Garbus. “I’ve been out of the joint six months,” Garbus said. “But the terms of…
A waste company is a terrible thing to mind, isn’t it? Take ENSCO. Please. When the Arkansas company started buying full-page ads in Arizona newspapers a few weeks ago to spruce up its image, it couldn’t even get its own logo right. Next to the ENSCO insignia (a bubble-like design…
Rancher Troy Neal talks more like an ecologist than a land baron as he surveys the 76 Ranch, his 24,000-acre spread in the Zane Grey country near Payson. “We have to take care of the land, or it won’t take care of us,” he says, gazing up at the 6,200-foot…
“All my life I’ve gotten everything I’ve wanted in politics,” John Kromko says, “and I’ll eventually get them, too. It’s just taking a while.” Them in the combative veteran Tucson legislator’s lexicon, refers to the Arizona Board of Regents, the nine-member body appointed by the governor to preside over the…
Law professor Jack J. Rappeport was once famous on the University of Arizona campus for his knowledge of contracts. He was lesser known for teaching domestic-relations law. That’s changing rapidly. These days, Rappeport is noted in legal circles for his wild stories about how his cleaning lady got impregnated with…
The truth in their message stands out so starkly that, even though they sound like extremists, you know they’re basically right: The Earth is being destroyed by abuse and corporate greed and somebody has to stop it. And there is something romantic, even heroic, in the stand-alone defense of Mother…
Want to win friends and influence people? A waggish mutt milliner with the unlikely name of April Ode has just the cure: “Walk your dog with a hat on, boy, and people come flocking to you.” Ode, who does for man’s best friend what Dr. Seuss did for cats in…
It’s early morning. The bartender spots the tall man as he comes through the door. “I’ll have a vodka on the rocks,” Neal Roberts says in a soft, polite voice. Roberts is tall and angular. He is an almost obsessively neat man with the darkest of pasts. These days, he’s…
It happens each time they meet. Sam Steiger and Ev Mecham appear on the same platform and Mecham turns into a seething mass of fury before long. The game begins when Steiger warns the audience of Republican voters: “The problem is that Ev can’t win the general election.” Mecham is…
The tour of Will Bruder’s buildings begins south of the tracks, amid the old warehouses and storage lots and junkyards around West Buchanan Street and Seventh Avenue. This isn’t a sneak investigation into the working-class underside of Bruder’s work; it’s an excursion plotted by the architect himself. Bruder, the architect…
The new downtown library is still just a block of clear plastic. It sits on a scale model of central Phoenix, centered in an orange splotch that represents the proposed library site. Built to scale, the block represents the approximate square footage of the new library, which was funded by…
The state Attorney General’s Office raised serious questions seven years ago about the legality of the Ensco bid to run Arizona’s hazardous-waste dump in Mobile, but dropped the inquiry after getting heat from the agency in charge of the dump, New Times has learned. A secret 1983 memo, written by…
Mobile isn’t the only place in Arizona where the words “hazardous waste” can set off a riot. Just last week, a Scottsdale businessman decided to withdraw a proposal to construct a $7.5 million recycling plant in Guadalupe because a group of angry citizens in the tiny, impoverished, industry-starved Yaqui Indian…
It was almost half time of the final game with the Portland Trail Blazers. Until now I hadn’t realized how badly Tom Chambers was playing. Then Kevin Johnson hobbled off the court after suffering an injured hamstring tendon. It was at this moment I realized that Chambers must play a…
Frank Turco sits hunched forward. He is worried. But he is also powerless. Turco is in the waiting room on the fourth floor of the Barrow Neurological Institute of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. Down the hall, behind rows of swinging doors, surgeons are operating on the brain of…
