Just a couple of miles north of Interstate 8, where the freeway cuts through some of southwest Arizona’s harshest desert, lies a narrow ribbon of riverfront property that is one of the most productive farming areas in the world. A relatively few farmers there–perhaps 125–like to brag that they can…
“Hempy Halloween,” proclaims the sticker plastered on the door of a conference room at the Hermosa Inn. Above the slogan is the image of a jaunty jack-o’-lantern with a joint dangling from its mouth. Elsewhere, a couple of children whose parents are attending the convention skateboard around the sidewalks of…
“I think that I shall never see/A tort lovely as a tree.” Or something like that. Bill and Sherri McDowell of Scottsdale probably wouldn’t find humor in that variation on the famous Joyce Kilmer line. After all, their lawyer has told a judge that the McDowells are suffering “irreparable harm”…
He’s been around. The veteran baseball writer has covered every World Series and every All-Star game since 1958. He is so highly regarded by his peers that he has already been inducted into the baseball-writers’ wing of the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. No one now covering baseball has such…
Attorney Steve Doncaster, an ardent cyclist, was pedaling home from work the other day. He was heading west on Washington Street from his office at Salt River Project when a car pulled out of a side street, crashing into Doncaster and his bike head-on. The driver fled. A Good Samaritan…
You might not be surprised to learn that Alex Gonzalez is an unhappy camper, considering he has spent much of the last four years in pawnshops. For the Arizona Pawnshop Association and its public-image-improvement efforts, the problem is that you might not be surprised; for Gonzalez, who has been fingerprinted…
David Wilbur Studli’s voice sounds disconnected and hollow, like he’s calling up from the bottom of a well. He speaks in short, nervous bursts of words that come quickly but still sound flat and murmurous. He is talking on a speaker phone from a room somewhere inside an Arizona state…
Everyone’s a Critic “I made some stupid mistakes,” Eddie Basha says matter-of-factly. Once again, “chubby grocer” is his full-time occupation. During a ten-minute phone interview Monday from Bashas’ Inc. headquarters, the vanquished Democratic gubernatorial nominee employs some brutal adjectives to summarize his performance against Fife Symington–like ignorant, unsophisticated and naive…
Bill Lowery has a police officer’s poker face and a flat and factual Jack Webb voice. “I’m not a police officer, but I talk to a lot of them,” he says. Lowery is a salesman, and he sells the future of police work in a box of circuits and silicon…
The police reports describing the South Mountain High School riot are written in the idiom of men apparently striving to emulate the literary style of a veteran sergeant. All drama is drained. The tone is monotonous. The repetition of phrases fogs the reader’s mind. But after you’ve read enough police…
When Roberto Frietz, now 39, was a student at South Mountain High School in the 1970s, a riot brought on by racial tensions broke out at the school. “I had no charges brought against me, because I wasn’t a participant,” Frietz recalls. “But I still remember what it was like…
There was a time when Bob Crane was even more famous than O.J. Simpson. But that was years ago, and our memories are short. Crane’s every movement was noted with a sort of breathless wonder by gossip columnists across the country. If Crane was seen in the company of a…
Tom Cutler walks through the corporate training room preparing for his evening sales meeting, pausing for a moment to fiddle with the flowers on the front table. The 33-year-old businessman is most at home here, surrounded by a buzz of new clients and suited sales folks. Cutler is no stranger…
Last spring, the state’s largest daily newspaper launched an expensive legal challenge to force the federal Resolution Trust Corporation to unseal hundreds of pages of documents filed in its $217 million lawsuit against Governor J. Fife Symington III and other officials of the failed Southwest Savings and Loan. Over the…
You may know that Tiny Tim was one of the most aberrant things to emerge from the Sixties. You may know that two and a half decades ago, he took his long hair, ukulele and piercing falsetto to international prominence, that he married a 17-year-old named Miss Vicky on The…
First things first about Cop Shoot Cop. The band’s name is not some sort of white-boy take on Ice-T anger. And it’s not a pithy stage direction from an old Keystone Kops flick. At least not according to Tod A., Cop Shoot Cop’s lead howler. “We used to have a…
I rang the doorbell at Senator Alston’s house in the 4100 block of West Cheery Lynn Road the other day, and was greeted by the tumultuous sounds of three dogs, two of them quite small but all yapping away at a great rate. Promptly, the door was opened by one…
After a certain age, you don’t get weepy over country-music laments or wonder at the integrity of politicians. But even if you’ve got the digestive system of a boa constrictor, it is difficult to swallow the level of distortion, the high-finance perversion of facts and the bald-faced lying that is…
It’s 3 a.m. What were only minor problems in the daylight are nightmares in the dark. Who can sleep with thoughts closing in like tarantulas stepping across my pillow? What if as a child I’d been adopted by Mia Farrow? Or, even worse, what if Carl Kunasek is elected to…
I knew I wanted to be a sportswriter when I was 14 years old. I had discovered Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly in the library . . . —Ron Rapoport of the Los Angeles Daily News in the introduction to A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Great Women’s…
As election day nears, so dawns the realization that by this time next week, we might not have Governor J. Fife Symington III to kick around anymore. As a public service befitting the gravity of the occasion, New Times has marshaled its vast resources to reflect on what we and…
U.S. Senator Larry Craig, a conservative Republican from Idaho, came to Phoenix a couple of weeks ago to lunch at the Arizona Biltmore and stump for GOP Senate hopeful Jon Kyl. Kyl’s opponent, Democrat Sam Coppersmith, celebrated the Idaho senator’s visit by faxing around a newspaper clipping that quotes Craig…
