The little creatures were enough to sell Ray Griswold and his wife on Union Foothills Estates six years ago. The 200-acre plot of desert just beyond Phoenix’s northern border struck them as a tranquil outpost with ample spacing between neighbors. “People want to live in the desert that hasn’t been…
After the game, the two coaches walked off the field together. Joe Bugel, who always seems like a particularly ambitious used-car salesman, kept grabbing at Mike Ditka, hugging him, patting him, smiling up at him. Ditka, the embodiment of the bohunk bartender in a seedy saloon, seemed embarrassed by Bugel’s…
Lena Goldtooth Canyon sits on a sturdy dinette chair, rubbing worn thumbs together and watching her feet tap on the linoleum kitchen floor. Below her long skirt, she is wearing white socks and black sneakers, laced but not tied. Canyon is 76 years old, a heavyset Navajo woman whose life…
On Thursday, July 23, Air Force Staff Sergeant Tom Paniccia, 28, sat nervously on the set of ABC-TV’s Good Morning America, resolutely blinking at the camera lights, his black hair combed back so tightly it looked painful. His mission that day ran counter to Air Force regulations. He was “coming…
Terry Gaskin glanced out the window of a downtown Circle K last Wednesday afternoon and witnessed the best-documented spill in the history of Phoenix. What apparently was a truckload of documents tumbled off a vehicle as it sped through the intersection of Third Street and Thomas. Clouds of paper, whipped…
Hanging in a second-floor gallery of the Phoenix Art Museum is a square canvas with the words “High-Speed Gardening,” in upper-case, sans-serif letters the color of a hunter’s safety vest. These letters are superimposed over a blur of vague greens. It could be an alien sunset, with the letters blaring…
Steve Mitchell felt the tension rise. They had just brought Dan Willoughby into the courtroom for the beginning of a hearing that could put Willoughby in the gas chamber. Willoughby wore jailhouse blues. His skin had turned pale during his time in the county jail. He had shaved off his…
One of the perils of turning on your car radio during midmorning is accidentally tuning in the Barry Young talk show on KFYI-AM. This happened to me the other day. Young’s guest at the time was none other than Charlie Keating’s former best pal, Senator John McCain. McCain, speaking by…
As a young man with spiked hair, earrings, and a skateboard under one arm walks into her store, Sandie Hamilton smiles and greets him like an old friend. After chatting with Sandie, the boy drifts over to the counter and starts searching the room for a familiar face. He didn’t…
Child molestation? Committed by a member of a church?! Alert the media! And who better to spread the word on this alarming “new” aberration than Channel 10 reporter Teresa Fischenich, latest recipient of New Times’ prestigious Bill Close Award. Named in honor of Channel 10 antiquity Bill Close, the award…
A forlorn picket shuffles listlessly across the forecourt of America West Arena, trying to rain a little conscience on the crowd celebrating the opening of this entertainment palace. His sign reads: $$$ TO BUILD ARENA BUT NO XXX FOR HOUSING No one’s paying attention; the crowd–later estimated at 60,000–is in…
He had been standing at the podium, answering a question from the Senate Government Committee chairman, when he tailed off into incoherence. He fell silent, lifted his glasses and felt for his pale eyes. His left hand drifted to his forehead. Abruptly, he turned and left the hearing room, as…
Rocked by sex scandals, the Mesa Police Department has changed its policy about releasing the results of its completed internal investigations. The new policy makes it even more difficult to determine what exactly is going on inside the sin-ridden East Valley department. No, this particular instance doesn’t directly concern the…
For well over a year, ailing America West Airlines has been scrambling to put together deals with lenders and investors worldwide. The implication is always that if America West can only get another $50 or $100 million, it will be rescued from this self-imposed disaster. One recent proposed deal involved…
“How does it feel to have a target on your back?” That’s what A. Milton “Mickey” Whiting, chairman of Kaibab Industries, asked an Arizona Game and Fish Department supervisor after a March 1991 Game and Fish Commission meeting. His company was completing a massive and unprecedented freedom of information search…
Up on the half-built stage, a short, gray-haired man with a puffed-out chest and an odd, shuffling gait is giving orders to his stage crew. Dressed in camel-colored polyester pants, a red-and-white-striped short-sleeve shirt and a narrow plaid tie, he follows his chief carpenter around a revolving, ringlike stage and…
Sarah Stannard is a candidate for Congress in the newly created 6th Congressional District. She’s running as an independent candidate against a system she sees as gridlocked and unresponsive. What she’s found is that the system is specifically designed to be unresponsive to her. Put simply, the 55-year-old Scottsdale woman…
The Peter MacDonald story defies belief. Watch carefully as it unfolds. The federal courtroom in Prescott, where the former tribal chairman of the Navajo Nation is on trial for causing a riot, is silent. “Did I tell you to lie on that stand?” shouts Joe Lodge, the assistant United States…
Last month the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour devoted a segment to Arizona. The idea of the broadcast, loosely speaking, was to discuss the sheer wonder of living in a state where seemingly normal adults have actually elected into office the stunted race-baiter Evan Mecham, tsetse fly survivor Rose Mofford, a Shriners’ caravan…
In a series of incidents that strikes some of its victims as both funny and frightening, a man is stealing boots from Phoenix construction workers and then writing them detailed letters describing his sexual acts with their footwear. The one bright spot, according to a victimized worker, is that the…
What Ray Bernal saw west of Casa Grande on June 30, 1975, troubled him so much he wrote a memo to his boss. An inspector for the Arizona Corporation Commission, Bernal wasn’t strictly responsible for the public’s safety at Arizona’s railroad crossings. His job was to check on the condition…
All that remains of the mining town of Seymour is a dilapidated, one-room stone house and a turn-of-the-century millstone used to grind ore. They’re on Ed Knipp’s ranch south of Morristown, surrounded by cattle beneath the spreading shade of ancient tamarack trees that run down to the banks of the…
