The afternoon sunlight glimmers across Wet Beaver Creek as kingfishers squawk and swoop, angry about an intrusion. A wide cattle trail soon splits into scores of paths that shoot off like nerves from a spinal cord into the thorny mesquite brush. Immediately to the left is the southern boundary fence…
Say You Ain’t Slow, Joe So you’re part of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s public relations dream team and you want to make up for the inmates-burying-the-dead blunder. What do you do? Book the Crime Avenger and his new book, America’s Toughest Sheriff, on a national television show where savvy guests trade…
Info:Correction date: May 2, 1996 Miner Regulations Arizona copper kings are enthusiastic about a pending mine-reclamation law–because they wrote it By Terry Greene Before Arizona’s 42nd Legislature shuts down this month, it is expected to quietly pass a law that runs counter to all the principles of regulatory reform espoused…
If it weren’t for the Earth’s gravitational pull, a Phoenix grandfather claims he’d have pedaled his stationary-exercise bicycle a fifth of the way to the moon by now. Punching some figures into his pocket calculator, the robust retiree amends the progress report on his hypothetical bike ride through space. “Actually,…
Don’t try to tell Dixie about the Freudian symbology of a lock and a key. She isn’t buying. Instead, the northern Arizona widow is selling–or at least attempting to sell–her late husband’s padlock collection, a lifetime obsession that eventually filled an entire backyard travel trailer with thousands of locks and…
One of Arizona’s largest commercial-rafting operations is up the Salt River without a paddle–or any other equipment for that matter. Salt River Rafting, which is based in Tempe, has had its river-running permits yanked by the White Mountain Apache Tribe and by the Tonto National Forest. And the company’s owner,…
Uno Dose Dewey Webb’s “Drugstore Caballero” (April 4) was entertaining, but New Times did us legitimate over-the-border pill buyers a disservice. On my frequent sojourns to Mexico, the farmacia is a required stop. Case in point: Ceclor, an antibiotic that I’ve been prescribed to fight recurring sinus and respiratory infections…
Let’s say you are meandering down the rows of a vast junkyard in South Phoenix. On one side there is a porcelain graveyard of yawning toilets. On the other, the entire history of American ovens–Dixie, Roper, General Electric, Amana, Monterey–simmers quietly in the sun. Walk toward the rear of the…
Harvey McElhannon is 65 years old, a tall man with good posture, an open face, a sincere smile and a firm handshake. He is patriotic to a fault, though he’d probably say that no such thing is possible. Hanging on the walls of his office are beautifully framed copies of…
Al Yee had to make sure qi flowed smoothly before he signed the lease for the North Central Avenue headquarters of the Phoenix brokerage firm of Yee, Desmond, Schroeder and Allen. Much to the consternation of his non-Asian-American partners in that spring of 1992, Yee had already rejected a number…
The mission of the “sexual predators” part of Arizona’s year-old Community Protection Act sounds compelling: keeping the vilest, most aberrant and most dangerous sex criminals off the streets after they complete their prison terms. The predators component of the new law is set to take effect October 1. That’s when…
It was Friday night, March 22, and the big show was three hours away. Already, cars were filling the lot at Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum. Most sported Arizona plates, but some had trekked from as far away as Florida and Virginia. Auto tags bearing the handicapped symbol were everywhere. Lots of…
A dozen people, some giddy from sleep deprivation, gathered at the Tempe home of Tom Polakis on March 30 to compare notes after one of the most remarkable weeks of their lives. Comet Hyakutake, which caused only a minor stir for most Arizonans, had turned life upside down for these…
Robert Updike gets a lot of parking tickets. He even got one once while he was in court, fighting previous parking tickets. Since he’s a member of the Arizona Legislature, he decided to do something about it. House Bill 2424 would force cities to provide free parking for people who…
But Are We Ahead of Guam? Fed up with a pay scale that forces some to seek food stamps, state workers protested Governor J. Fife Symington III’s annual Employee Appreciation Day on April 9 by donning tee shirts that document their plight. The front of the gray tee shirts contains…
John Yeoman’s death last week in an automobile crash is not expected to derail a federal grand jury investigation of Governor J. Fife Symington III. “The case does not turn on Yeoman,” a source close to the grand jury probe says. “It would have been made better with him, but…
Flag Bashing Government funding for the arts is essential to the support of emerging artists; exhibitions and performances for the public; arts education; fostering creative expression as a chronicle of our times; and for this country to take its place as the most prosperous nation in the world, not only…
What began as simply another Arizona Gallery of Art exhibition on the history of fried chicken has recently sparked an unprecedented uproar on a national scale. Yet, of the numerous works on display in “Old Crispy: The American Chicken, Fried and Otherwise,” one piece in particular has fomented the fracas…
They’re Not Booing, They’re Saying “Lew!” With court employees looking on in admiration, KPNX-TV (Channel 12) newsman Lew Ruggiero helped a confused citizen find records of a 22-year-old felony. The citizen, a middle-aged man in tennis shoes and warmups, had explained to a court clerk that he wanted to buy…
Last Friday at the Phoenix Art Museum, a group of ladies on a tour stood around the infamous U.S. flag on the floor, peering over the edges, their faces frozen in smiles, looking for the emperor’s new clothes. The work in question, Dread Scott’s 1988 “What Is the Proper Way…
A recreational-drug user since the late Sixties, my friend Skippy is a man who likes his pills. So I wasn’t exactly surprised when, grinning from ear to ear, he triumphantly whipped out a bottle of the prescription muscle relaxer Soma. What did surprise me was his explanation of how he…
A woman in a long dress sat quietly on a living-room couch as the clergymen debated how to cope with Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s media machine. The subject was Arpaio’s heavily publicized chain-gangs-burying-the-indigent-and-learning-a-valuable-lesson-while-saving-taxpayer-dollars shtick. On March 14, the first such chain-gang burials had provided the sheriff with a terrific photo opportunity…
