Whether small, medium or large, cities across the nation have one recurring problem: they don’t have enough money, and their inhabitants don’t want higher taxes. Consider Manitou Springs, a small city with big city problems. To visitors, Manitou may seem like a little bit of paradise at the foot of the Front Range, blessed with […]
Most of us have lifetime habits that have lodged in our minds. Are they inherited, or did you create them? It doesn’t much matter who’s to blame, but like my parents, grandparents, and their predecessors, I don’t like to throw things away. Should I declutter? Probably, but I hoard the remnants of the past, and […]
What team sport is the most popular in Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak Region? The answer is simple and obvious: soccer. Starting in grade school, virtually every public and private school fields soccer teams for both boys and girls. Soccer is fun, easy to learn, doesn’t require expensive equipment and, with its emphasis on […]
A friend of mine once explained the aging process – he knew, because he was almost 85, and I was a sprightly young fellow in my early fifties. “At 50, you don’t pay attention to aging, unless you’ve got some kind of age-related problem. But you’re still old – women in their thirties won’t date […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. Who among us has not succumbed to Amazon’s siren song? You can get whatever you want from your favorite megabusiness within a day or so, appropriately packaged and shipped, often incorporating absurdly low prices with surprisingly […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. Facing an uncomfortable reality has never been my strongpoint. Eight years ago, I crashed my bike and woke up in a hospital in urgent care. I thought I’d be okay in a few weeks, but it […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. When addle-brained lawyers, judges and politicians get together to determine our nation’s fate, what happens? Nothing good. Let’s start with birthright citizenship. The words of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States are […]
Rummaging through a junk-filled closet on the second floor, I came across an enormous bound volume of newspapers from the summer of 1921. How they got there I haven’t a clue, but I suspect that I bought them decades ago at a garage sale, or at Ross Auction, or … who knows? The newspaper was […]
What do we want from life? Growing up, I saw life as a voyage through everything I could think of, success in all endeavors, and most of all (as the late, great Brian Wilson wrote), “Fun, fun, fun!” Much to my surprise, most of my dreams came true. I’m blessed with kids, grandchildren and great-grands, […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. Halls of Fames have long been popular, both for celebrating the past and and advertising the present. There are literally hundreds of such halls in our fame-obsessed nation, scattered throughout most of our 50 States. Colorado […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. Do we shape our homes, or do our homes shape our lives? After 85 years of living in many types of dwellings in various parts of the world, I know the places we call home have […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. Decades ago, the Gazette prominently featured the Society Column, a weekly tribute to the parties and gatherings of our city’s leading citizens. If you aspired to become one of the chosen few, there were lots of […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. If you love art, you may yearn for masterpieces, but you buy what you can afford. For most of us, that means paying at most a few hundred bucks at a gallery, and much less at […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. As you age, memories often flood the mind. At 84, the past is much more fun than the present, especially during miserable weather. You chuckle, you smile, you think of those who are no longer with […]
The future is unknowable, the present changes from minute to minute, but ah the past!! Shapeshifting, constantly receding and sometimes coming into sharp focus, we can embrace what we like and ignore what we don’t. As we age, we forget, we throw away stuff, we’re constantly dealing with health-related issues and, for our sins, we’re […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. We Americans have always admired entrepreneurs, seeing them as bold risk-takers who have built and rebuilt our beloved nation for centuries. Yet sometimes these fearless men and women have disappeared from history. Let’s consider the voyage […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. Let’s see; Trump and his co-conspirators have only been in power for three months, and they’ve already demonstrated a level of stupidity, incompetence, incoherence and ignorance unmatched in American political history. It’s quite a feat. To […]
Like virtually every other American octogenarian, I’m only alive because of modern medicine. I was a fragile and often sickly child, and I probably would have succumbed to some sort of nasty infection that antibiotics quickly cured. And before the Salk and Sabin vaccines, polio was not uncommon, infecting several of my friends at Steele […]
This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin. April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) After March’s warmth and sunshine, we somehow believed that […]
As long as Donny Dementia is wreaking havoc in the White House, there will always be something for appreciative, cynical and elderly journalists to write about. Can you imagine how boringly competent Kamala Harris might have been? No DOGE, no Elon Musk, no Tulsi Gabbard, no Pete Hegseth, no destructive firings of competent civil servants, […]
