Shortly before Thanksgiving, parents at Dallas Independent School District’s Preston Hollow Elementary School got some alarming news. Their children, who had suffered through a six-month paint job at the Walnut Hill Lane school–a job that was supposed to be completed during the summer break–may have been breathing dust from lead-based…
Mea culpa Buzz doesn’t want to dwell on how we found this out. We simply want to warn our fellow motorists on the Dallas North Tollway. You may have, like Buzz, occasionally whizzed by the exact-change basket as you passed a toll booth even though you hadn’t found 50 cents…
Sax sells OK, two weeks. Two Buzz mentions [November 13 and 20]. It’s time to set the record straight about how I am not John Tesh-like: 10. I’m not married to Connie Sellecca. 9. I’ve never been part of an infomercial and never will. 8. I would never use cheesy…
Dallas city councilman John Loza has been an elected official for only six months, but you’d never know it. Because when he opens his mouth–which he does frequently and with no small degree of self-importance–there is no doubt in his voice, no hesitation, no sign of a learning curve for…
The man on the phone speaks in conspiratorial tones. His name is Martin Barkley, a 40-something divorced father of two who has devoted so much of his life to a single purpose–proving that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book…
Late one day last week, after presiding over a full day of misdemeanors, Dallas County Criminal Court at Law Judge Dan L. Wyde hied himself from the Frank Crowley Criminal Courts Building to a run-down area of strip shopping centers, Korean grocers, and small warehouses near the intersection of Royal…
A woman scorned It’s a proud moment for a reporter to learn that his or her work has driven some crooked bureaucrat to Nixonesque levels of paranoia. So Buzz was touched to read the deposition of Freda Jinks, the Dallas schools administrative assistant turned cheese-eater whose ratting led former superintendent…
Last week, federal prosecutors from the offices of U.S. Attorney Paul Coggins reversed their ever-shifting position on the heavily guarded Peavy Tapes. Earlier this year, those same prosecutors had agreed that Dan Carver Peavy, a former Dallas Independent School District trustee, could keep a copy of his tape-recorded conversations with…
A big sign in the Seagoville senior center commands us to “Smile.” Another one–stretched across the back of the stage in stenciled letters–declares that “Life is beautiful when in full bloom.” But the cheery thoughts stay stuck to the walls. There is nothing beautiful or blooming about the handful of…
Fowled out [Robert] Wilonsky is on the way out. Sources in Washington, our nation’s capital, report that the Observer is going to release the reporter for his four-letter word usage [“Pssst…” November 13]. Ken Hurrington Via e-mail Wilonsky, psychoanalyzed Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about places, and…
On ordinary school days, Kerry Walls grips the wheel of his white squad car and patrols DISD’s hundreds of campuses. But on a Sunday afternoon in October 1996, Walls landed a much loftier assignment. He stepped into his role as chauffeur and ferried a trio of highly distinguished passengers downtown…
A Dallas Observer Guide to Holiday Gift Buying and Events For the holiday exterior decorator whose skills consist of creating Gordian wire knots, blowing fuses, and electrocuting small shrubs: Tired of Houdini-proof tangles of wire, palm piercings caused by tiny Italian lightbulb tips, and the smell of smoldering body hair…
His hands are those of his father–enormous, fleshy, strong. They are calloused, almost faded, worn from years of wrapping them around men’s faces and using them as weapons. These are the hands that wrestled a decade’s worth of opponents, men with such names as Ric “Nature Boy” Flair and “Gorgeous”…
Guess again, Kay Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has made her opposition to changes in the Wright Amendment clear. What a pity she hasn’t bothered to acquaint herself with the amendment’s history before weighing in on whether to expand flights from Love Field. In a letter to a constituent, Hutchison offered…
After six months of turmoil that turned neighbor against neighbor, sister against sister, the tiny town of Bethel, population of maybe 210, is no longer a town. In a Grayson County courtroom packed with more than 100 protesters and staffed with extra sheriff’s deputies, Visiting District Judge John McCraw on…
It had been an embarrassing week of missed deadlines: no master agreement, no arena site, no substantive communication from the teams. City Manager John Ware had spent all day last Wednesday pacing the council chambers, nervously popping nuts into his mouth, waiting for the phone to ring–waiting for a green…
Gene Reitnauer devoted her life and Wise County home to caring for abused and abandoned exotic felines. Now, after a protracted legal battle brought by two wealthy donors, Reitnauer has lost it all–the sanctuary she built, access to the cats she loved, and possibly even the rights to her home…
Beyond crappy Laura, great article [“Priced to sell out,” November 6], but unfortunately the deal is even worse than you presented, because the super-rich owners are not going to have $110 million in it by any stretch of the imagination. First they are free to sell ticket licenses or bonds,…
“That’s not how you do it!” insists Chris Ware, who at a lanky, falsetto-voiced 16 could pass for 11. He’s criticizing friend and classmate Robert Headrick’s impersonation of an effeminate gay man. Sixteen-year-old Headrick is heterosexual, after all, so some important details are lost in translation. We’re waiting for world…
Mr. Schieffer goes to Austin For those Texas Rangers fans who want to know why their beloved baseball team fails year after year to live up to expectations, we advise you look only to the man in charge–general partner and president Tom Schieffer, a man who apparently never took to…
The denizens of the Frank Crowley Criminal Courts Building are no strangers to controversy, gossip, or for that matter, rumbles with the Dallas County Commissioners. Even so, tensions at the courthouse may have reached new heights. First came ParkingGate, in which Dallas County Commissioner Jim Jackson or his lackeys leaked…
To people already in a state of posttraumatic stress from dealing with the boozed-up, belligerent, peeing-in-the-shrubbery nightclubbers who visit their street every weekend, the idea sounds particularly cruel: Turn an old Baptist church that has worked as a weak buffer between their homes and the bars on Lowest Greenville into…
