More kudos for Benji I’ve been a reader of the Dallas Observer for quite a while, and I’ve come to expect quality articles that are truthful and sincere. I have felt that your articles are well thought out and researched. However, I was very disappointed in your recent article, “The…
In a small pocket of Oak Cliff, the twin steeples of Sunshine Elizabeth Chapel once rose above a neighborhood unlike any other in Dallas, signaling passersby that they had entered an area known collectively as Tenth Street. The street which gives the neighborhood its name still winds up hills, upon…
How ’bout the “Greyhound?” As any expectant couple can tell you, it’s a big, big decision: What to name the new baby. Dallas Area Rapid Transit Authority apparently didn’t realize just how big a decision. When DART’s bouncing baby, the gleaming train service between Dallas and Irving, was belatedly born…
Like their counterparts in the Dallas area, Preston Hollow Elementary School educators were excited to be selected in 1995 as a model site for the new, much-ballyhooed Voyager Expanded Learning Inc. after-school program. Instead of going home to empty houses when the regular school day ended, or killing time in…
The college football faithful may finally rest easy. The Texas Attorney General’s office has spoken, and an Aggie cannot read the Longhorn playbook. The University of Texas football team’s playbook is exempt from the state’s open records law, according to a recent ruling made by Assistant Attorney General Kay Guajardo…
If there’s one theme that emerged from the cast of characters who graced this page last year, it was cluelessness. At least that seemed to be the defense of choice for everyone from the mayor to that role model in the floor-length fur coat: ignorance, confusion, denial–and when that didn’t…
A vote for Paul I am still shaking my head as I re-read the lead article about the Honorable Paul Fielding [“Should Paul Fielding go to jail?” December 26]. You should be pleased to know your publication is so carefully read; I’ve been over this copy six or seven times…
Like Joe Greed the Ford peddler and Widetrack the Pontiac hound, attorney Brian Loncar is almost universally recognized in North Texas. A half-million dollars a year in tacky TV ads will do that. One doesn’t have to know a thing about automobile collision claims, or what a plaintiffs’ lawyer actually…
As electronic technology advances, video is increasingly becoming the most accessible and personal mass medium. Even the lowest-budget film is an arduous exercise–in terms of both technology and expense–compared to making a video. In video, there’s no painstaking development of negatives, no tiresome editing of celluloid strips, and–particularly for emerging…
Conservative politicians and district attorneys across the country always seem to be waging battles to shut down sexually oriented businesses. But the largest and most successful adult newspaper in Texas is finding its worst enemies have come from within. The Metroplex Sundown, a Dallas-based weekly that circulates throughout the state,…
Patrick Bahr and David Michelini have spent a considerable amount of time this holiday season wondering what is wrong with people. Bahr and Michelini own and operate the Antique Bahr on lower Greenville Avenue, and they had a lot of spirit going into the Christmas season. An apparent upswing in…
Evolutionary thought Being new to Texas, this spring marked the first of many trips to Glen Rose and Dinosaur Valley State Park. During our second trip to Glen Rose and the park, we visited the Creation Evidences Museum [“Footprints of fantasy,” December 12]. Indeed, it is located in a doublewide…
The word went out quietly in August. A choice little wedge of land in Uptown Dallas, the trendy neighborhood around McKinney Avenue where real estate speculation is in high fever, was being made available to the highest bidder. Only a handful of the city’s wealthiest developers were invited to tender…
When veterinarian Dr. Claudia Alldredge first saw the tiger, she was shocked. Too weak to roll over or stand up, all the four-month-old cub could do was lie in a little orange heap on the examining table and whimper an almost inaudible m-r-o-w-r. Suffering malnutrition, the cat had been dumped…
A Las Colinas-based company has agreed to plead guilty to five felonies and pay a $4 million fine to settle federal criminal charges that one of its rendering plants polluted a Minnesota stream. The fine Darling International Inc. has agreed to pay is the largest ever assessed for environmental violations…
It ain’t science As a person raised in–and a member of–a fundamentalist church, and a staunch believer in evolution, I thoroughly enjoyed Kaylois Henry’s expose of “creation scientist” “Dr.” Carl Baugh [“Footprints of Fantasy,” December 12]. What is ignored or denied by proponents of “creation science” is that the doctrine…
It’ll be a very good year… Thanks to a “Jewish metaphysical healer” who claims to have earned his spurs at Dallas’ Baylor University Medical Center, ailing crooner Frank Sinatra has a fighting chance of not only completely recovering his misogynistic, photographer-punching health, but remaining Chairman of the Board into the…
Reporting from the wild side It was an evening that would have given femi-Nazi-baiting Rush Limbaugh weeks of material. Dallas’ Association for Women Journalists gathered recently to hear Grace Halsell speak. Halsell, who says she’s a journalist, author, and one-time speech writer for Lyndon Johnson, apparently mesmerized the gathering with…
Peerly Butbul was in no mood to suffer any more than she already had. The pregnant, 30-year-old mother of two, lumbering 10 days past her due date, had finally entered Columbia Hospital at Medical City Dallas last week for a scheduled induced delivery. She was in labor for an exhausting…
Little faith I read with interest the article “Losing Faith” [December 5], but there must be an error in it. Regarding Bill Keever’s alleged actions at the DISD board hearing on August 22, surely nobody with an ounce of brains in his skull would have locked the doors of a…
On a chilly morning in early November, on his 133rd day under federal indictment, Paul Fielding was waiting impatiently at Dallas Love Field’s Gate 12. It was 9 a.m., and he was dressed in a pair of tan corduroy pants, a perfectly pressed flannel shirt, and a pair of brown…
The early-morning sun is just beginning to warm the dirt-and-gravel lot on Beeman Avenue. The only apparent movement at the ramshackle headquarters of Elite Towing, Inc. is the wandering of a flea-bitten black Labrador, whose painstaking steps are punctuated by the steady, annoying ding of a nearby railroad bell. Leon…
