On a recent Friday evening, the third-floor foyer and ballroom of the Galleria Westin Hotel was crawling with well-fed Dallas matrons. Clad in jeans and T-shirts, the 50 or so women were keenly focused on their task: transforming the standard-issue upscale-hotel-chain version of splendor (ostentatious chandeliers, ruby carpets) into a…
Since Dallas City Council enacted a ban on roosters last summer, the Oak Cliff Coffee House on Davis Street has become a shrine to the forbidden bird. Partly out of protest, partly from nostalgia, the cock has been made the caffeine hangout’s logo; the is bedecked with stuffed and illustrated…
When Sam Wyly began kicking around the idea of environmental advocacy ads in late February, the Dallas billionaire called his son. A 20-year-old freshman at the Denison University in Ohio, Andrew David-Sparrow Wyly says he wasn’t surprised to hear from his dad: Sam Wyly knows his son has long been…
Caught napping How many tranquilizers would it take to put an entire lake of fish asleep? One, Buzz figures, if it was the same brand of sleeping pill used by the staff of The Dallas Morning News, who let a fishy tale slip into print last week. On March 30,…
Those magic bridges Thank God for Jim Schutze, the Dallas Observer, and the truth. Schutze’s series of fine investigative reporting on the city of Dallas’ Trinity River project has revealed a shocking level of deception (recent articles include “Jack! Jack!,” March 16, and “Whoa, Noah,” March 9). Trinity project proponents…
Catherine Shelton puts down her glass of Beaujolais and walks quickly out of her bedroom, searching through her pitch-dark house for a gun. “Where is that damn gun?” she says, walking back into the room and rifling through two sets of dresser drawers. She’s looking for a handgun loaded with…
On a Sunday night in Brooklyn, Misty Owens sits cross-legged on a worn futon, methodically mending holes in the black tights she wears for dance class and performing. She selects one pair at a time from the amorphous pile of spandex and cotton resting beside her on the comforter that…
Over the last two years, scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have purchased 63 dogs for use in federally funded experiments that began as far back as 1988. The canines, mostly foxhounds and mongrels, are trained to run on treadmills, and are then anesthetized for…
Rhae Lumpkin’s property is a mess. The house looks to have been built in chunks — one painted white, one painted red, and one rendered in unfinished cedar. On the porch, a large industrial spool serves as a table. An old rusted still, a piece of found art, sits in…
Location, location, location For two years, Amelia Core Jenkins, proprietor of a bed-and-breakfast at the corner of Young and St. Paul streets downtown, dutifully paid her dues to the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. The money earned her inn, in a converted abandoned warehouse, the right to be listed in…
Eyes wide shut Your article “Impossible dreamer” (March 2) reeks of skepticism. I’m sure you have a duty to explore both sides, but I have discovered that what Bobby Wightman-Cervantes says is true, as I too have been subject to the oppression that is endemic in this Texas system that…
Eddie Deen wants to correct Gov. George W. Bush’s calculations or, short of that, squeeze more money out of him. “Looks like I might need to send his people another bill,” the Dallas caterer says with a laugh. On the campaign trail the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has told audiences…
This blows Federal workers who make charges of waste, fraud, or abuse can be subject to severe reprisal and recrimination for their efforts. I am a federal government employee and a union officer. I want to point out some pitfalls in Mr. Schutze’s comments about whistle-blowing in the federal sector…
“I don’t know if I should say this or not,” she says, her voice shaky, her hands pressed together in front of her mouth. As she sits in her modest Fort Worth home, Lydia Galvan recalls what she found days after her husband, a Dallas police officer, was killed in…
It’s an early Tuesday afternoon at Barbara Jordan Elementary School in South Oak Cliff, and Chet Baker, a tall and cheerful visitor dressed in a dark gray suit, takes off his jacket and makes this straightforward inquiry to Jeff Sughrue’s third-grade class: “What signal would you show if today is…
Like other organs of local government, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department adopted a strict no-smoking policy in 1988. Over the last two decades, such edicts have become routine and largely unquestioned in workplaces, exiling the nicotine-addicted to sidewalks. But Thomas Reilly, a sheriff’s investigator, charges that his department holds itself…
Bark, don’t bite So, how is KTVT-Channel 11’s newscast now that popular anchorman Tracy Rowlett has joined the team? Has Rowlett’s former station, WFAA-Channel 8, suffered noticeably? If you have an opinion, please feel free to voice it, unless you’re Dallas Morning News TV critic Ed Bark. The word from…
Judging John Marshall “Bench press” (March 9) was a great article by Thomas Korosec. I’ve known John Marshall since I was a freshman at Vanderbilt and have always been impressed with his wit and integrity. The citizens of Dallas County can be proud that John has rendered judgments that have…
You were right about God, Marshall. He is a Good God. And you, you there, with imagination in your eyes And hope forever forwards in your soul, you are A Good Person. You are a human being and isn’t it exciting to be one? Isn’t it glorious this life God…
Dallas Community Television’s studios usually don’t get busy until after 5 p.m., when people get off their real jobs and turn to shooting, producing, and editing Dallas’ public access TV fare. On a recent Friday evening, El Centro College student Vernon Hadnot was in one editing room, using computer graphics…
It’s Oscar time. Everyone wants to be a critic. On Thursday evenings at the Starbucks on Northwest Highway near Preston Road, for the price of a cup of java, everyone can do just that: voice their cinematic opinions nonstop for 90 minutes as Gary Cogill, the film critic for WFAA-Channel…
The new Mod Squad Last week, a group of cops went to the city council to ask whether it would please pay Dallas police officers wages competitive with such crime-ridden hot spots as Plano. This week, the cops aren’t playing quite as nice. The Dallas Police Patrolman’s Union has posted…
