For Charles Townsend, war, as the saying goes, was hell. Among the first troops deployed to the Middle East during Operation Desert Shield in August 1990, Townsend worked long days in blazing sun and menacing sandstorms to set up a base camp in the Saudi Arabian desert. Repeated fogging of…
For 11 years now, the Dallas Video Festival has been better appreciated across the country and around the world than it has in the city whose name it bears. You could offer this as evidence that Dallas has earned its reputation: that of a Southwestern money mecca whose residents would…
Have rubbers, will travel It was a nice gesture. DISD board members, who’ve come under fire in the past for their supposedly excessive travel at district expense, received rather handsome green travel bags from the Dallas Rotary Club at a luncheon last week in Union Station. When Don Venable got…
It is late on the last Friday evening in February, and most employees on the fourth floor at City Hall have long since gone home. But Assistant City Manager Mary Suhm is still bouncing from one crisis to the next. Not only is a city councilman camped in her office,…
Saipan’s slaves Thank you for running your article on the Saipan garment workers [“Our man in Saipan,” February 19]. My wife and I live in Saipan as well and witnessed the horrific working and living conditions that exist there for these people. I, too, have been inside these barracks, and…
Judge John Creuzot looks down from the bench at one of his new charges and apparently doesn’t need a probation officer’s report to figure out what’s going on. “You’ve got a pretty good buzz going, don’t you?” Creuzot says. “You’re high right now. What have you been doing?” “Well,” the…
It’s 7:30 p.m. on a mid-December evening, two days before the restaurant Avner at Preston is scheduled to close. The caviar bar upstairs is quiet, the dining room downstairs empty but for two guests. The atmosphere–the silence, the untouched settings all perfectly assembled–is haunting. A single server mechanically goes through…
They were just a bunch of buddies, cruising Red Bird Mall, trying to stay out of trouble while killing time. On that summer day in 1989, Kevin Abdullah, who had just graduated from Dallas’ Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, didn’t even notice the approaching…
Dallas Observer staff writer Miriam Rozen has won a 1997 Benjamin Fine Award for Education Reporting, given by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Rozen won in the non-daily newspaper category for her September 11 cover story, “See Yvonne. See Yvonne run. See Yvonne run from the truth.” The…
Garbage in One man’s trash is another’s news story, at least at The Dallas Morning News. On Tuesday, the News devoted 47 column inches to an article and photo about an Irving man, Jesse Rincon, who believes he has found a historic homestead on a vacant lot behind his house…
Below the belt Wow, “skunk stripe” and “bathroom throw rug”? The Dallas Observer certainly is a hard-hitting news outlet. Hitting below the belt, that is. With the departure of Laura Miller, I expected the mean-spirited half-truths and personal attacks synonymous with her column to wane. Given the content of a…
Darrell Jordan can’t get comfortable. He shifts in his seat, squirms from left to right till his long legs bend and twist into position. His arms and shoulders and back seem to be pointing in three different directions as he attempts to cram his imposing frame into one of the…
To free-market conservatives, the Marianas–a chain of tiny, palm-shrouded islands in the western Pacific–are, well, paradise. According to this ideological spin, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas is a capitalist Eden, a Rock Candy Mountain of commerce bustling with folks willing to cut and stitch and sew in the service…
For the past 12 years, Dennis Eichelbaum has served as general counsel for the Dallas Independent School District. But earlier this month the DISD board, apparently displeased with his performance, handed Eichelbaum his walking papers. The trustees had terminated Eichelbaum’s contract as outside legal counsel in June but continued to…
Making amends Buzz has just been all torn up inside since colleagues here at the Dallas Observer wrongly accused FOX 4 anchor Ashleigh Banfield of performing a Linda Ronstadt song and, of course, made fun of her singing with the band Tommy Hyatt & the Haywires. So when we read…
Us rubes Thanks so much for “Renoir, Shmenoir” [February 5]. I hope the Kimbell Museum curators are as chastened by Christine Biederman’s astuteness as I am. How rueful was my realization that I was one of “the rubes” drawn in by the Kimbell’s desire to “toady up to potential donors!”…
Only one photograph of Willard Rollins exists in his personnel file at the Dallas Police Department. This crude mug shot, taken 23 years ago, captures Rollins–now third-in-command on the Dallas force–as a fresh recruit. The image is flawed: Bright lighting casts a sharp glare on Rollins’ face, and a name…
It was time for the clock on Amarillo’s 15 minutes of fame to start ticking. A herd of reporters had gathered at Amarillo International Airport for the arrival of Oprah Winfrey, who was flying into town January 19 to defend herself against accusations that she had libeled beef. It was…
Conspiracy du jour They were all in one place, sitting in a stuffy back room at DISD’s Environmental Education Center in Seagoville: Matthew Harden. Kathleen Leos. Don Venable. Shirley Ison-Newsome. What do all of these folks have in common? Lawsuits, of course. Big, messy ones–sprinkled with tales of racism, sexual…
Critics of the Texas Industries cement plant in Midlothian have obtained company documents that appear to bolster their contention that TXI officials distorted information about health hazards posed by the plant’s emissions. The information comes as TXI opponents prepare their final challenge of TXI’s attempt to win a 10-year state…
On February 21, volunteers, local artists, and arts board members will gather at the Fairmont Hotel for the 1998 Gala for the Arts fundraiser for 500 Inc., the nonprofit organization that last year coughed up $350,000 for more than 40 Dallas performing arts groups. Depending on whom you ask, the…
Art, shmart We live in a city that tears down beautiful architecture and replaces it with tanning salons and condom stores, considers its shameless sports heroes “art” (in their case, “non-performance” art), and “boasts” a public school system that, well…you guys have written enough about that. After reading the Dallas…
