An extremely important thing happened at the city council meeting this morning. Nothing happened. I can’t tell you how big that is. Angela Hunt won. Mayor Tom Leppert told a packed house that the city council had agreed informally not to vote on the contentious Love Field concessions issue, directing…
I saw the Harlem Globetrotters not long ago but I’ll admit, I had no idea they had a “draft.” You? The world’s most famous basketball team yesterday drafted the “Club Trillion” founder, a college slam dunk champion, a husband-wife couple and – lookie here – a dude from SMU. That’s…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Watching Thursday night’s NBA Finals Game 7, it struck me just how far your Dallas Mavericks are from a championship. Lakers 83, Celtics 79 was a rugged, violent scrum on every possession…
Dear Mexican: I’m a civil rights lawyer. I sue the San Diego Minutemen. Whenever the Minutemen are accused of being racist, they always say something like, “I’m part Hispanic,” or they’ll note that some of their members are Mexican. This last claim is actually true. Some of the most zealous Minutemen are…
The Dallas Morning News has been doing stories and editorials about the shrinking population of black students in the Dallas public school system—a phenomenon the newspaper calls “black flight.” In its first story the paper reported: “Interviews with dozens of parents reveal that the exodus is not fueled by a…
The irony here is that true historic preservation activists in Dallas are going to welcome this latest bit of Trinity River toll road news. I began hearing from them long before the Corps went public with its efforts to get some kind of protective historic designation for the Trinity project…
Yesterday’s mail included a couple of letters from the Texas Attorney General, which I will share, regarding two unrelated matters. The first was an opinion dealing with my letter to Dallas Area Rapid Transit on March 23 in which I requested: “All reports generated by DART’s departments of board support,…
Delicious development over the weekend as TCU’s baseball team took two of three from Texas in Austin to earn its first ever trip to the College World Series. The Horned Frogs begin play in Omaha, Nebraska Saturday at 1 p.m. against Fresno State. TCU has a legit shot because of, if…
I hate it when things work out. From my point of view, it’s not good for business. But it looks like city staff and the Dallas City Council may actually come up with a reasonable way to oversee operations of multiple neighborhood farmers markets. Ah, well. Can’t lose ’em all…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *The Southwest Conference lived to be 80. The Big 12 won’t see its 17th birthday. Favorite part of the squabble is Texas A&M threatening to go to the Southeastern Conference without…
D has posted an item on its blog, FrontBurner, reporting that I traveled by kayak out to the Calatrava bridge site and defecated on the bridge to show my disapproval. The item, written by D Major Domo Tim Rogers, was satirical and not meant to be taken seriously. But a…
Dear Mexican: I worked a summer job during college in southern Arizona during the late 1960s, where most of my coworkers were Mexicans from the state of Sonora. Their favorite expression when something was broken was no vale verga, literally “not worth dick” but actually meaning “totally fucked up.” What…
Just sitting here drumming my fingers on the desk. It’s been six weeks. I asked City Hall a simple question. I’m still waiting for their call. This is starting to remind me of my teenage dating career. My question to the city six long weeks ago was this: How many…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Thing that jumped out at me about Thursday night’s Game 1 of the NBA Finals was how physical it was. The scrapping for loose balls. The intensity of picks. Just running through…
I work at a high school where there are a significant number of students without papers. Two students (one from Mexico, the other from Paraguay) who I had worked with for four years graduated last June, and they are now attending community college. They have both read your books. My…
Roscoe Betz won his lawsuit. I have written about him before. He’s the 91-year-old man who sued DART, the transit agency, three years ago for damming up a creek and flooding his property. DART argued there was no creek. The guy just thinks there’s a creek. Two weeks ago a…
This morning’s daily newspaper provided a sad occasion to reflect on downtown Dallas. Tom Lardner, an early developer of Dallas’s Uptown district, died May 24. His classified-ad death notice is in The Dallas Morning News today but no editorial obituary has appeared yet. I had lunch with him about a…
Last night I joined my cover-story-mate Ed Spencer and his daughter, Amy Hammer, at White Rock Lake, where we poached on the Asleep at The Wheel concert at the Dallas Arboretum from our kayaks. First time we had ever done it, but a regular group gathers on the lake in…
Dear Mexican: I have a sister. I read your column each time it comes out in the Tucson Weekly. Once, we were talking about all the hatred against Mexicans in our state and my sister said, “Sis, why do they hate Mexicans so much in Arizona? Why do they hate…
Five years ago a fierce battle was fought to stop the demolition of a house on my block in Dallas’s first and oldest historic district (The Swiss Avenue Historic District). Blogista (and friend) Sharon Boyd called those of us who wanted to save the house “Preservation Nazis,” which I guess…
Someone has posted to YouTube a 1961 film about school desegregation in Dallas called Dallas at the Crossroads. (Parts Two and Three follow after the jump.) I forget what kind of hoops I had to jump through in order to see this thing back in the mid-1980s when I was…
For most people, Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert’s campaign to open up the bidding process for concessions at the city airport must seem open and shut. He wants the bidding to be open. But the door is shut because the concessions are in the hands of politically connected people. For insiders…
