Oweda Johnson, who no longer works for Kirk, says she does not remember getting a call or a fax about the Akiba dinner. Likewise, she doesn't remember putting it on the mayor's calendar. "I would have told her that we book him 60 to 90 days out, and September was a little far out for us to be booking him," says Johnson. "But if she faxed me the information over, I'd be happy to put it in his suspense file, and as we got closer to the event, we'd consider it."
Last Wednesday, I went to City Hall in search of the last piece of the puzzle--the mayor's Akiba file.
I had tried to obtain it the day before during my conversation with Sherrill, but had had no luck. "Why do you need that?" Sherrill asked me suspiciously. "What's this for?" Her response was typical. Sherrill has been the steely grand protectress of Dallas mayors since Steve Bartlett was elected in 1991.
Sherrill never did produce the file, so I figured I'd pay her a visit.
Now, though, I was shooed away from the mayor's inner sanctum while a game plan was hatched, the mayor's office door opened, and Kirk himself emerged--tossing a football from hand to hand. Which I thought was very appropriate in this case.
"What do you need?" he said.
"Well, I really don't need to see you," I informed him. "I just need the Akiba file."
Kirk ushered me into his office and shut the door. During the course of a long conversation, Kirk told me that he had instructed his staff to no longer talk to me. Only Sherrill was allowed to talk to me (which, I knew, was as good as talking to myself). As for the Akiba file, he said, holding it aloft, what specifically did I want from it?
All of it, I said. And Kirk, to his credit--though, come on, these are public records here--promptly asked a staffer to fax it all.
Funny enough, one of the things Kirk was holding was that paper trail that he claimed didn't exist about the dinner invitation. As it turns out, on May 7 Gayle Haney had sent Kirk's scheduler, Oweda Johnson, a three-page fax about the dinner. The third page consisted of a short description, written by Susan Diamond and her husband, Rick San Soucie, of the dinner and the mayor's role in it. "The dinner usually starts at approximately 6:30 and finishes no later than 9 or 9:30," the summary stated. "Mayor Kirk does not need to stay after his talk if he needs to leave; we will work around his schedule. More details to follow."
When those details finally arrived three months later, Kirk--who during our third conversation finally recalled this--decided, once again, not to go to the dinner. Never mind that the school was counting on him. Never mind that there was nothing else on his calendar that night.
"I don't know Wally Rynek," Kirk told me last week in his office. "I mean, I'm sure he's a great guy, but I don't know him. And I didn't know anything about the Akiba Academy. My judgment about this was just that I was on a pretty tight schedule; I was going out of town either Friday or Saturday and going to the Cowboys game on Sunday with my bride. And Sunday night I was with my kids--and I don't feel a need to apologize for spending an evening home with my children."
Later, in yet another conversation we had about this, Kirk finally, blessedly, just summed it up: "I just didn't want to go.
