Letters

Fricked off
Spotting Ed Frick's name and confused rantings in your Letters section [May 15] brought back painful memories of when he published a rag called Oak Lawn Today in the mid-'80s. As the unrestrained putative editor, Frick subjected the Oak Lawn area to his exclamation-point-laden gushings, outrageous fluff pieces, and other printed embarrassments that drove me and a good many others to bemused distraction twice a month for a couple of years.

In his letter to the Dallas Observer, Frick seems to criticize what he refers to as the "Grand Prairie President" of the NAACP (Lee Alcorn)'s motives in wanting more minority representation on the DISD Board simply because the majority of students enrolled in the DISD are minorities. Then Frick somehow compares Alcorn's concerns to the "historic Boston Tea Party" and calls it "taxation without representation."

As I grew weary of saying back when Frick imposed his so-called "thoughts" on the largely unsuspecting and otherwise innocent readers of Oak Lawn Today, HUH?!

Please, Mr. Frick, you've had YEARS to compose your thoughts so that those of us without direct access to how your brain functions can understand what you're trying to say. Other than being a not-so-subtle piece of racism, I fail to understand your point.

Michael G. Jameson
Dallas

Grateful
A big "Thank You" to the Observer for its accurate and fair reporting of our retirement problems with the Dallas City Council ["Tension fund," April 3].

Thanks also to the citizens of Dallas, councilman Larry Duncan, the employees and retirees of the City of Dallas, the members of the Texas Public Workers Association, and many unknown interested friends for their support which resulted in the defeat of proposition 14 in the May 3 election.

Sam Harting
Dallas City Retired Employees Association
Dallas

Rich is rich
I really enjoyed Jimmy Fowler's article about the film festival [Mia & Peter & Liza & Mazursky," April 17]. However--and I know some will accuse me of being nitpicky--isn't the Sundance festival held in Park City, Utah (not Park Cities)?

Kolya Renne
Fort Worth

Race or class
I can't resist the opportunity to commend Julie Lyons and Ann Zimmerman on their recent articles on the DISD. No, they're not likely to please everyone, but at least they made more of an attempt at even-handed coverage than their mainstream competition.

Indeed, my only quarrel with their articles is that they did not spend enough effort covering non-racial issues. Like it or not, most racial issues nowadays are class issues, and we Americans are notoriously poor when it comes to dealing with class. As long as more middle- and upper-class families move out of the DISD than move in, the DISD is going to have money problems, and one can't honestly say that all families relocating from the DISD are necessarily white. Nor is the increasing enthusiasm for private and parochial schools or school vouchers likely to help ease the DISD's problems.

Then, of course, there are historical patterns. Many Latino immigrants today are ironically following the same path African-Americans followed in the 1920s and 1930s when they started relocating from the rural South to the urban North. At the same time, many African-Americans are ironically trying to set up the same type of bilingual programs that many Latinos are starting to reject. Even Latinos who despise U.S. English as much as I do can't help but find something ironic about a Latino middle class that practices English immersion with its own ninos while advocating bilingualism for the children of the working poor.

Which brings me to another point--the growing gap between one half of the Latino community and the other. We already saw signs of this during the Los Angeles riots, when the more established Latinos of East L.A. chose to sit out the same riots that many recent Latin immigrants in South-Central L.A. chose to participate in. As John Sayles hinted in Lone Star, we can see signs of this in our own state, too--and not just on the border. Let's hope we can learn from history before it's too late.

Rogelio Mendoza Jr.
Garland