Last summer, Pat Stone phoned her daughter, T.J., and told her she had something very important to talk about. Pat and her husband, Dan, were planning to visit T.J. in Virginia, and Pat wanted to make sure her daughter could carve out some time for them to be alone–no easy…
Like their counterparts in the Dallas area, Preston Hollow Elementary School educators were excited to be selected in 1995 as a model site for the new, much-ballyhooed Voyager Expanded Learning Inc. after-school program. Instead of going home to empty houses when the regular school day ended, or killing time in…
When veterinarian Dr. Claudia Alldredge first saw the tiger, she was shocked. Too weak to roll over or stand up, all the four-month-old cub could do was lie in a little orange heap on the examining table and whimper an almost inaudible m-r-o-w-r. Suffering malnutrition, the cat had been dumped…
Bandit, our winsome, butterscotch-colored golden retriever, is like a lot of men I know: not very complicated and utterly focused on meeting his basic needs. In Bandit’s case, this means eating as often as he can and getting his tummy rubbed even more frequently. (This, too, could apply to several…
It’s political theater imported from another time and place. In the packed pews of Kirkwood Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in South Dallas on a recent night, two groups of actors–one speaking English, the other Spanish–reinterpreted a biblical story of Moses seeking God’s counsel. In this version, Moses, played by…
It was happy news, and Elizabeth Faeth meant to share it. On March 9, 1995, the legislative assistant to U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson wrote her boss a note, informing the congresswoman that Faeth and her husband were expecting their first child. Faeth had been on Johnson’s congressional staff for…
Helen Washington was in a hurry. A big hurry. And anyone with a shred of humanity would understand why. A home health aide, Washington had been at her job of five years–caring for an elderly woman in Garland–when she received a heart-stopping phone call from her neighbor, Minnie. Minnie said…
District Court Judge Mike Keasler was not pleased. On August 23, Scott Fernandes, a 27-year-old youth soccer coach, stood before the judge and pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting one of his female players several times in 1994. A popular coach for two competitive soccer clubs and Jesuit College Preparatory School,…
Sheldon Pearl is edgy. As the new school year draws near, the East Dallas teen-ager can’t seem to shake the anxiety that knots his neck muscles and clutches at his stomach. He tried to keep calm during the summer, spending several weeks, as he has in the past, looking after…
A gray granite marker put up by the Texas Historical Society stands in a weed-choked field a dozen miles west of Tyler. It is the only reminder of what happened here. If Ruth Smith had her way, the world would know about the betrayal and murder of the legendary Cherokee…
Don Maison was worried. As president of AIDS Services of Dallas, the only local agency providing housing to indigent persons suffering from the HIV virus, Maison this spring found himself facing two problems. The waiting list for his agency’s handsomely renovated garden apartments in Oak Cliff was growing. And the…
A few weeks ago, as Cheryl Wattley was filling out her daughter’s financial-aid package for Amherst College where she’ll be a freshman this fall, the Dallas attorney and single mother of four paused when it came to questions about her job status. Are you employed? the application asked. Well, sort…
At the end of this school year, Mrs. Davie’s fourth-grade class at McKinney’s Glen Oaks Elementary School had expected to be saying goodbye to Kathryn Benton, who is two years older than her classmates and was slated to attend a special-education program in a McKinney middle school next year. Afflicted…
The middle-class blandness of Garland, Texas, with its great expanse of ticky-tacky tract houses, strip shopping centers, and wholesale stores such as Hypermart, is as far as one can get from the glamour and glitter of Hollywood. Yet every Friday night for the past three years, aspiring local screenwriters, who…
In the fiercely competitive world of youth soccer, no one has more power and influence over children than the coaches. Several weeks ago, a young female soccer player from North Dallas accused a popular coach of two prestigious local soccer clubs and Jesuit College Preparatory School of abusing that power…
E-e-e-e-e-o-o-o,” squeals Kathryn Benton, a brown-haired moppet with vivid blue eyes and a wide smile. With a rigid hand she paws through a book of laminated pictures of family, friends, and teachers created for Kathryn by her special-education teacher, Holly Clemons. It is almost noon on a school day in…
Ron Carpenter was looking forward to going home. It was shortly before quitting time on a Thursday in early November and Carpenter, a maintenance man at an apartment complex in far East Dallas, was anticipating being greeted by his daughter, Autumn, a pixyish 3-year-old with silky brown hair. He loved…
Four years ago, Greg Vaughn’s 13-year-old daughter, Holley, came to him with an age-old problem: the-night- before-the-term-paper’s-due blues. “You’ve got to help me,” a panicked Holley said to her dad, after apologizing for waiting until the last minute. Her assignment was to write about Sam Houston, the colorful, controversial president…
Not long ago, Cheer Dallas, the country’s first serious gymnastics-oriented, pompon-eschewing, non-drag-wearing gay cheerleading squad, had the opportunity for statewide exposure. This Week in Texas, a magazine with a huge circulation that lists events in the gay community across the Lone Star State, wanted to put a couple of the…
Two weeks ago, Kathy Krasniqi collapsed at her job, gasping for air, her chest pounding with pain. After a week of tests, doctors have determined that she suffers from serious heart and lung disease. Albanian Muslims from the former Yugoslavia, Kathy, 41, and her husband, Sam, lost custody of their…
The boys should have been having a ball. It was a sunny autumn day, and on the greensward that is Garland’s Winters Park, the culmination of everything for which the Genesis ’85 boys soccer team had worked so hard all season lay before them. They were at the annual Celtic…
Susan Campbell takes pride in knowing a chameleon from an anole. (It’s an anole running down your backyard fence.) She has been known to spend 100 hours designing a box of skulls and bones and animal teeth for children to paw through, and her idea of a good time is…
