On a normal fall afternoon at the Dallas Nature Center, the only sounds one expects are those made by the resident wildlife and the rustle of wind-teased leaves. Today, that gentle chorus is being interrupted by the buzz of saws and drills and the groan of a small tractor straining…

The Olympic gold medal is the ultimate badge of international athletic achievement, material proof that its owner has reached the highest rung on the sports ladder. And although the Sydney Olympic Organizing Committee will put no monetary value on the gold medal, they do admit that, in fact, precious little…

Seated at his kitchen table, former Dallas County prosecutor Clark Birdsall–his voice soft, his speech measured–didn’t act like a man who had just left the courthouse a free man, judged innocent of a tawdry crime he had spent the last four months insisting he hadn’t committed. Only a day had…

“After review of your taped senior sermon, I am convinced that your ministry is destined to focus on the dying; lending comfort to those faced with death and those who are losing loved ones…” –A written evaluation of seminary student Carroll Pickett in 1956 For hours the young man had…

COOPER–It is mid-afternoon and in the booths down at the Dairy Queen and at the tables of the 75-year-old Miller’s Pharmacy on the square, a religious rite of small-town Texas is being practiced. There is some talk of the endless drought and the brain-baking heat, maybe even a bit of…

TRINIDAD–Alicia Gray, a pistol strapped to her right hip and extra ammunition in place around her thin waist, squinted into the blistering noonday sun and made her point with neither histrionics nor anger. Leaning against a padlocked gate bearing signs warning trespassers on her family’s property to beware, she said…

GUN BARREL CITY–On early East Texas evenings, when the frustration becomes unbearable, Keith Tarkington, a 34-year-old cable installer, takes a solitary drive south into an isolated section of Henderson County. Past Cedar Creek Lake, out Highway 274, then onto a blacktop lane leading to a narrow dirt road that winds…

The young bricklayer peered out the window into the gray January morning, sipped from his coffee cup, and resigned himself to an idle weekend. No construction crews, he knew, would brave the bitter temperatures and frozen roads to work. The previous night’s blizzard, which left a 12-inch blanket of snow,…

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. –The Second Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1791 Texas, it would appear, has become a lightning rod for the nation’s most volatile…

In the dark, troubling aftermath of last September’s shooting rampage at Wedgwood Baptist Church, predictable rumors began circulating even as funerals were being planned and reparation to the damaged sanctuary was under way. A half-dozen writers, locally and from afar, were talking of tracing the tragedy, fashioned by mentally deranged…

HUGHES SPRINGS–From the porch of her red-brick home, poet Leafie Mason could stand watch over the energy that kept the small town she called home alive. Just beyond West First Street, yards away, runs the railroad track, a pathway for Kansas City Southern trains that daily hurry westward from Shreveport…

PAYNE SPRINGS–The tree-canopied blacktop roads wind endlessly along the shores of Cedar Creek Lake, past mobile home after mobile home in this out-of-the-way maze of communities with names like Payne Springs, Malakoff, Mabank, and Gun Barrel City. It is here that bass boat meets cattle trailer, gimme caps share fashion…

“I was the first to light the torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail and easily extinguished that flame may be…” –from a 1933 letter written by Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft At first blush it is little more than parched flatland, colored only…

With Christmas just 10 days away, the petite blonde sat at her computer screen, engaged in her night-owl habit of checking e-mails and responding to chat-room questions posed by a growing collection of fans she’d never expected to have. True-crime author Barbara Davis, at 49 a latecomer to her profession,…

When the time comes for historians to reflect on the decade of the ’90s, one of the troubling issues they will face is the headline-grabbing litany of violence that all too regularly has visited unlikely places. Misguided outcasts sprayed lethal gunfire into schools in Pearl, Mississippi; Littleton, Colorado; and West…