Arlington businessmen Charles Biney and Eric Owusu disagreed mightily about what to name their magazine. Both natives of Ghana, the men had worked hard to put together a distinct, informative publication about the African continent for readers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They began bouncing around a title. Biney came…
Upon greeting the photographer assigned to take his portrait for a newspaper profile, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Arau immediately turns his Crescent Court hotel suite into a set. “Do you like this light?” he asks, gesturing toward delicate sun rays that shimmer through a window and rest upon a fawn-colored chair…
The last day criminologist Daniel Rhodes worked for the Plano police department, he found someone had been messing with things on his desk. He had already found a new job with the Arlington police department and was cleaning out his cubicle. But in a frame that used to hold a…
It was a cold, gray morning. A Sunday–they never have funerals on Sunday. The Reverend Gregory Spencer, Fort Worth’s renowned preacher, undertaker, and entrepreneur, opened the back door of his Eastwood mortuary, which doubles as his home. And as he looked outside, he found himself staring straight into the barrel…
The women at the post office cringed every time they saw Ella Patterson heading their way. The busty, energetic teacher-turned-author would arrive at West Dallas’ central station lugging cartloads of her book, Will the Real Women…Please Stand Up!, packed one-by-one in red-and-white overnight envelopes. The postal workers just saw packages…
If you’re a topless dancer who wiggled at Cabaret Royale some time during the past six years, you may be eligible for back pay. So ruled a federal judge last week in a protracted dispute between the U.S. Department of Labor and Dallas’ best-known topless club. The Labor Department won…
The peach-colored building stands amid plainer houses of entertainment along Restaurant Row like a country club among car dealerships. Its nightclub and adjacent management offices affect an air of aloof respectability, complete with valet parking and handcarved Spanish doors. Inside, a brass chandelier dominates the foyer. An ornate staircase ascends…
Four years ago, a New York-based wine company met with Federal Trade Commission officials, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the U.S. Surgeon General. The subject was a fortified wine called Cisco that was posing serious health risks–particularly to teens. The company, Canandaigua Wine Company, was under fire…
Delvin Gray watches as two stray mutts–one black, one gray–circle a trash can in a small South Dallas park beside a pond. Gray’s six-month-old son, Julius, sleeps soundly in his lap. It is dusk now, and so quiet in the park, so peaceful, you can almost hear the baby’s breath…
