It lasted, at most, two or three seconds. Enough time to send and receive a million impulses that ripped through her mind like neural buckshot. They are stuck there today, two years later, as memories, and Elise Thompson can feel them viscerally; she recalls the sounds, sights, and sensations as…

The tall, deep-voiced security guard looked at his buddy, a squat cowboy in droopy trousers cinched at crack-level. “It’s a woman thing,” he said, as dozens of fans lined up in the Lone Star Park paddock for autographs from a tiny girl jockey with a hamster face, darting hands, and…

This wasn’t the hardball question, the kind a reporter slips in at the end of a dull conversation, hoping to catch the city council candidate off guard. But it stumped District 4 hopeful Elijah McGrew. The patter stopped, all the easy talk in that soothing baritone voice about fixing streetlights,…

In public, at least, the charges are somber, the rhetoric bare. The school board race between Richard C. Evans and Se-Gwen Tyler revolves around a high school diploma, which Evans finally admits he doesn’t have. Local educators line up to voice sober thoughts about the benefits of such a diploma,…

To hear lawyers at the Dallas law firm of Baron & Budd tell it, they are frontline warriors in a battle against callous corporations whose product, asbestos, claimed the lives and health of thousands of working men. But the first casualty of war is truth, and at Baron & Budd,…

Fred Baron is one of the good guys. Or so he says, loudly, repeatedly, as though it were an incantation to make the questions go away. The legendary plaintiffs’ attorney marshals his defense with high drama: hushed apologies, and a grand array of verbal feints and bobs. It all adds…

It’s a long way to the 21st century when you’re trying to get there with a 286 personal computer, a clicking, grinding beast consigned to obsolescence sometime in the late 1980s. A 286 is too slow to support Microsoft Windows, the operating system that’s become the universal standard. And because…

James Fears parked his ancient tow truck, stepped out onto the unfamiliar turf of West Dallas, then adjusted his shades and notched the top button of his white polyester sport coat. The candidate had arrived. Looking about him, he summoned a tentative smile and ambled toward the Mattie Nash-Myrtle Davis…

How’s this for a novel idea, Dallas: A black school board president. Thank you. It took me a long time to come up with that. We’re supposed to be way beyond racial hang-ups, I know. We’re sophisticated folk, savvy enough to purge the N word from our vocabularies and subject…

A big sign in the Seagoville senior center commands us to “Smile.” Another one–stretched across the back of the stage in stenciled letters–declares that “Life is beautiful when in full bloom.” But the cheery thoughts stay stuck to the walls. There is nothing beautiful or blooming about the handful of…

As soon as I arrived at DISD headquarters, I knew that something unusual, even historic, was taking place. Outside, next to the tiny visitors’ parking lot, some 150 Latinos were gathered around a man whose strained voice could barely be heard above shouts and loud talking. I couldn’t see him…

The horse had an ungainly name, and was a tough ride besides. I Are Sharp was rank and willful, with a bad habit of picking some inopportune moment during a race to take a breather. A jockey who didn’t figure that out might think his mount had run out of…

Someone must have said something really funny. Or maybe the photographer strode into the DISD boardroom trailing 10 feet of toilet paper. Whatever the case, he caught Kathlyn Gilliam smiling–an open-mouthed, toothy grin so jolly it looked as though she’d just burst into uproarious laughter. Needless to say, there is…

For 50 years, he had counted on silence–and fear, and the distance that separated people who possessed pieces of the truth. The Rev. Harvey Wesley Cutting had built his life around deceptions. But he was adept at pretending, and put on the constructs of his imagination like a cowl. To…

J.D. Cash looked at me incredulously. He couldn’t believe that anyone bought into the supposed confession of Timothy McVeigh. “People in Dallas believe it?” he asked, speaking from the living room of his buddies, the Wilburns, in Oklahoma City last Saturday night. Yes, I insisted. Not only that, but any…

Let’s be fair. The man can’t help it that he sounds like a yapping Chihuahua when he’s angry. After all, if you’d been charged with keeping order in the mighty dysfunctional world of DISD board meetings, you, too, might find yourself letting loose a few high-pitched canine squeals of aggravation…

Mari-Lena Ochoa had it all figured out. “I want to be a teacher,” the 19-year-old explained earnestly, leaning over the empty seat between us to talk. “I really want to make a difference. White, Hispanic, Oriental, black–I want to help.” Nice sentiments. Wrong venue. What better place to squash one’s…

Christian Coalition leader’s comments about Hispanics and English-as-a-second-language programs in public schools have enraged parents in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district north of Dallas. Doug Hellman, co-chairman of the conservative Dallas County Christian Coalition and a member of the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school board, made the statements during a taped interview…

While I sat through a four-hour, Friday-night meeting of the Christian Coalition earlier this month, I searched hard for the sinister folks who have infiltrated Texas’ Republican Party. I scanned the fellowship hall of Northwest Bible Church, eyeing the faces in each row of those $20 padded “stacker” chairs that…

On the eve of Armageddon, my grandma sat on the living-room sofa and considered this theological conundrum: Was it right to pray for the Green Bay Packers to win? Was it right to beg divine intervention on behalf of the more virtuous, if less talented, team? If Jesus were here…

They arrived without invitation one fall night, five parcels of fur and bones and screaming lungs, crying desperately and unceasingly for milk and shadowing Kirby Fry and Inger Myhre’s every move. The kittens, ranging in color and shape from a pair of emaciated black runts to a plump, white-faced tabby,…

It is one of the stranger sights in South Dallas: each day, when the weather is fair, 125 teenage girls stream out of the Ambassador hotel and cross the street into Old City Park. The girls are dressed almost identically, in navy blue smocks and skirts and crisp, lace-collared blouses,…