The biggest African American funeral home in the Southwestern U.S. is located here in Dallas, and it’s called Golden Gate Funeral Home. Its CEO, John Beckwith Jr. — a man who dreams of burying everybody in Dallas, black and white — is the subject of this week’s cover story in…
John Beckwith Jr. walks into his morgue and over to the new corpse. His colleagues and pastor follow him inside, still talking from lunch. The air in the morgue stirs and rattles a paper sign taped to a door that reads, “Where excellence is standard and only perfect is acceptable.”…
A few years down the road, you just may get pulled over by a Dallas Police officer driving this hot new number. If nothing else, it’s on the DPD’s wish list — appropriate in the hometown of RoboCop.The first purpose-built police car is on a national tour and stopped this…
The Major League Gaming Pro Circuit has rolled into Dallas: Yesterday, scores of gamers (and their parents) checked into the Hilton Anatole, where the competition is being held this weekend for the third year in a row. I know this only because I ran into a group of gamers last…
Turns out, Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell was available to talk to us today, following the news that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools refused to reinstate the the 137-year-old institution’s accreditation. Not surprisingly, Sorrell was defiant in the wake of the decision: “When we went down this…
The president of Southern Association of Colleges and Schools just called Unfair Park with news concerning Paul Quinn’s accreditation status. Says Dr. Belle Wheelan, “The appeal panel did uphold the decision the commission had made.” In other words, Paul Quinn will remain unaccredited. The decision comes two months after the…
Working for the electric company’s not exactly a job you’d expect to put you in the line of fire, but this morning, one Oncor employee found himself on the wrong end of a shotgun. Dallas Police report that when worker showed up to replace the meter at a Fair Park…
Following up on the memorial bike ride video we pointed out yesterday, Texas Highway Patrol tells Unfair Park that within the last five years, the number of stunt riders on our highways has definitely increased. “In the last three, four, five years, the number of complaints have gone up,” Texas…
Since so many of you were wondering, we’re passing along word the Dallas District Office of Texas Department of Transportation is checking to see if the grass growing on the side of the highway is viable for livestock feed. After we wrote about this rancher who drove six hours north…
Anyone who’s driven south of town knows most of the state’s suffering from a severe drought, especially south-central Texas. And without water, there can be no hay. So Monday morning before dawn, a ranch foreman from Harwood headed north to Bonham to buy some for the cattle and other farm…
The debate surrounding the proposed health care bill can seem distant. The bill is some 1,000 pages. Those who claim to have read it become experts either for or against the legislation. But last night, a cherry-faced, white-haired politician successfully tied this unwieldy document to a singular concept his constituents…
At 7 tonight, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins will speak to an audience at Irving City Hall about the county’s budget cuts — specifically, those cuts affecting his office. He has invited Dallas County Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield to join him, but if last night’s jam-packed town hall-style meeting at…
The kids are not allowed to wear red or blue when they show up to the SMU campus to participate in a summer camp — those are gang colors. And they’re not allowed to smoke during breaks or anywhere on the premises. The environment should allow even the most hardened…
It may not be election time, but tonight at 7, two politicians will duke it out at Friendship-West Baptist Church: In this corner … Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins. And in this corner … Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price — well, maybe as the commish has been extended…
Kwaku Twumasi had been out of work for seven months when he decided to try a new approach to job hunting — right, the very one you see above. The 34-year-old SMU Cox School of Business graduate had exhausted the more traditional routes of job scouting, like mailing resumes and…
For Ira Glass, the 50-year-old host of Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, doing radio is like talking on the phone to somebody late at night. “There’s an intimacy to just hearing someone’s voice,” said Glass, Saturday’s keynote speaker during the University of North Texas’s fifth annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction…
Local MoveOn.org members had penciled in on today’s schedule a protest in front of Senator John Cornyn’s Spring Valley Road office, during which they had hoped to pressure the senator to support President Barack Obama’s public health care legislation. But when Paula Anderson, a MoveOn.org member and spokeswoman, showed up…
A Dallas County security officer who worked at the Frank Crowley Courts Building was fired on Monday for a number of reasons, including being a morale-buster. But Charlotte Hardy insists the real reason she was fired was because she told higher-ups that officers at the Crowley are sleeping on the…
Ten years ago last March, “Roderick Newton and Julian Williams went to a car wash in Pleasant Grove in Dallas looking for someone to rob.” So reminds the Texas Attorney General’s media release issued last week, which recounts the reason Newton is scheduled to be executed by the state Thursday…
The hearing for once, twice, three-times-a-fired-Dallas cop Fernando Perez just wrapped — and Administrative Law Judge Willie Crowder upheld the termination. And thus ends the tale of Fernando Perez, who opted to hold the hearing behind closed doors when Unfair Park showed up at City Hall for a progress report…
More than two weeks after Southern Association of Colleges and Schools removed Paul Quinn College from its membership list by revoking its accreditation, the school now has the support of city and state political leaders who cheer its decision to appeal the move. So said members of the Texas Legislative…
Last summer, we took a peek at the Dallas Police Department’s murder stats and suggested you were best served by staying home between 6 p.m. and midnight on Wednesdays, the prime time for murder. As we just got our hands on the latest batch of stats — and already warned…
