It’s Oscar time. Everyone wants to be a critic. On Thursday evenings at the Starbucks on Northwest Highway near Preston Road, for the price of a cup of java, everyone can do just that: voice their cinematic opinions nonstop for 90 minutes as Gary Cogill, the film critic for WFAA-Channel…
In the venerated legal directory Martindale-Hubbell, North Dallas lawyer David A. Schiller appears to lead a flourishing practice. Even though the 36-year-old Louisiana native graduated from the South Texas College of Law just four and a half years ago, according to his directory entry, Schiller now operates his own shop…
For Roosevelt Holiday, the “bat cave” reference was just a night-shift cop’s feeble attempt at humor. A 43-year-old Dallas police officer, Holiday used jokes to soothe the jumpy nerves of new recruits he once trained to patrol predominantly minority neighborhoods in southern Dallas. Often the trainees were white. Holiday is…
The FBI is conducting an investigation into possible criminal violations of environmental laws committed at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, according to five people with firsthand knowledge of the agency’s inquiries, who spoke on the condition that their names not be published. On the record, neither the FBI nor airport…
Chris Beamon, a pudgy, freckle-faced 13-year-old boy, nestles beside his mother on the living-room couch. For the next few minutes, mother and son play out a scene that, if scripted for a TV sitcom, could pass as one of those requisite moments of domestic tranquility. Mom strokes a tuft of…
Is he in, out, suspended, reinstated, praised, excoriated? Not even sometime-Dallas NAACP chief Lee Alcorn, the subject of those questions, knows the answer. But things are happening in the local branch. That’s about the only statement anyone can make with certitude concerning the latest political machinations of the Dallas NAACP…
In 31 years, Kay Baker rose from a job as a teenage sales clerk at a J.C. Penney store in Oklahoma City to become one of the retail giant’s top-ranking female executives. Her fall from Penney’s corporate headquarters in Plano would take only days. It was a swift end for…
Carlton Whitlock is about to lose money — a lot of money, fast. Perched before a computer at a Far North Dallas office, the 39-year-old Garland man will soon see $1,600 evaporate in less than an hour. Four weeks have passed since Whitlock quit his $100,000-a-year marketing job at Nortel…
When Tom Lardner drives his burgundy Chevy Suburban around the historic State-Thomas district these days, you’d expect the real estate speculator to marvel at his own handiwork. Just 10 years ago, the neighborhood north of downtown was little more than a cluster of deteriorating dwellings, home to a dwindling, impoverished,…
The lunch served at the daylong meeting last August was nothing to brag about. “It was just your standard chicken lunch,” recalls Rosemarie Allen, who was, at the time, one of three associate superintendents in the Dallas school district. Yet the meal was part of a pricey gathering arranged by…
People keep coming in here to say good-bye,” says Cheryl Craigie, the president and CEO of KERA public television and radio stations who announced her resignation earlier this month. “But for me, it’s business as usual.” Although Craigie has told her staff that she is quitting, the 43-year-old public television…
Jim Crites takes off his suit jacket to give himself relief from the 100-plus-degree heat. For more than an hour, the director of operations at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport has driven and walked around the airport grounds, giving a nosy reporter and photographer a tour of DFW’s drainage system. It’s…
When Willard Rollins talks about the incident between his automobile and a red Lexus on July 31 in a neighborhood north of downtown Dallas, the executive assistant police chief is brief but emphatic. “Just for the record,” he says, “no fenders were bent.” A few hours before Rollins talked with…
Cher Lon Phalen, a divorced mother, grimly recalls her first class in a 12-week course at the Coparenting Institute of the Southwest. On a Wednesday evening three months ago, Phalen and a handful of other divorcées crowded into a claustrophobic conference room on the second floor of a nondescript office…
Rachel Pantoja — cherubic, strawberry blond, and surprisingly self-possessed for a 12-year-old — whips around in her swivel chair as she awaits her turn at the mike in a recording studio in North Dallas. Rachel, whose idea of a good time is squirting lemonade at her friends from a toy…
The direct-marketing mailer sounded too good to be true: You too could be become a global entrepreneur realizing untold wealth from the Internet simply by turning “your Web site into a 24-hour credit card order-taking machine” and selling vast quantities online of whatever product you wished. All you had to…
Consider the challenge: It’s your job to sell a presidential hopeful who, compared with his rivals, possesses only the skimpiest national resume. Even magazine publisher Steve Forbes, running for vanity, notoriety, whatever, has driven around the block once before as a presidential candidate. But your guy, despite his youthful good…
The Texarkana federal judge who presided over Texas’ case against the tobacco industry, which led last year to a $17.3 billion settlement, is raising questions about one lawyer’s claims to a share of the windfall. U.S. District Judge David Folsom wants to know why a state arbitration panel that awarded…
“What is a suffete?” Chava Ruderman asks. The 8-year-old has come across the curious word in an ancient book she now lugs from the desk in her bedroom to a sewing room next door, where her mother plucks stray pins from the floor. Chava’s mom, Chana Ruderman, an English teacher…
On New Year’s Day, when A.H. Belo Corp. launched its 24-hour, all-news cable television station, it touted the enterprise as a statewide effort, hoping to cover the news of Texas for every Texan with a cable box on his set. But there is a hole in that claim that stretches…
If plans by the African American Pastors Coalition succeed, some 250 to 300 new middle-class homes will pop up soon in the heart of South Oak Cliff, a neighborhood that conventional residential real estate developers typically consider akin to the moon because of its poverty. “We are trying to take…
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison will introduce later this week–as soon as the president’s trial stops long enough for some legislating to take place–a bill to bar the federal government from horning in on Texas’ $17 billion tobacco settlement. The Texas senator is co-sponsoring the bill with her Democratic colleague Bob…
