Not content to let Dallas school trustees corner the market on racial skirmishing, Dallas City Hall seems ready to reclaim a bit of its old territory, even if it needs a largely symbolic issue to do it. The subject: a proposal to rename Oakland Avenue, which runs from Deep Ellum…

Jasper Baccus couldn’t help thinking to himself how sweet life was beginning to look as the pencil-nosed, chartered Lear 35 lifted from Dallas’ Love Field and headed west. It was early last November, and the 68-year-old owner of Baccus 50-Minute Cleaners in South Dallas was thinking about his future. He…

Problems continue to multiply for management of the Dallas County Community Action Committee, the anti-poverty agency that is big on hiring relatives and even better at making tax money disappear. When allegations of mismanagement, waste, and nepotism first surfaced [“Family first,” July 31], the agency’s director, Cleo Sims, and board…

The Meadows is an old battleship of an apartment house afloat in a sea of sun-blasted pavement, weeds, and debris. Painted institutional gray, the building sits with nearly half its 51 units empty or loosely boarded up, their insides reeking of mildew and rotting carpet. Seen through a broken window…

At the Dallas County Community Action Committee, charity really does begin at home. Cleo Sims, executive director of the government-supported anti-poverty agency, set up her daughter, a convicted cocaine dealer, with a $25,000-a-year contract to manage two agency apartments in drug-infested parts of South Dallas. She put her son to…

A Harvard Club of Dallas luncheon should be a cozy enough setting for Paul Edward Coggins Jr., Harvard Law ’78. But even on this welcoming turf, 39 floors up in the Texas Commerce Tower, a question can fly in the window. Coggins, who for the past four years has been…

What could Michael Irvin and Erik Williams be thinking? Why would two guys with reputations steeped in strippers, sex toys, and baby oil–not to mention drugs or alcohol–want to mix it up in civil court with KXAS-TV Channel 5 and the Dallas Police Department? Big Nate Newton, the Cowboys’ motor-mouthed…

In Far North Dallas, just up from the Whataburger and the Just Brakes and the Blue Star miniwarehouses, Jeffery Smith is wandering with his putter among the plastic zebras, dreaming little dreams. Sure, his sport holds about as much cachet as indoor roller-skating, or bumper pool, or lawn darts. “It’s…

At 10 o’clock on a Friday morning, Jesse Enloe is downing his usual breakfast—three eggs, sausage, biscuits with extra gravy–at his customary spot, JoJos in southwest Fort Worth. Amidst clanking dishes and shouted pancake orders, the 50-year-old vice president of the Republic of Texas is talking affairs of state. It’s…

With the myriad species of thug life that hung out there, the fast food shop at the corner of Commerce and Griffin streets developed a nickname all its own: CrackDonald’s. This very urban Mickey D’s was Exhibit A in the average person’s case against ever setting foot in downtown again–ground…

Katherine Andrews wasn’t certain what she heard or what it meant. At the front of the Denton courtroom where Andrews had spent the previous three weeks, the judge pronounced the verdict in legal code: “Question No. 1 is answered ‘Yes.’ Question No. 3 is answered ‘Yes.’ Question No 4…” Andrews…

An artistic soul with a ’60s sensibility, Fred “Hutch” Hutchison can find poetry in anything. Literally, anything. The off-color ads in the back of this publication, for instance, caught Hutchison’s eye, and what he saw was pure verse. So he copped lines from a bunch of advertisements, strung them together,…

Cheyenne Turner bursts into the Unity Church’s carpeted lobby, looks around, and, with lips pursed, executes a hasty head count. Maybe 250 people are buzzing and milling around, but Turner isn’t impressed. “Could be better,” she says, sending off the efficiency vibrations of a million-dollar real estate agent–or the lady…

Dallas attorney Brian Loncar vows in his hard-to-miss TV commercials, “I’ll fight for you.” Of course, that presumes he’ll show up when the judge calls your case, and not send some coffee-fetching flunky who doesn’t know a pleading from a Post-it note. That’s a presumption you might not want to…

Like Joe Greed the Ford peddler and Widetrack the Pontiac hound, attorney Brian Loncar is almost universally recognized in North Texas. A half-million dollars a year in tacky TV ads will do that. One doesn’t have to know a thing about automobile collision claims, or what a plaintiffs’ lawyer actually…

Gather the elders. Light the faggots. After a 300-year hiatus, witch-hunting is back! Not since the days of the Massachusetts Bay colony has the prospect of barbecuing Satanists been so much the rage. And it’s right next door in Arlington. Bless their hearts, those godless witches of Interstate 20, and…

Kevin Massey gets so worked up before he “posts,” he can feel the sweat. His face aglow in the blue light of his 20-inch Sony monitor, he grips a pencil-shaped “mouse” in his right hand–the letters “F-T-W” (Fuck The World) tattooed between his knuckles–and prepares to cast his thoughts worldwide…

Nowhere can you look so far and see so little–or so you think while traveling across the Texas Panhandle on the way to the little feedlot town of Hereford. The railroad tracks and telephone wires and tar-covered highway race across land so flat you can see into the middle of…

Like a few other Native Americans in the area, Sue Amos can’t understand why the Dallas Inter-Tribal Center doesn’t have a child welfare worker on the job anymore. Amos, a 56-year-old Choctaw who shares a small two-bedroom apartment with her mentally handicapped daughter and three grandchildren, says the state would…

Eleventh-grade English at Wilmer-Hutchins High wasn’t what Tiffany Pullum had hoped it would be. Instead of reading novels or writing compositions, her class dozed in front of Bad Boys, Forrest Gump, and just about any other Hollywood video the kids thought to bring in and unspool. “The teacher told us…

Virtually every popular source of personal financial advice repeats the retirement mantra of the 1990s–sock money away in some form of tax-sheltered plan, like a 401(k). Nobody talks about what happens if the boss decides to sink the retirement fund into a speculative piece of flood-plain land, and then sues…

At a certain point in the evening, the DJ at the Legendary Crystal Chandelier likes to play some of those mesmerizing catastrophe videos. Images of ships capsizing in high seas, extreme skiers cartwheeling down sheer cliffs, speedboat crashes, bungee cord failures, funny-car wrecks, and other snippets of mayhem flash up…