Self-flagellation People who live near Lower Greenville Avenue have long complained that they get little help from the city when it comes to regulating the glut of bars — and the shortage of parking spaces — choking their neighborhoods. Whose side is the city on? they wonder. Now they have…
They greet one another like combat veterans. Their hugs are tentative but warm; their smiles, always broad. Sitting beside the crackling fireside in a holiday-decorated North Dallas home during the last week of 1999, these men reminisce for a while, tossing around names like kids playing catch. They pore over…
By almost any measure, Mediterraneo is a morgue. It’s 8 p.m. Thursday, a time when just a few months ago the critically acclaimed Plano restaurant would be buzzing. But this night the valet attendant stands alone under the awning, shivering from mid-December gusts and watching a paper cup tumble across…
Rest of the Tubervilles Linda Dennis, meet Alex Troup. He’s the guy who knows what the city did with your dead relatives — at least one of them, anyway. “I know where the Tubervilles are,” says Troup, a local historian who recently contacted the Dallas Observer after reading a news…
Nineteen ninety-nine, the last year of the millennium, a time to… OK, hold it right there. Among the dozens of you reading this are no doubt some who just slapped their foreheads, muttered “idiot,” and grabbed a pen to fire off a letter pointing out that 1999 is not the…
Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander couldn’t have picked a better time to slip out of town. Democrats in Austin who have loathed her since she changed parties in the mid-1980s were trying to smear her with a Nixon-like scandal involving audiotapes of phone conversations that her staff attorney recorded clandestinely…
Sandwiched between Central Expressway and Southern Methodist University, University Gardens is a housing oasis — an aging but genteel condominium complex offering all the amenities of the Park Cities without the steep prices. Its 350 units house mostly senior citizens and families, many of whom have lived here for decades…
The arrest of drug suspect Edward Allen Wright in an Oak Cliff drug house in January 1998 stirred up more than the usual ration of trouble — mostly for people other than Wright. First, there was the bounty hunter who was incensed that someone else had “jumped his claim” by…
Even for someone as prescient as Ravi Batra, the economics professor and author who predicted the Asian stock market crash and the fall of Communism nearly a decade before the Berlin Wall toppled, the final exam grades he’s posting on his office door in Umphrey Lee Hall at Southern Methodist…
His bright red hair has turned ashen with age, bereft of the pompadour that once gave him a more towering presence in court. His hawkish blue eyes appear puffy and sullen, clouded by too many years of litigation and liquor. His back hurts, his arthritis is killing him, and too…
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…
The map on the wall at Luke’s sporting goods is as overrun with boldly colored lines as a New York City subway map. Orange, red, green, blue, they intersect and collide in a web covering most of Dallas County. This laminated dream, produced by a couple of slick consulting companies…
Art lovers Maybe it’s the Christmas spirit. Maybe the folks at Deep Ellum Center for the Arts are really, really good sports. Whatever motivated them, we here at the Dallas Observer would like to thank DECA for not pressing charges against two of the paper’s advertising staff who undecked DECA’s…
Jeff Swaney has been doing business in Deep Ellum for a long time, since the area was little more than abandoned warehouses and starving artists. Swaney and his then-partner Steve Clohessy began hosting parties in the old Clearview Blind building on Elm Street in the mid-1980s, eventually turning it into…
Played in Quebec City in front of as many as 13,000 screaming French Canadians, the International Pee Wee Hockey World Championship is one of the sport’s biggest tournaments. Top-notch teams fly in from Russia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and other hockey powerhouses. Over the years, many of the National Hockey…
The first thought Mike Perryman had as he climbed out of bed that Sunday morning nearly two years ago was that it was his son Colt’s birthday. His quiet, brainy boy, his first-born son, his hunting buddy and best friend, was turning 15, and for the first time, he would…
Dr. Robert Haley, chief of epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, sounds as exuberant as a schoolboy winning his first science fair when he talks about all the media attention garnered by his team’s latest study on Gulf War Syndrome — results of which unequivocally point to…
After six months of apparent drift, the case of the vanished atheist came abruptly to life last week when a federal grand jury in Austin indicted Gary Karr, a Michigan handyman, on conspiracy charges of kidnapping, extortion, and robbery. The five-count indictment — the first against anyone in connection with…
Buzz’s holiday gift guide The desperate hours are approaching. The holiday is almost here, and Buzz still doesn’t know what to get Mrs. Buzz for Christmas. She asked for a vacuum cleaner, but Buzz knows a marital test when we see one, and there’s no way we’re dumb enough to…
Do you know TITAS? The Dallas-based arts organization has brought avant-garde dance and theater performers from around the world to North Texas, but many people don’t know the name. Maybe TITAS needs an American Express card, recognized around the world. If not a card, then perhaps a sizeable grant from…
Arlington taxi driver Eric Owusu always said he felt safe driving his cab, provided he steered clear of Dallas and Fort Worth, two cities the London-raised cabbie deemed hazardous. Unfortunately, he could do little to save himself when danger found him on a suburban street on St. Patrick’s Day 1996…
On November 29, Linda Dennis sent Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk a letter containing what may well be the last and weirdest claim made against the city this century. Dennis, a Dallas native whose family has deep roots in the city, announced she was formally claiming an eighth of an acre…
