Sitting in Ross Perot’s favorite booth at a fancy Dallas restaurant, Leigh Valentine eats half of her low-fat redfish and then explains her husband’s “disguise kit.” The kit contained several fake moustaches and a $1,200 custom-made wig. Robert Tilton, the Texas televangelist, carried it everywhere, and during their first year…
Explosive” and “heartbreaking” are what former Dallas City Council member Jerry Bartos calls a secret meeting Fort Worth power brokers held several years ago to discuss strategies in combating Dallas on issues regarding the Wright Amendment. The meeting’s five-page transcript, a copy of which was obtained by the Dallas Observer,…
Paula, Bill, and the horn Buzz has watched with wonder the comings and goings of a sign on Hillcrest Drive outside a large house near LBJ Freeway. The sign says, “Honk if you believe Paula.” At first, Buzz noticed that the sign came down when a settlement seemed near between…
The night Frederic Martin became an outlaw, a furniture rebel, was wonderfully serene, perfect to spend in a park. By 8:00 p.m. on September 16, a cool breeze had swept away the day’s heat and a full moon was climbing above the live oaks that dot the neatly manicured landscape…
There it lay, staring up at me from my front lawn, as appealing as a dead possum. It was the Saturday front page of The Dallas Morning News–on this day, a truly nauseating sight. It featured a gigantic color photo of Mayor Ron Kirk, Dallas Mavericks owner Ross Perot Jr.,…
The August meeting of the Swiss Avenue Historic District Association took place, as usual, inside the quaint “garden room” of the Aldredge House, a 17-room mansion well known for its exclusive black-tie receptions and ball-gown affairs.MMMXNormally, the sound of clinking champagne glasses and carefree laughter would have filled the estate’s…
Stop the Insanity Susan Powter, former Dallas pudgy turned fitness guru turned bankrupt Californian, is back on the shelves with a new book: Sober…and Staying That Way: the Missing Link in the Cure for Alcoholism. The spiked, bleached ‘do is a touch longer, though still a long way from the…
Forget the gray beards of the Dallas criminal bar: the Doug Mulders, the Vee Perinis, the Billy Ravkinds, the George Milners. Ignore the up-and-coming generation of lawyers: the Tom Millses, the Jay Ethingtons, the Brad Lollars. If you find yourself in the felony or misdemeanor soup, the man to dial…
You’re Wright, Rita First the good news: I loved Ann Zimmerman’s concise (albeit long, but no longer than necessary to tell the full story), informative, and extremely well-written article on the saga of Legend Airlines [“The (W)right to fly,” October 16]. Part II: Whoever edits your calendar needs to get…
Robert Groden, JFK assassination researcher, has had way more than his 15 minutes of fame. In the mid-1970s, he painstakingly created an enhancement of the Abraham Zapruder film that landed him a high-profile appearance on Geraldo Rivera’s Goodnight America television show. The film showed in gruesome detail President Kennedy’s head…
“Look at the writing–the writing,” exclaims Evan Fogelman, his well-tanned, shaved pate gleaming in the low incandescence of the Melrose Hotel’s Landmark restaurant. With one Bombay Sapphire martini (straight up, with olives) under his belt and another queued up, Fogelman, a Dallas-based literary agent who is the prince of the…
Jim Cleamons, head coach of the Dallas Mavericks, is quick to answer. His voice is soft and reflective; his phrasing, slow and measured. It’s a question he’s thought about often, ever since he began playing basketball as a young man in Lincolnton, North Carolina–“down South,” he says of his birthplace–and…
Among Dallas schools administrators these days, it seems no one is beyond reproach. Now even the DISD internal police are under investigation. Wesley Owens, the chief internal auditor at the Dallas Independent School District, confirmed that he expects to initiate a preliminary investigation this week into allegations that some $10,000…
Dallas Observer staff writer Thomas Korosec is this year’s winner of the Philbin Award for newspaper coverage of legal issues in Dallas. Korosec won the $500 award for his January 9, 1997, cover story about plaintiff’s attorney Brian Loncar, “Smash ’em and smile”. The brash lawyer is well known in…
No black-velvet Elvis? Yvonne Gonzalez, the jailhouse-bound former Dallas school superintendent, showed up attired entirely in black–a la Johnny Cash–for her arraignment last week at the federal courthouse. Unfortunately, such understated styling was not her way in January when she did all that furniture shopping for her home and office…
Councilman Don Hicks is between a dump and a hard place. Pleasant Grove homeowners are furious with Hicks because for the last several months he has been meeting with T.E. Frossard Jr., a Highland Park developer whose family owns 40 acres of arid, hole-filled land in Pleasant Grove next to…
Barry bad deal After reading an advance copy of the Observer this week, I must comment that the Switzer article [“Losing it,” October 16] seemed spineless, comfortably floating pro/con reasons why he can’t motivate the Dallas Cowboys. This analysis of the Cowboys’ losing streak may be comforting to all the…
It takes a lot to shock Jerry Bartos, but what the former city council member and foe of government waste, special interests, and dirty politics heard this day was alarming even by Dallas standards. A cranky fiscal conservative who had become the city’s most vocal opponent of the Wright Amendment,…
For a moment before dawn last January 18, Heath Green toyed with the idea of playing hooky from work. Green, a 25-year-old pipefitter apprentice, considered not showing up at his job installing pipe for a subcontractor hired to help Texas Instruments, Inc. expand its semiconductor manufacturing facilities in North Dallas…
Robert Gessel and his family made some carefully calculated choices in buying a home in east Plano in 1991. They wanted a neighborhood with hills and trees. They wanted minimal noise and traffic. And they wanted as much green space as possible, which they found in Bob Woodruff Park, a…
Go down Moses Paul Fielding, the former Dallas City Council member headed to the federal pen on charges of fraud and extortion, persuaded a judge last week to postpone his scheduled prison-entrance date. His excuse for delaying his trip to the pokey? Fielding wanted to be a free man to…
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…
