It wasn’t long ago that Alphonso Solomon was considered a rising star among black business owners in Dallas, a walking testament to the notion that ambition and business savvy could bring prosperity to the city’s minority community. Solomon had started three independent companies in South Dallas–a consulting business, a janitorial…
In The Dallas Morning News, politics is no joking matter. Dallas cartoonist Buddy Hickerson learned that lesson the hard way when his quirky, irreverent cartoon, The Quigmans, was exiled from the comics page recently for daring to do what folks–at least those outside certain Middle Eastern countries–do every day: poke…
Nothing but the truth To Laura Miller–great work on “Combat zoning” [September 19]. You and the other great writers at the Dallas Observer go underground to tell the real truth about the stuff the Morning News will not touch. Keep up the great work, and we will keep abreast of…
About 12 years ago, syndicated columnist Mike Royko traveled from Chicago to Dallas to write some material about the Republican Convention. He promptly delivered the standard barrage of complaints that “real city” people bring forth when they describe our landscape and the people who live on it. Too bland. Too…
In the annals of business history, what took place in the high-ceilinged ballroom of the posh Omni Mandalay Hotel in Las Colinas late last July surely qualified as a moment: T. Boone Pickens Jr. very nearly cried in public. The occasion was the annual meeting of Mesa Inc., the oil…
What goes around… Texas Monthly was chock full of laughs this month–mostly at the expense of the media. It all started when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram printed an obit containing a list of spectacular–and questionable–lifetime achievements for the deceased. It would seem that James M. Woodson, who passed on at…
If Nancy Goodstein’s allegations are true, the devil inside Dr. Edward Porter has taken over his true personality and is leading the Plano preacher and counselor down an evil path. Whether the 61-year-old Porter is still paddling his patients on the butt and biting them on the shoulder during this…
Peekaboo I have been somewhat surprised by your paper’s total lack of coverage of the indictment of Dallas City Councilman Paul Fielding. I hate to suggest that you may be guilty of biased coverage, but I feel certain that if it were any other city official, you would have had…
Where was the mayor? That was the question on a lot of people’s minds on the night of Sunday, September 8. It was 8:30, and 367 nicely dressed people were assembled in the Galleria Ballroom of the Westin Hotel–all of them friends and supporters of a small Jewish day school,…
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…
A Dallas County jury may soon get to decide if Cowboys head coach Barry Switzer is an insensitive buffoon who thinks all strapping young black men play football. But the verdict is already in on Switzer’s alcohol consumption: He prefers Cabernet with dinner, because Scotch makes the Bootlegger’s Boy bleed…
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…
Lord bought ’em a Mercedes Benz You probably didn’t hear about the recent civil disturbance in the Park Cities. In a Dallas blueblood equivalent of a soccer riot, the Parkies got positively inflamed about projection problems with First Wives’ Club at the Highland Park Village Theater. After the first couple…
One month after he was sacked as the president and chief executive officer of Performance Nutrition Inc., Gary Lewellyn has filed a $30-million lawsuit in state court against employees and investors of the company he founded. In the suit, Lewellyn contends that the group is responsible for fraudulently ousting him…
Second opinion I was quite shocked to find my favorite newspaper sinking to the pits of journalistic sensationalism with your article on Dr. John Hargett [“Under the knife,” September 26]. Rose Farley dug so deep into the past that I’m surprised she failed to mention every single parking ticket Dr…
Michael Pezzulli wasn’t terribly surprised when NBC called him two months ago looking for Walker Railey. After all, the Dallas civil trial lawyer has had his share of high-profile clients. There was, for example, the time he represented Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow in her quest to exhume her husband’s body…
The doctor was in. He was seated at a table beside the bar, and he’d been there for five hours, drinking with several of his McKinney buddies. It looked like any other Saturday night inside Chris’ Blue Tees sports bar in downtown McKinney. On April 27, 1996, the Indiana Pacers…
The well-heeled Highland Park schools rarely elicit sympathy from the Dallas area’s commoner districts. Who could summon pity for a school district where the average home value hovers around $400,000, and where only eight African-Americans are currently enrolled in its schools? Indeed, for a quick measure of the Highland Park…
Henry Billingsley, the son-in-law of Dallas real-estate developer Trammell Crow, has been sentenced to six months in a halfway house and three years’ probation for his illegal dealings with a Libyan finance minister. Billingsley had pleaded guilty in July to charges of smuggling Mohammed Bukhari across the Mexican border into…
No static at all When I first moved to Dallas, I also thought WRR should be sold by the City of Dallas [“Static quo,” September 19]; however, over the past 13 years I have come to enjoy and appreciate the value of WRR to the City of Dallas. WRR is…
Fifty yards from the Fair Park Midway, and mere spitting distance from the landmark Texas Star Ferris wheel, sits a squat, putty-colored building. Modest signs first lead visitors down a narrow alley to the building’s locked back door. It takes more poking around corners and tiptoeing through shrubbery to find…
The sculptor’s fortress rises above a South Dallas neighborhood that has long since gone decrepit. His home is an island, surrounded by a sea of busy streets. It is walled off on three sides by an 8-foot, black metal fence, jagged at the top, and on its fourth side by…
