Clouds hover, but rain has not yet begun to fall on a Wednesday two weeks ago. It is 6:18 p.m., and Larry Fitzgerald has just finished the job he’s done more than a hundred times before: witnessing a Texas inmate being put to death. This time, it is a 44-year-old…
Mary Thompson has her prey in sight. Thompson, a Dallas grandmother of six and co-founder of the women’s anti-gun-control group Second Amendment Sisters, is patrolling the hallways of Capitol Hill, looking for targets in her war against gun control. What better place to find her enemy, the gun-control lobbyists and…
It had been 14 years since she last saw him. Now looking at her father as he lay in the casket before her, she thought that he hadn’t really changed. Same round face. Same shaved head. It was as if no time had passed. But it had. And something was…
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. –The Second Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1791 Texas, it would appear, has become a lightning rod for the nation’s most volatile…
People don’t talk politics at most funerals, out of respect for the dead. But on the steps outside Munger Place United Methodist Church after former Dallas Mayor Wallace Savage’s recent funeral and again half an hour later at a reception at his home, intense little circles debated who may run…
Feel a draft? From the start, it wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven. Now it appears that Belo Corp. and the Dallas Mavericks are headed for an amicable, if lucrative, separation. Belo revealed this week that it has reached an “oral agreement” to sell its minority share of the…
Mending fences Your article was most interesting and you were right on target about Flower Mound (“Good fences,” June 15). A few points: ··· Since the town of Flower Mound has mandatory water rationing from May to October, I wonder how are we going to be able to provide water…
It seemed like such an innocuous idea to his new American scientific partners: take visiting Russian scientist Alexander Chepurnov out for dinner and a movie. Some laboratory joker recommended that they take Chepurnov, head of a virology lab in Siberia, to see Mission: Impossible 2. When he settled into his…
I was stretched out on my futon reading Harpers, the cat asleep on my stomach, when the fire alarm in the hallway went off. I have often heard fire alarms accidentally triggered, so at first I didn’t think much of the sound except how annoying it was. Then I looked…
Donna Blumer made a pronouncement to her peers on the Dallas City Council at mid-morning. “It seems as though things are unraveling,” she said simply. They were. The council had spent all morning last Thursday slugging through the language used to describe the duties of the soon-to-be-created city ethics commission,…
In the dark, troubling aftermath of last September’s shooting rampage at Wedgwood Baptist Church, predictable rumors began circulating even as funerals were being planned and reparation to the damaged sanctuary was under way. A half-dozen writers, locally and from afar, were talking of tracing the tragedy, fashioned by mentally deranged…
Bob Brightwell is reluctant to talk about it, and he damn sure doesn’t want to be photographed. Not with the skin grafts that discolor his forehead and temple. Not with the scars that disfigure his arms and hands. Not with the memory of the fiery crash more than 19 months…
Head hunting Buzz was ecstatic that DISD Superintendent Waldemar Rojas (SWR) wasn’t fired last week. We don’t care that SWR appears to be borderline certifiable, or that he’s helping to further screw up one already twisted school district, because we home-school our little brats. (“You call that a pony? Go…
I have two recurring, absurd, paranoiac fears: one, that when I fall asleep, I’m not really dozing off but instead I am succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning; two, that the Dallas Observer will soon enter into a joint news-sharing agreement with “WB33 News @Nine.” Which, in my nightmare, looks something…
A local Nightline? One of the most annoying gripes people have about the media is this: “News coverage is all surface; it isn’t in-depth enough.” It’s annoying, because those same people increasingly read fewer newspapers and get more of their news from television. Worse, they get it from bad television–for…
It’s the money As the wife of an immigrant, I am much more familiar with the bureaucracy and snail-like pace of the INS than I would like to be. I think there must not be any agency, public or private (with the possible exception of any long-distance provider), that has…
The last time anyone admits seeing Danny Fry alive is September 30, 1995, when he sat mutely, seemingly ill or in shock, on the veranda of the Austin apartment of his old buddy, ex-con David Waters. “He was sitting out there and he looked so…just really horror-stricken, like something was…
Donna Morris lives the good life. Each day, the well-groomed 40-year-old attorney wakes up, whispers good morning to her husband, Roy, sees the three kids off to school, and heads to work, sometimes with her husband, sometimes solo. They always meet at the only law firm in town: Morris and…
Did the city of Dallas deliberately blow a permit hearing last month and let the much-dissed Baby Dolls topless club stay open another year at Bachman Lake? Neighborhood opponents of strip clubs, who believed the city had a slam-dunk case against granting the permit, are convinced that’s what happened. “The…
Inside Rabbi Asher Goldschmidt’s North Dallas home, a visitor can learn about Judaism in at least four different languages–English, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. “Oops,” gasped a woman, sitting with the rabbi and six other students at a dining-room table last week. A fellow student, speaking Yiddish, had just explained to…
When a chicken lays an egg, it actually comes out soft. The hard covering you crack on the frying pan is the result of a chemical reaction between the surrounding air and calcium in the shell. Probably the last mouth one would expect to hear such trivia from is that…
Daddy got his gun So, how much time do you plan to spend picking out your dad’s Father’s Day present this week? Two minutes? Five? Let’s be honest: When it comes to filial affection, Dad gets the short end of the stick giftwise. Still, you have to get the old…
