Texas state trooper Ted Smith sat in his patrol car north of Pottsboro, patrolling for drunk drivers near the American Legion Hall. It was a warm fall night, and Smith was poised to land a big one. Or so he thought. Just after 11 p.m., Smith saw a silver pickup…
“After review of your taped senior sermon, I am convinced that your ministry is destined to focus on the dying; lending comfort to those faced with death and those who are losing loved ones…” –A written evaluation of seminary student Carroll Pickett in 1956 For hours the young man had…
It’s Saturday afternoon in Plano, and for once, the weather is nice. So nice that a young man leans against the outside wall of the Sprint PCS Store at 1913 Preston Road, smoking a cigarette. This twenty-something Sprint employee, dressed in slouchy khakis and a red polo shirt, is taking…
A year ago, Horace Caraker sat in the bright, sterile visitors’ room of a South Texas federal prison and swore to a reporter that he was tired of spending his life behind bars. He was 57 years old, in ill health, and vowing to stay free of these confines once…
September 14, 2000 For immediate release Belo Chairman Robert W. Decherd Announces New Bureau DALLAS, TEXAS/PR Newswire/-Belo (NYSE: BLC) chairman, president, chief executive officer, and all-around badass Robert W. Decherd announced at a press conference today an exercise in synergy unlike anything the free world has witnessed since Paul Lynde…
First the good news: It’s becoming less likely that Oliver Stone, who shot parts of Any Given Sunday, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK in Dallas, will ever shoot another film here. (Buzz is not a fan.) The bad news? It’s becoming less likely that anyone…
This is no fairy tale: Leave it to the Dallas Observer to go where no other media source–in this town, anyway–will go. A beacon, albeit a small one, but a beacon nonetheless in the mists of a diluted and sugar-coated media fog. We certainly wouldn’t hear this type of story…
Spell it out: So this is it then. After years of spiritual aimlessness and fistfuls of antidepressants, Buzz has finally found our lot, our destiny, our reason to exist. It’s to provide you all life’s little vulgar details that other Dallas media won’t. Sounds like a pretty good deal to…
Last week in Part 1: When Dallas cop Danny Maples turned himself in to police investigators in December 1998, he vowed to tell everything he knew about other dirty cops. But apart from Maples, only one officer, Quentis Roper, was ever charged with a crime. “Danny Maples’ jury gave him…
Inside a one-bedroom Oak Lawn apartment where a cat named Angel saunters among a cluttered field of prescription bottles and small framed pictures, Greg Brown hands me a book. It’s a 1984 portrait collection called Texas Women, by photographers Richard Pruitt and David Woo. I flip through the volume quickly,…
Sometime in the next six weeks, you’ll almost certainly see TV commercials with Regina Montoya-Coggins doing all sorts of touchy-feely things. Flip the channel, and you’ll probably see the same sort of commercial, but with Pete Sessions doing the hugging this time. Don’t know who Sessions and Montoya-Coggins are? Don’t…
The last wave: I can’t even tell you how much I loved the article on surfing Padre Island during heavy weather (“Ride ’em, Surferboy,” August 24). It made me feel young again. I met lots of Texas surfers when I lived on the Texas coast in 1962-’63 and began my…
COOPER–It is mid-afternoon and in the booths down at the Dairy Queen and at the tables of the 75-year-old Miller’s Pharmacy on the square, a religious rite of small-town Texas is being practiced. There is some talk of the endless drought and the brain-baking heat, maybe even a bit of…
Everything about the State of Texas vs. Daniel Earl Maples Jr. seemed terribly, terribly wrong, beginning with the defendant himself. The quiet young man on the witness stand just didn’t fit the part. At 6 feet and 150 pounds–wet–27-year-old Danny Maples was a wisp of a man, outfitted with an…
“We’ve got the AC/DC collection, if you want it,” Toadies guitarist Clark Vogeler says as he glances at the disc in the stereo’s CD player. “It’s basically the same record.” Vogeler laughs as he and drummer Mark Reznicek take seats across from each other in the cramped rehearsal space. Reznicek…
David Dean, a former Texas secretary of state and now a professional lobbyist, knows how to get what he wants. Unfortunately, what Dean wants and the tactics he’s employing to get it have stirred up a donnybrook among residents of the Swiss Avenue Historic District. Dean and his wife, Jean,…
Though they are only miles apart, East McKinney and the town of Fairview are opposite in nearly every way except one: Neither community wants more airplanes flying overhead. Residents from both places have joined forces in a bitter fight against a proposed $67 million expansion of the McKinney airport. Fairview…
Inquiring minds: So Wick Allison, publisher of D magazine, in defense of decency and virtue ordered 70,000 copies of his magazine destroyed before they reached readers because D inadvertently accepted a pair of “obscene” ads, The Dallas Morning News reported. Uh-huh. That’s nice, and we’re sure his mother, if she’s…
Oh, sweet heaven, I’ve hit my nadir: I’m writing a column about contracts. Not sexy contracts. Not “Troy Aikman’s multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract” or “Tony Soprano’s mother-killing contract.” I’m writing about “freelance contracts.” These are pieces of paper signed by people who are not employees of a media product, but who…
The truth is indeed stranger: “Poo Poo” (August 17) is one of the funniest pieces I’ve read in a long time! It deserves a place of honor in the “You Can’t Make This Sh– Up Department.” Letting the terminal self-parody of places the likes of We Oui come through by…
Tom & Jerry’s was dead. The bar and grill in the heart of South Padre Island’s nightlife strip usually teems with people this time of year. But August 15, as Tropical Storm Beryl threatened the Texas coast, only a handful of customers sat at tables. The bartender was taking inventory…
“Hurry! Hurry!” Stephen Hill’s at the edge of the stage, beckoning this crowd of 1,200 with his hand. His face is red and sweaty; pacing, he looks desperate to save them before heaven’s gate slams shut forever. Hundreds–young and old, from all walks, all races–rush forward, falling at the altar…
