The first hint Michael and Marisa Hierro had that something was amiss when they pulled into the driveway of their Rowlett home on the night of December 20 was their Christmas lights. They had been on when the couple left earlier that day, but now they were off. The Hierros…
Catherine Shelton isn’t exactly the belle of the Dallas bar. In fact, since 1988, when she turned up in Dallas County working court-appointed cases from then-criminal District Judge Tom Price, most of Shelton’s brethren at the Frank Crowley Criminal Courts building have given her a wide berth. It wasn’t just…
As the harsh smell of raw crude oil becomes overpowering, Joe Nelson peers over the bow of his aluminum skiff. “There it is,” he says, pointing to a 20-foot-wide ribbon of black that winds across the murky waters of Galveston Bay. The oysterman follows the trail of oil for about…
When Linda Proach and Valerie Pankratz founded the Plano Chamber Orchestra in 1983, the musicians played for free to help get it started. Now, as it begins its 17th season, the once-harmonious group, which changed its name to Plano Symphony Orchestra in 1998, faces discord over money. The musicians and…
Good God, a good grade A bit of good news published in last Thursday’s Dallas Morning News surprised Buzz so much that we nearly spit out our morning bourb…um, coffee. A study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation found that Texas is “one of only a handful of states” that…
It was Craig Murphy’s idea, really. The Oak Cliff Democratic precinct chairman was tired of listening to the party faithful moaning about how local Democrats had no decent candidates running for countywide races. “We were mostly putting up sacrificial lambs,” he says, “people who would go on the ballot just…
On the Monday before the new millennium, Legend Airlines’ new work force, which numbers 150 and still counting, show up for their first day of training. Thirty flight attendants, a dozen pilots, and about 20 customer representatives arrive at the old Aviall building on Lemmon Avenue to be indoctrinated in…
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…
