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We all know and love Jaap van Zweden. But without the efforts of Liener Temerlin and those who joined him, the great conductor wouldn’t have a building in which to conduct. But in September 1989, Dallas got its symphony hall. And the Arts District began to take shape.

The Dallas Museum of Art was the beachhead for what became the Arts District. The trump card was when Dallas decided to build the symphony hall. I was on that board, and for 10 years, those of us who were interested devoted time and energy to raising money. I think, at the time, the City Council, with some exceptions, was very much opposed to raising that money. Being president and chairman, that was my chief responsibility: getting people to put money in.

I think it was more than $120 million, and that has to be a hell of a lot more than that in today’s dollars. (By the way, D Magazine used to run a thumbs-up/thumbs-down feature. Well, I got a thumbs-down from D Magazine for milking the community by raising money for the symphony hall.) Just in terms of selling, I said if we can establish a high-water mark, like the museum did, this portends all kinds of exciting things for Dallas. The analogy I drew was if you had all the money in the world, you’d never have a museum to equal the Metropolitan or the Louvre or the British Museum, because they have all the artwork. But that’s not true with a symphony hall. I said if we build a great symphony hall, we can end up with the best symphony hall and the best orchestra in the world, because that’s all au courant. And that seemed to make sense to everybody.

The symphony hall really became the cornerstone, I think, for what was to follow. The visionaries in Dallas certainly saw that, including Stanley Marcus. The great violinist Isaac Stern said it best. There was a fundraising event, and I asked him to come down. His words were, “The symphony hall shows what Dallas thinks of itself,” which is a great thought, and I think that’s true of this city.

When there was a committee looking into various architects, I.M. Pei said, “I have never built a symphony hall before.” But we had assurances from Pei that he would devote his exclusive time to it, and it turned into a masterpiece.

There was a sort of warfare going on between I.M. Pei and the acoustician, Russell Johnson. There was a constant battle about the floating ceiling. Pei wanted one shape, Johnson wanted another. I finally got them both together and said, “I’m walking out of the room. I’ll be gone for a couple of hours, and if you two [can’t agree]”—and I remember my heart was pounding in my chest as I said this—“we’re going to end up letting both of you go and start all over.” And Dallas Symphony Orchestra executive director Leonard Stone was there at that time. I thought he was going to kill himself. It was costing the symphony money that we raised, because we couldn’t do things until they made that decision. I said, “That’s not going to look good for Dallas, the symphony, or either of you.” They got together, and as a result Dallas is recognized in headlines all over the world.

It was easy to raise money for a while. Then Dallas went into its first slump ever, and it was hard as hell to raise those extra bucks. There’s another story: my wife told me that Ross Perot had called. I was in Chicago, and Ross said, “I understand that you would name the hall after whoever gave $10 million.” He said, “I’ll give you the $10 million, Liener, on three conditions. One, that you follow I.M. Pei’s plans to the nines. Two, that you don’t name it after me: name it after Mort [Meyerson], because he represents EDS, so much of what built the company. I want to recognize the employees. And, three, I want a portrait done and hung in the hall of Margaret McDermott because she taught this city how to give.” And I called Margaret, and Margaret said, “You tell Ross Perot that it’s high time someone said no to the man”—which I love.

As it turned out, I had to call Ross back several times. I told him that I would keep him informed. We didn’t have enough money for the marble floor. That was going to be $2 million or $4 million, I forget what it was. I called Ross, and he said, “I’ll give you two of that if you’ll match it.” I said, “Ross, people cross the street when they see me coming,” because I’d been doing so much fundraising for so long. And he said, “Okay.” So he gave. He didn’t want it published, but he gave $14 million.

American Airlines was one of my accounts, and I called the CEO, Bob Crandall, and they flew that marble in from Rome to make the opening. As the symphony was rehearsing for the grand opening, I was going around asking, “How are the acoustics?” I asked just enough to irritate Johnson, and he said, “Liener, if you stop listening for the acoustics, and start listening to the music, you’ll come to the conclusion all by yourself.”
Today the hall, the acoustics, and the symphony are recognized all over the world.

Liener Temerlin is a longtime Dallas advertising executive and president of Temerlin Consulting.

I remember back when the Mansion was first renovated in 1980. We were turning the kitchen and dining room into a bar for a party. I asked the designer to get some animal heads for a Western theme. When she said she didn’t have any, I said my husband had plenty and that he’d loan her some. When my husband saw them the night of the party, he nearly died. He said she chose the worst specimens, like animals with crooked horns. When I asked her about it, she said, “I chose them because they had sweet expressions.”

The Mansion has hosted many famous guests. In the late 1980s, entertainer Robert Goulet came. He always traveled with his two pet cats. The cats arrived before he did, and the hospitable Mansion staff brought them welcome baskets. There was a catnip mouse in there, and when he arrived, they were wild, climbing the drapes.

A couple of years ago, Crown Prince Abdullah, now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, rented the entire hotel and part of the Hotel Crescent Court. He required a bathroom remodel, which was accomplished in one week’s time. He also had an entire suite devoted to all the televisions he brought with him.

In 1989, I realized how special the Mansion was when we won the Mobil Five Star Award—the only hotel in Texas so honored, and a designation the Mansion has had since.

Caroline Rose Hunt is the founder and honorary chairperson of Rosewood Hotels & Resorts.

Thanks to Errol Morris’ documentary The Thin Blue Line and a growing number of wrongly convicted men exonerated by DNA evidence, Dallas County long had a reputation as a place where justice was quick but not always just. Fresh off a historic win that made him the county’s (and state’s) first black district attorney, Craig Watkins made a move to erase that reputation, and the practices that had led to it, by creating the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit in 2007.

When I was campaigning, and even before that, when I was a defense attorney, I’d seen all these issues of claims of innocence. When I was campaigning for office—in fact, maybe a month before the election—a story came out about this guy who was going to be freed for a crime he didn’t commit. They did a little blurb in the newspaper. A guy from the newspaper called me, and I was like, “You know, I told you so. I told you all this stuff was going on.” He just started laughing, laughing it off, blew me off.

And then I came into office and started looking at the files, and looking at all the claims that we had gotten before I’d gotten here that were denied. There were like 400 files that had requested this DNA deal that were denied. So we started looking at those files and saw there was legitimacy to these claims, outside of the scientific part. We looked at the facts of the case and all that. We thought, there is some legitimacy to all this. To first assistant district attorney Terri Moore’s credit, she came in and said that we need to go ahead and put something in place to systematically look at this. I said, “Yeah, you’re right. We need to formulate some ideas.”

So we sat down, and I guess we talked about it and talked about how we were going to do it, for about a week. And then the time came for us to implement it, and to be honest with you, I was a little, you know, taken aback or leery or kind of on edge about doing it that early on in our administration. Because we did it—I don’t think it was even six months in. I was still dealing with the difficulties of being elected, people questioning my competence. And here I am, this first black DA, being an advocate for letting folks out of jail. So I was thinking about it from that perspective.

What convinced me to go forward was Terri Moore: “This is something that needs to be done. It’s not just Dallas County. I saw the same thing in Tarrant County.” She had dealt with a lot of defense attorneys from a lot of different areas, and she was like, “We’ve got to do this.” I was saying, “Terri, but politically, what does that mean for the success of this office? Are the citizens of Dallas County ready for something like this? We’ve got to look at it long-term. Change has to come, but we don’t want to do it too quickly. We have to be very careful in how we do it.” At the end of the day, we decided to go ahead and go forward with it.

Looking back on it, I kind of question why that decision was so difficult for me, when, you know, I had always put myself out to be an agent of change and progress. Here we were, at that moment for me to act upon what I pretty much had wanted to do my whole life, and I was afraid to do it. I really regret that, at this point. I’m still trying to make up for it, the fact that I had doubts and I was afraid.

Craig Watkins is the Dallas County district attorney.

In 1986, Dallas was considered a banking powerhouse. Oil was flowing, money was being spent, and all was well. Then the world came crashing down. Oil prices plummeted and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 left banks with massive loans. By 1992, 506 commercial banks had been closed. Businesses moved out of their downtown offices, creating a wasteland. Today, the city is still recovering.

As the sun rose on January 1, 1986, Dallas possessed the 17th, 20th, and 25th largest banking companies in the United States: First RepublicBank Corporation, MCorp, and InterFirst Corporation. They were also the three largest banking companies in Texas, with combined assets of $63.4 billion.

Four short years later, as the sun set on the decade, Dallas didn’t have a single home-based bank with more than $1 billion in assets. Dallas had been transformed from one of the nation’s great banking powers to a financial wasteland. The financial landscape had permanently changed, and with it Dallas lost the engine of growth that built one of America’s greatest cities.

The story of their demise is a tortured Greek tragedy that should never have happened and that can’t be completely told or understood unless you lived at the heart of the story.

The decade of the 1980s began during an oil boom that started with the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and pushed the Texas real estate and energy economies to giddy heights. Money poured into the state, resulting in prosperity and a spending binge that was unparalleled in Texas—and perhaps in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, boom was followed by bust, creating an economic tidal wave that swept over the state, catching Dallas in its vortex. The beginning of the end occurred in the first quarter of 1986, when the price of oil plummeted from $35 per barrel to $9.75 per barrel in three calamitous months. This was quickly followed by the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which removed most of the tax incentives for individuals and businesses to own real estate, leaving the Texas and Dallas banks, which were laden with real estate loans, vulnerable to the following devaluation of real estate.

Against this background, Congress had deregulated the nation’s savings and loan industry, creating an atmosphere in which every crooked fox in Dallas found a fertile and lucrative henhouse to plunder. A small band of thieves built and ravaged Empire Savings, Vernon Savings, Sunbelt Savings, and Western Savings. These organizations grew in aggregate from a few hundred million to more than $5 billion in assets in less than four years as a result of loose and illegal lending practices, “hot shop” deposit soliciting call centers, and self dealing.

One of the most ludicrous and unsound loans was made by Sunbelt Savings, aka “Gunbelt Savings,” to a real estate investor in Dallas to buy 84 Rolls Royce automobiles for $3 million from the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh of the commune Rancho Rajneesh, Oregon. Thirty-six of these cars were hand-painted by the Bhagwan’s staff with peacocks and geese in flight. Not surprisingly, the loan went sour. All of the above mentioned S&Ls were closed by federal regulators, and their CEOs were all convicted of fraud and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.

Unfortunately, the S&L crisis, the abuses at Penn Square Bank in Oklahoma City, and its subsequent failure in 1982, created a vindictive and punishing atmosphere among politicians and regulators in Washington. Federal regulators closed 225 of the 279 S&Ls existing in Texas on January 1, 1988, including 94 of the largest 100 in the state. From 1983 to 1992, regulators closed 506 commercial banks, which was approximately one-third of all commercial banks in Texas—and 25 percent of the total closed in the United States. Of the 10 largest banks in Texas, nine were either forced to merge with larger out-of-state institutions or were declared insolvent.

Were the regulators too hard on Texas? In an interview with the Dallas Morning News on April 5, 1992, Bill Taylor, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the successor to Bill Seidman, who presided over the agency during the Texas financial crisis, said, “The person who says things got a little aggressive in Texas probably isn’t all wrong.” That is a startling statement from a regulator.

To Dallas, the undisputed banking and financial center of Texas, the impact was devastating. Dallas was left with fewer banking alternatives, and decisions once made locally were subsequently made by executives located in faraway places. The financial engine that drove the commercialization and industrialization of Dallas and provided the early entrepreneurs with the seed money to build some of the leading businesses was gone.

With the centralization of authority in the headquarters of the institutions that were built on the carcasses of our leading banks, we lost major power bases as well as the institutional incubators that in the past spawned so many of our city’s leaders. Importantly, with the demise of the major banks, and other major institutional employers, downtown Dallas was left bereft of tenants for its office buildings, and during most of the ensuing years we had one of the top five highest vacancy rates in the central city of any major city in the country. We are still in the process of recovering after nearly two decades.

In speaking to a group of private investors and financial executives in Dallas on October 24, 2009, Bill Isaac, chairman of the FDIC from 1981 to 1985, said that in his opinion, the nation’s financial crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s was far more serious with potentially greater downside consequences than the current crisis. He cited the 3,000 bank failures in the country, which far exceeds what we are facing today with 115 in the current crisis, and perhaps as many as another 300 or so in jeopardy. He further stated that had the sovereign debt of foreign nations on the books of our largest money center banks been “marked to market,” most would have been declared insolvent, creating a far more serious crisis than that of today.

When a vacuum is created, it is filled by others. Fortunately, the large banks that replaced those that failed have played a major role in meeting the borrowing needs of our citizens and businesses. Additionally, many once-small community banks have grown to play a major role, and dozens of new banks have been formed to fill the vacuum. Private equity today plays a major role in financing our entrepreneurs and emerging businesses, as do other specialty lenders.

Jody Grant is the author of The Great Texas Banking Crash—an Insider’s Account. He is the principal founder of Texas Capital Bank and the founding partner of BankCap Partners, a private equity firm.

Founded in 1888, the Dallas Times Herald was the blue-collar paper that published screaming tabloid headlines in the afternoon. On its staff at one time or another were Skip Bayless, Lee Cullum, Molly Ivins, Blackie Sherrod, Jim Lehrer, and Jim Schutze. On December 8, 1991, Belo, the owner of the Dallas Morning News, bought the paper, which published its last edition the following day.

The decision to close was made by the owners of the Times Herald. They decided that they were going to close down. Then we decided that we would purchase the assets. The sequence is important because I have read from time to time that we bought it and shut it down. That actually is not the way it happened. They shut it down. We then bought the assets.

For me, we certainly fought with the Times Herald—no question about that—and we competed extremely vigorously for a long time. On the other hand, I don’t think anybody envisioned until near the end that one of us would go away, would simply cease to exist.

I don’t know quite how to describe it because while all of that was happening, we were too busy getting our newspaper out, trying to prepare for what might happen, what we learned very near the end was going to happen. And so my principal concern was trying to figure out if they go away and if we get the assets—which we knew by the end of the process that we would—how much of what Times Herald customers valued most highly could we preserve: which features, down to puzzles and all of that. At the same time, how many of those jobs can we preserve? How many people can we afford to hire? How many of their folks would want to be part of theMorning News? How many of their folks would fit in our culture and would be happy there and could contribute there, and how many could we afford to take? And how would we serve the circulation that they had that was exclusive to them at the time? How could we serve the advertisers that they had, which we didn’t have?

So most of the effort that most of my colleagues and I spent during that period was trying to figure out how to preserve what we could of what was good about the Herald. It was a very busy time. It was only after the fact when we realized: they’re not here today.

You’re always better if you have a strong competitor, and I felt that the fact that we were constantly challenged by a competitor made us better and made them better. It was a better result for the readers and the advertisers of both papers.

Then we had to regroup and figure out that the new competition has to be redefined perhaps as “How good can we be? How well can we serve. How well can you do things?” And that’s a different model.

The Dallas Morning News and the Times Herald competed in an extremely robust way for many years, but always with a respect, if not warm friendship, for the other side. The day the Times Herald closed, I recall driving to work, looking at the news racks on about every corner, and feeling a sad emptiness in my day. Most everyone at the Morning News felt the same way. There was no inclination to gloat or to high-five, but an immediate sense that our newspaper had a greater obligation than before to serve everyone in the community.

Burl Osborne, the former publisher of the Dallas Morning News, is interim CEO of California-based Freedom Communications.

Even fewer can point to one family that made it all happen, the way Fort Worth can look to the Basses and all they’ve done. It started in the early 1980s, with a two-block project that became Sundance Square.

We have always believed, from the time we started with the restoration of the initial two-block area in the early 1980s, to today with 20 redeveloped city blocks, that Sundance Square is both a financial investment and an investment in the future of our hometown. Cities really need to be re-energized with every generation in order to thrive, and I am proud that our generation is giving the next a healthy, vibrant downtown to enjoy and work with going forward.

I love Fort Worth. I believe it is one of the finest places in this country to live, work, and do business. I cherish the friendliness and the quality of life, and I appreciate the vitality and sophistication. On a very personal level, I have also enjoyed tremendously living downtown since 1984. Year by year, I have been joined by more people, seen more activity, and experienced more energy, and that’s what makes it all the more fun.

It has taken more than 30 years of continual work, patience, and perseverance to create Sundance Square and its environs. We could not have achieved what we have without Fort Worth’s unparalleled spirit of cooperation. When it comes right down to it, it is the people of Fort Worth who have made Sundance Square a success. They have played the most crucial role of all, joining in and coming downtown to partake in all we have to offer. We owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude.

Edward Bass is a developer and an environmentalist.

Before the David Schwarz-designed shopping mall (and city hall) opened in 1999, the phrase “new urbanism” meant nothing to the average North Texas suburbanite. Now it has spawned imitators across the country, as people have learned to appreciate development on a human scale, with a sense of place.

Shortly before the opening of Southlake Town Square’s first phase, in March 1999, I said that I believed the grand opening would serve as a “passing of ownership” from our vision to the reality of Southlake finally having a downtown of its own. We knew we’d gotten it right when, as the barricades came down, letting the public in, children were playing in the park, throwing Frisbees, and dipping their hands into the fountain. From that moment, the community took ownership of its downtown.

Though many people considered the idea of creating a small downtown “from scratch” novel, the only novelty was the plan to do it over more than 20 years instead of more than 100 years. All downtowns have to start somewhere. I said in 1999 that within five to 10 years, when the shininess wore off and the trees had grown and the project began to show some wear, it was going to be a real head-scratcher to figure out when it was built. It didn’t take even that long. Less than two years later, a visitor walked through Town Square and remarked that it was the best renovation of a historic downtown that he had ever seen.

What we tried to create was something that allowed people to naturally come to this place and not have to think why they were coming, but provide enough destinations that when they got here, they would fulfill any of those desires. In March 1999, Southlake Town Square included about 250,000 square feet of retail and office uses. In 2009, Town Square has grown to more than 1.3 million square feet of mixed uses, including the City/County Town Hall and Library, the Southlake Post Office, a downtown Hilton Hotel, a state-of-the-art Harkins movie theater, a deep lineup of retail establishments, 26 restaurants and other food and beverage operators, and more than 250,000 square feet of office and service businesses. Retail sales in 2008 exceeded $200 million, a testament to the project’s regional draw.  And we’re not done. The Town Square master plan accommodates more than 3 million square feet of mixed-use development, leaving an estimated 2 million square feet yet to be built. We’re currently planning for the next 20 years of development at Southlake Town Square.

Perhaps one of the best testimonies to Town Square’s special place in the community came in December 2008, when Forbes.com ranked Southlake the most affluent neighborhood in the country. In the writeup, Brian J.L. Berry, a dean at the University of Texas at Dallas, was quoted as saying that what separates Southlake from its white-collar counterparts is undoubtedly its town square. “It is an upscale community with an expression of that status in its town square,” Berry said. “If there is anything special about the suburb, it is that square.”

Brian Stebbins is a founding partner of Cooper & Stebbins, the developer of Southlake Town Square.

That’s when he was led to a cow pasture in the middle of Plano, which in 1996 became a home for 28,000 members of God’s flock. Fourteen years and more than $100 million later, the congregation of one of the nation’s largest mega-churches wouldn’t change its decision.

Throughout the early days of Prestonwood Baptist Church, the congregation flourished, with thousands attending on any given Sunday. A few months after the resignation of the founding pastor, I became pastor in June 1989. And after a period of healing, the congregation, which was highly spiritually motivated, began to grow again—its mission to share the Gospel intact. More and more came to call Prestonwood home, and we soon ran out of space, both inside and outside, at our landlocked location at Hillcrest Road and Arapaho Road in North Dallas. So we began to consider expanding.

We drew up plans, we put a contract down on a large shopping center across the street, and we attempted to buy neighboring houses. We even had an architect draw parking garages with walkways under the street and over the street because we had been busing people in from a local high school. Our parking lot felt like a bus terminal—we were moving so many people. It became obvious that everything we were attempting to do would really be overbuilding our neighborhood and underbuilding our needs.

While on vacation in Colorado with my family in the summer of  ’94, I went out for a walk and was thinking about the church. We already had some plans approved by the church to expand. But as I was walking and praying, God dealt with me in a very personal way. He spoke to me. Not out loud, it was louder than that. He said, “Jack you are limiting what I want to do with this church.” I didn’t know exactly all that it meant, but I knew I needed to act on it. Immediately after I came home, I gathered key leaders of the congregation, and we discussed our options. Basically, we had four: we could continue to try to expand; we could break the church down and start new churches elsewhere, reducing the membership; we could have a satellite or multiple locations, but that was unheard of in those days; and, of course, we could relocate.

Once we really looked at the four options, it became apparent that God was leading us to sell the property and move. This was a risky thing, to ask a congregation to move, because a church can become very settled and secure in its location. And it was obvious it would be very expensive to move. There were times when I needed to make sure we were hearing from God, that these weren’t my ideas or human plans, but God’s plans.

After a long search with a group of key laypeople and advisers, we found this cow pasture at the corner of Hebron and Midway roads in West Plano. It was one of the last large properties available in Plano, and it was apparent that this was a great place for us.

The congregation made a huge step of faith and voted to move. Now, to move a 14,000-15,000-member congregation and to sell a property that included a 4,000-seat worship center seemed almost impossible. But God opened doors and closed the doors that needed to close, and we were able to facilitate the move. The congregation was unified and supportive. We knew we were moving, not moving away from our growth, but into our growth when we came here.

We didn’t realize what a good decision it was at the time, but in retrospect, it is dead center to the population growth of North Texas. We couldn’t have found a better place, and we do believe God led us to this place.

Of course, since then this whole region has developed around us as the church has flourished. The congregation has doubled, we have plenty of room, and we have since added our second location in Prosper. We have seen God’s favor and faithfulness in all of this.

And God’s people have provided the funds. We have a minimal, manageable amount of debt. People have given more than $100 million since 1996 through three capital campaigns. Our people have given and given and sacrificed—all because they believe in Christ and the mission of Christ on Earth through His Church.

We are all appreciative of the facilities, we are grateful for the financial sacrifice people have made, but we’ve always said this church is not contained here. Our people are in the suburbs, in the urban areas, and around the world. We are not a religious country club sitting on this corner. We are the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, commissioned by Him to touch people at the point of their needs and to share the Gospel.

I shudder to think what would have happened had we stayed where we were. We would have limited the church’s potential and the possibilities for it to fulfill the Great Commission. The Prestonwood family didn’t resist—we believed, we trusted, and God provided for us every step of the way.

I am grateful for the privilege of being the pastor of this great church and to be blessed with the opportunity to reach this region and the world for Christ. God is not finished with Prestonwood. He brought us to Hebron Road for a reason. In the Bible, the word Hebron means “face to face with God.” I’ve sensed that we’ve come face to face with God in this place.

Jack Graham is the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano.

On November 12, 1986, Dale Hansen and his producer, John Sparks, aired a 40-minute special report on ABC Channel 8 revealing that SMU was paying its football players. Despite being on probation, the university had continued giving some of its players thousand-dollar signing bonuses, rent-free apartments, and $750-per-month allowances in some cases. The report led to the cancellation of the school’s 1987 season, the first “death penalty” ever handed down by the NCAA to a major university. In many ways SMU is still trying to recover—even off the field.

I was just sitting in the office, like in one of those old mystery novels: “It was a day, like any other day.” And I got this phone call from a woman at SMU who worked in the athletic department. She said, “Dale, I’ve got a story for you.”

Her tip led us to David Stanley, a kid who had a drug problem and had basically been kicked off the football team. He was trying to sell his story. He tried to sell it to us, and we said, “You know, we don’t pay.” So my biggest concern at that point was, here’s a kid with an agenda. He wanted money. So we had to convince this kid to give us the story without a check attached. And he finally did.

That led to the interview at SMU that has been seen a thousand times. Producer John Sparks and I sat down with Henry Lee Parker, the SMU recruiting coordinator; Bobby Collins, the head coach; and Bob Hitch, SMU’s athletic director. I was concerned they would eventually say we had lied to them about the purpose of the interview—and they did. So I told our photographer, “Push the camera straight down, but leave the recorder on.” It would make them think it was off, which it wasn’t. The picture’s off, but the sound isn’t. It was never going to be used on the air, but I thought we needed the protection, and we did.

I said, “Before we begin, are there any ground rules here? Is there any misunderstanding of what this interview’s about? Because we have some serious questions about your football program.”

Hitch said, “Hell, Dale, ask whatever you want.”

We did. And months later, when Hitch complained to the Times Herald that we had lied to him about the purpose of the interview, I told the Heraldreporter to call Hitch back and tell him I have a recording of our conversation before the interview started and see if he really wants to say that. He didn’t, and Hitch never complained about it again.

Anyway, at the interview, I had an envelope that Stanley said he’d gotten cash in. It was given to him by Parker, the recruiter. It was handwritten on SMU stationery, and it said HLP in the corner, for Henry Lee Parker. But Parker denied it.

When I reached into my pocket and  pulled out the envelope—and I hate this every time I see it—I said, “This is hard to do.” I don’t think Mike Wallace would have reached in his pocket and said, “This is hard to do.” But there it was: the smoking gun.

There was a certain empathy I had for Bobby Collins. I had worked with him. I’d worked with Henry Lee Parker. I’d worked with Bob Hitch. They’d always been generous with their time. So I had a certain empathy for the situation that they were about to find themselves in.

The interview wasn’t that contentious. It was along the lines of Henry Lee Parker saying, “No, Dale. That’s not me. I never sent this kid anything.”
But they all knew this wasn’t good. And at one point, Collins stormed out of the interview. I looked over at Hitch, and I asked him, “What is his problem?” And Hitch looked at me and said, “That’s a man who has just seen his entire career flash before his eyes.” That somehow flew right over our heads. I sat there, and I did not pick up on the basic admission. Days went by, and we were sitting in the edit room one night, and I said, “Oh, my gawd! Guys! Guys! Here it is!”

When the word got out that we were working on a story, we started to get a lot of pressure. People in the highest management levels of Belo, which owns the station, had some strong SMU connections. There was some concern that we couldn’t trust our own attorneys because of their SMU connections, so we hired a Washington law firm—a completely independent law firm—to oversee the investigation. We wanted everyone to know how thoroughly we had investigated this and how seriously we took the issue. By then we knew how damaging this was going to be. We were naming names; we were ending careers.

So it came to the broadcast—8:30, 9 o’clock of the night the story aired. And the whole newsroom was on edge. Management was having this big meeting across the street. They said, “We want you to call Henry Lee Parker. We want you to ask him again about his initials on the envelope.”

Here’s the thing: to the satisfaction of the FBI, we had proven that without question Henry Lee Parker had sent that envelope with something in it to David Stanley. David Stanley passed a lie detector test saying it was money, but we had no hard evidence. All Parker had to say to me was, “Dale! I’m glad you called. Thanks for jogging my memory. We sent him a schedule for the upcoming fall.” We would have had to start over.

I had a little cubicle downstairs. My producer, John Sparks, was right over my shoulder. I called Henry Lee Parker. I can almost recite the conversation twenty-some years later. I said, “Henry, this is Dale Hansen. We’re going to go with the story tonight, but before we do, I’m going to ask you again: did you ever send David Stanley anything? Did you send him anything in that envelope?”

And he said, “Nope. Nope. I told you before: I never sent him anything.”

I got off the phone and said, “They’re sticking to this story.” It’s amazing in hindsight. The Washington lawyer just sat there and said, “They still say they sent him nothing? You told him about the lie detector? You told him about the FBI agent?” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I did. He knows all of it.”

The lawyer and Sparks went back across the street where the meeting with management was going on. But somewhere around 9:30, John came running in, saying, “It’s a go! It’s a go!”

When we got off the air after the special, we were all high-fiving and hugging—but not in celebration. It was relief, just relief after all the tension and the pressure and the build-up.

Then the threats started. I got a huge box delivered to my office. I opened it up, and there was a huge dead bird with a mangled neck. Stuck to its chest was a note that said, “You’re next.”

After that, the story just kept growing. A former SMU player told me a year or so later that we’d missed the bigger story. It was gambling, he said. He told me this story: SMU is playing Rice, and one of the big-money boosters comes down to the sideline and tells Bobby Collins, “I need another touchdown.” The score’s like 40 to 7. But he needs another touchdown. So they put Eric Dickerson back in the game. We’re sitting there going, “What the heck? It’s 40 to 7, and now you bring Eric Dickerson back?” And—boom—off he goes. The coaches said afterward, “We did that because we realized he has a chance to set a rushing record, and we wanted to help his Heisman chances.” But, in fact, they put him back in to cover the spread.

I told this story on the radio, and Gil Brandt, the former Cowboys director of player personnel, was at the station that day. Brandt stormed into the studio and started screaming at me: “What the hell?! You irresponsible piece of shit! There’s no truth to that!” He pulled his cellphone out, punched out some numbers, and said, “Here! Talk to him!”

I said, “Who is it?”

Brandt said, “It’s Eric Dickerson.”

So I said, “Hey, Eric. I heard this booster came down onto the sideline and told Bobby Collins to put you back in the game so he could cover the spread. True?”

And he says, “Yeah, that’s true.”

I said, “Here, tell Gil.”

That SMU story changed how I see sports. When I was working in Nebraska, before I came to Dallas, I would go to the Nebraska games wearing a Nebraska sweater and red pants. I was jumping up and down. My photographer used to get madder than hell at me because I’d be jumping up and down, and the camera would shake. I used to genuinely root for the home team. Now I’m cynical about most sports. I had a former Husker player from the early ’70s walk up to me during all this and he said, “You know we were paid at Nebraska, right?”

That story—the good and the bad—God, it was so incredibly exhilarating. I doubt very seriously I’ll ever feel that again. But I hated it. I hated the fact that this story had to be told. And I am incredibly proud that we were the ones who did it and even prouder of the way we did it.

Dale Hansen is the sports anchor for Channel 8.

There have been three pivotal moments in my professional life: the glorious day I was hired to work as a totally unhindered, gloves-off investigative reporter at the Dallas Observer; the day I went from being the hunter to the hunted when I switched from journalism to politics; and the day I went from representing 1/14th of the city as a councilmember to the entire city as mayor, causing an unexpected and nearly instantaneous broadening of my perspective.

Case in point on No. 3: I couldn’t stand the Trinity River Project when I was a councilmember. The plan as passed by voters in 1998, on the same ballot where I was a new council candidate, had been designed by road engineers, and they had made the miscalculation of giving me a detailed briefing on the project right before the election. At the end of their two-hour presentation, I had only one question: “Where’s the water?” So I voted against it, even though my husband told me I should vote for it because we lived in Oak Cliff, which would benefit if the river was improved. If I were lucky enough to get on the City Council, he said, I could add water later.

Well, I’m glad Mayor Ron Kirk got the project passed, in retrospect, but I never did get to work on it as a councilmember. For those three and a half years, the City Council spent almost no time on it; the environmentalists sued the city over its lack of river attributes; and the unsavory centerpiece of the project—an eight-lane, high-speed Trinity River toll road, split four lanes on each side of the river—reigned supreme and intact. When I ran for mayor in 2001, I was an ardent and vocal opponent.

In the club of Dallas mayors who have served under 14-1, there are only four: Steve Bartlett, Ron Kirk, me, and Tom Leppert. But only I have had the unique experience of going from being a 14 to a 1. The difference is jarring—and instructive.

Within days of my election, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison took me out for coffee at La Madeleine. She said, “I’ve worked hard for years getting money for the Trinity River Project. Are you going to support it?” Reasonable question. A few weeks later, City Manager Mary Suhm, who was then the No. 2, told me it was time to go on the city’s annual trek to Washington, business leaders in tow, to ask Congressional members for federal money for the project; I balked and didn’t want to go. Suhm said fine, but if the mayor was a deliberate no-show for the first time ever, no elected official would support funding us. Did I want the Trinity Project to stall, overnight? Another reasonable question.

Single-member district councilmembers don’t have to worry about such things—it’s not in the job description. They can question and criticize big projects all day long and still sleep well at night, knowing that somebody else—the mayor, the city manager, the councilperson from the district where the big, messed-up project is located—is the one ultimately responsible for carrying the burden. And if you’re a maverick councilmember—and I was one of those, full of passion and principle, short on the art of political tact—the Ultimately Responsible People don’t want you anywhere near them or their problems. Which causes mavericks to get publicly sidelined and even more resolute in their opposition.

My fundamental change of opinion on the Trinity Project was due to the very thing that had made me realize that my days of stalking City Hall officials with reporter notebooks were over: I had switched jobs. And there was nothing subtle about it. It was guttural and felt urgent.

We convened an all-day meeting of the City Council just to openly dissect the project. After an honest and thoughtful conversation, we all agreed we had no idea how to proceed. Some of us wanted an even bigger, wider highway right down the river bottom; others wanted no road at all; everybody wanted more water.

We had no money. We had a worried business community, a hopeful environmental community, and a skeptical city staff.

So we raised $600,000 in private money to redesign the project without delaying it. The first $200,000 came from arts supporter Deedie Rose, the last $118,000 from oilman Boone Pickens. Similarly diverse folks with an interest in the project (i.e., road lovers and road haters) were assembled to interview and hire urban planners from outside Dallas (to avoid bias either way) to create something we could all love. Former Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson (the revered cool head and road proponent) and I (the quixotic new mayor who preferred a donkey trail) became the official “clients” of the redesign, so if both of us blessed the result, it signaled a real truce.

The eventual plan adopted by the City Council in December 2003 was negotiated by all the relevant parties: city of Dallas, Dallas County, TXDoT, North Texas Tollway Authority, Dallas Institute of Humanities, North Central Texas Council of Governments, the Dallas Plan, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

For those who argue the merits of the project today: the first thing we asked the urban planners to do was move The Road, an important traffic reliever for the Mixmaster, out of the river entirely. It didn’t work. What worked was a much narrower, four-lane road on the downtown side, inside the levee, which is the key to preserving the water and park elements.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed off on the road compromise, along with the rest of the plan. And the Corps met with city officials weekly for the next four years to begin implementing it. How then did the Corps suddenly pronounce the project unwise, unsafe, and undoable last year? In my opinion, if their internal rules regarding levees changed after Hurricane Katrina, then it is their burden and their responsibility to find a way to make this project work. Just like the Dallas City Council did in 2003.

The lesson learned from my long relationship with the Trinity River Project is simple: every journalist should know what it’s like to be in public office, and every councilmember should know what it’s like to run and serve citywide.

And since those two things will never happen, I’ll just be grateful that, somehow, I got to do both. Hopefully, it made some small difference.

Laura Miller was mayor from 2002 to 2007.