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PEOPLE HAIL AND FAREWELL

Saying goodbye to 43 significant people who left us in 1995
By D Magazine |

ERIK JONSSON

By Lee Cullum

ERIK JONSSON, WHO DIED AT 93, WAS DALLAS’ GREATEST MAYOR. HE took a city turned in upon itself, riddled with the dark humors of the John Birch Society, wracked by self-blame for the death of John F. Kennedy, and opened that city up to the world. This he did in many ways on many levels.

Most obviously, he took the lead in building the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a pivotal accomplishment from which all else has flowed. Erik Jonsson saw what eluded many others: That DFW had to be enormous to do its creative work. Anything less would have left Dallas in a backwater.

Even more sophisticated was his insistence on a great architect to build City Hall. I.M. Pei was hardly a household name in these parts when he first came to town to vie for the commission. The dramatic structure he gave Dallas confronted the prevailing taste (exceedingly conservative) with a whole new aesthetic. That building set a standard from which flowed Pei’s Meyerson Symphony Center, Edward Larrabee Barnes’ Dallas Museum of Art, Philip Johnson s Momentum Place (he too tried for the City Hall job), and the fine Richard Keating towers built by Trammell Crow, not to mention Fountain Place, which also came from the Pei office.

Because of Erik Jonsson, not only is downtown Dallas an architectural wonder, it’s also a showcase for I.M. Pei, now recognized as one of the foremost architects of his time. Anyone who wants to study Pei’s work must come here.

Erik Jonsson also addressed the psyche of the city. After November 1963, he rallied the business community to rise as a force for decency, sanity, and tolerance in Dallas. No longer would established leaders stand helplessly aside while fanatics attacked and insulted distinguished visitors (Adlai Stevenson, et al.) they did not understand. No longer would anybody cater to these impulses and still be accepted as a respectable person, It was a necessary transformation.

In his business life, Erik Jonsson, along with Cecil Green and Eugene McDermott, invented high-tech Dallas. From Texas Instruments came the whole panoply of the communications industry. It changed the city’s culture, heretofore based on oil, making it more complex and more subtle.

Was Erik Jonsson an expression of Dallas or did he work against the grain of the community? The answer is both. He moved here as a young man, bright and bookish, and as he prospered into importance he challenged the thinking of the community over and over, just by being who he was, But he also evoked a new spirit in the city that wanted desperately to be born.

Lee Cullum is a former editor of D Magazine and a frequent columnist for The Dallas Morning News.

Willard Watson (THE TEXAS KID)

By Janelle Ellis

Imagine heaven since The Texas Kid hit. Not a feather dropped from an angel’s wing will escape his eye. Bits of glitter from haloes will be gathered, sprung strings from old harps heaped. He’s joined his beloved mother, Mary Liza Frazier Watson, and it’s for certain she’s helped him stitch a rootin’ tootin’ toga.

If you study the 12 Texas Kid drawings owned by the Dallas Museum of Art, you’ll notice that the center of each piece, the anchor of his life, is his mother. Little Willard learned to sew working the pedal of her machine, tatting, quilting, and hemming his sisters’ dresses. During the Depression, entering his teens while the country braced for hard times, he tailored fashionable shirts, pants, and jackets from serge and gabardine pieces. He and his mother managed to keep him moving around with pocket money while packs of whites and blacks weren’t. Always the popular playboy, he danced and dodged his way through gambling shacks and juke joints, and after the War, he and his partners earned more dollars for dancing at weekend exhibitions in places like the all-white Abe and Pappy’s in Oak Cliff than they could washing dishes in downtown diners all week.

Unlike Ralph Ellison’s protagonist, Willard Watson became a “vis- ibie” man. He took his nickname from the outlaw getups he rigged for himself, his wife, his trucks, and horses when they won contests at Frontier Days in Oklahoma in the mid-’60s. After seeing a hippie van swirling in psychedelia, he was inspired to personalize his pickup truck, turn his property near Love Field into a sculpture garden, and take his place in full-time art production. Grounded and stable at last with a cherished daughter (Carol Anita) to rear and a good wife, Elnora Love, to help him, he went from the back of the bus to the back of a stretch limo. With rich white society boys turned artists and writers, he roamed the Dallas-Fort Worth gallery-and-gala scene.

And what he could turn out: The first Christmas tree I saw in 1979 was an upside-down silver thing he found and propped in the corner of his living room. Wishbones from all the chickens consumed over the year had been made into elves, birds, hearts, horseshoes, clowns-painted and pasted with holly, crystals, ball fringe, and sequins. A huge Japanese lantern filled the space at the top.

At his funeral, he wore the tuxedo he had sewn for trips with my family around the country to places where his artistic achievements were celebrated: hand-crocheted lace over the shoulders and down the sleeves, his red shirt, his string tie dotted with little Texas doodads, rings on all his fingers and in one ear, and his black hat.

Now that’s he’s arrived, The Texas Kid will request that the cherubim and seraphim make room for a few of his friends (from the good ol’ days in the cathouses on Central Track): Can the choir please include a bit of blues from John Lee Hooker? Some bop from Dizzy G.? And let all the Celestial Spirits allow themselves a fresh, funky holiday spiced with our proud artist’s precious touch.

Janelle Ellis and Willard Watson co-authored The Art and Life of The Texas Kid. She teaches writing at El Centro College.

During World War II, an officer tried to “punish” Craig Furlet by transferring him to a previously all-black medical unit. Furlet later opened his own Dallas advertising agency, but he retained a lifelong interest in the African-American experience. As a volunteer for the Dallas Public Library, he spent the last six years of his life reconstructing four decades of local black history that had been ignored by the mainstream press. He died at 70 of a heart attack.

Back when baseball was a game and the minor leagues mattered, Sal Gliatto, who died at 93, was a tough and crafty pitcher for the Dallas Steers and the Dallas Rebels. After retiring from baseball in 1949, he opened a bowling alley in the Vickery Park area and coached Little League ball.

Pat Anderson, 63, co-founder of Half Price Books, died of natural causes. While her colorful partner Ken Gjemre made headlines with political causes, Anderson quietly tended the company’s financial fortunes. Under her direction, the company, which began in 1972 in an old Laundromat on Lovers Lane at Inwood Road, grew to 51 stores in eight states. Last year, the chain sold $45 million worth of used books, magazines, compact discs, records, and more.

From 1966 until his death at age 88, Judge Irving L. Goldberg served on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, handing down significant rulings on civil liberties, school integration, and criminal procedure. An attorney (he cofounded the firm that became Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld) and Democratic loyalist, he was among the guests waiting to hear President John F. Kennedy at Market In the frantic hours after the assassination, Lyndon Johnson called him seeking advice on presidential succession, It was Goldberg who suggested that Judge Sarah T. Hughes perform the ceremony aboard Air Force One at Love Field.

The oldest son of one of Dallas’ premier political fainilies, F.F. “Pancho” Medrano Jr. died at 53 of encephalitis. He was a Democratic Party activist, union organizer, and aerospace worker.

Thaher ai-Shubbary, 28, was shot to death in an attempted robbery while working at a Mobil station near Love Field. A Shiite Muslim from Iraq, he had spent two years in a refugee camp following the Shiite rebellion against Saddam Hussein. His dream, a relative said, was to work hard, save money, and be “a nice American citizen in this country.”

James W. Aston, 83, was an extraordinary fundraiser whose efforts helped pave the way for DFW Airport and the expansion of UT Southwestern Medical Center. In the ’60s. he was president and chief executive officer of Republic National Bank. But long before that as Dallas’ youngest city manager, Aston was a staunch defender of the council-manager sysrem. In 1939, when a councilman tried to investigate I lie water department, the 27-year-old Aston threatened to quit if the council encroached on his domain. The councilman withdrew his motion.

Attorney Phill L. Burleson, 61, died of a heart attack. Best known for his work in defending Jack Ruby and securing the acquittal of Fort Worth oilman T. Cullen Davis, he was a senior partner in the firm of Burleson, Pate & Gibson.

James Clay. 59. jazz musician, died of a stroke. Considered one of the all-time greats on tenor sax, Clay chose to stay in Dallas rather than move to New York or Chicago. That decision probably cost him a large national reputation, but also ensured his niche in music history as an innovator of Texas jazz.

He moved around, but Roscoe White always had a place for Dallas to eat. He opened his first restaurant in 1939, the Kings Way Grill on Knox and Travis streets. It had an upstairs casino, and the beer was stored in the icehouse next door. Later he opened the Corral on Mockingbird Lane, a drive-in that became a haven for SMU law students. White also owned the Easy Way Grill on Lovers Lane and then Roscoe’s Easy Way on Lemmon Avenue. He died of a stroke at 88.

The man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” Clarence A. Laws, died of kidney failure at 87. Laws served as field secretary and later southwest regional director for the NAACP before joining the Dallas civil rights office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, where he was die agency’s first African-American administrator. He was parade marshal for Martin Luther King’s 1963 march on Washington.

Brice Butler, 23, had told his mother he would sell the $2.000 chrome Daytona wheels on his 1980 Oldsmobile. His 21-year-old brother had been shot to death in an unsolved murder nine months earlier and Brice, engaged to the mother of his five-week-old baby girl and preparing to attend college, didn’t want to be the next victim of senseless violence. But before he could get rid of the expensive wheels, gun-wielding robbers took his life while taking the rims.

Russell Smith, 38, died of AIDS complications. During 13 years with The Dallas Morning News, Smith built a reputation as a discerning editor and a tough-minded, unconventional music and film critic.

Much of the look of modern Dallas-including NorthPark Center, Valley View Mall, and Dallas City Hall-bears the stamp of Raymond L Goodson Jr., the civil engineer who also oversaw the reconstruction of Greenville, Skillman, and Gaston avenues. He died at 76 of a heart attack.

A crusader for civil rights and champion of causes. Nina Daniels Wheeler lost her final battle, at the age of 60, to cancer. Known as the “civil rights twins,” Nina and her sister Ina, invariably dressed in matching clothing and carrying an American flag, were fixtures in national demonstrations for more than 30 years, participating in such historic events as the 1963 march on Washington and the 1986 Hands Across America event, which threw a spotlight on poverty and homelessness.

A close brush with history, captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, brought fame to L.C. Graves, the Dallas policeman who tore the pistol from Jack Ruby’s hands seconds after Ruby fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Graves, who retired from the department in 1970, died of heart disease at the age of 76.

Laurence Perrine, who died at 79, taught literature at SMU from 1946 to 1981. A slight, almost frail man, his booming voice surprised students when he read poetry aloud. His 1959 textbook Sound and Sense revolutionized the teaching of poetry in American universities and remains in wide use today. After his retirement, Perrine published two books of limericks.

Eisa von Seggern, a longtime patron of the arts, saved the Dallas Opera from bankruptcy in the 1970s by personally meeting the company’s payroll and underwriting entire productions, Her contributions totaled well over $1 million, but the value of her efforts to our arts community is lasting and immeasurable. She died at 90.

Fred Cuny, presumed dead at age 50, risked his life to help people in virtually every major disaster site of the last 25 years, including Nigeria, Columbia, Somalia, Iraq (where he helped relocate starving Kurdish refugees), and Bosnia, where he devised an emergency water-supply system that still serves Sarajevo. Ultimately Cuny found himself amidst the escalating conflict in Chechnya, where he was last seen in April. The FBI believes he was mistaken for a Russian spy and executed by his Chechnyan captors. Reluctant to accept his fate, Cuny’s family continued its search for four months, only to discover information that concurred with the FBI’s.

A voracious reader, political speech writer, and longtime volunteer at the Lakewood Library, Anne S. Good interviewed dozens of local figures for an oral history project that grew into a book, “Reminiscences: Glimpses of Old East Dallas. ” She died of cancer at 73.

Trying to help people who were trapped in their cars as Dallas streets flooded this past spring, Cruz Aguilar, 35, a furniture mover and father of three, lost his own life. Aguilar and two other men were swept into a whirlpool that was created when a manhole burst open.

B.J. Kirby, the founder and longtime proprietor of the original Kirby’s Charcoal Steaks on Lower Greenville Avenue, died of heart disease at age 72. For more than 30 years Kirby’s served between 7,000 and 8,000 steaks a month, providing Dallas diners with scores of good meals and decades of good memories.

While best known as the idea man and chairman of Zale Jewelry Co., which he and his brother-in-law Ben Lipshy built from a single jewelry store into an industrial giant, Morris Zale’s sphere of influence extended far beyond the business world through his enormous philanthropic efforts. The Russian immigrant was a pioneer in establishing scholarships for black students. Through the Zale Foundation, which he began in 1951, he also provided financial support to educational, arts, and medical institutions including Bishop College, the Dallas Theater Center, UT Southwestern Medical School, Children’s Medical Center, and the Zale Lipshy University Hospital. Zale died at 93 of complications from pneumonia.

A fighter to the end, gay rights activist Alan Ross lost his battle with AIDS at age 57. Recognized as the force that united local gays for political and social causes, Ross was honored by his followers, who named Dallas’ annual gay-pride parade the Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade.

Though he lived for only six short years, Clayton Dabney inspired many in his heroic battle against cancer. As the honorary chairman of the Junior Cattle Baron’s Ball, he helped volunteers see first-hand the true merit of their fund-raising work.

Striking a blow against citizen apathy, David N. Adamson founded the national Write Your Congressman Club in 1958. Today, the nonpartisan organization has branches all over America. Adamson died at 81 of complications from pneumonia.

Dinh Van Phuong escaped communist re-education camps in Vietnam and survived the killing fields in Cambodia to get to East Dallas in 1981. Before his heart gave out at age 57, he was a frail man, his body bearing the scars of countless beatings, two heart-valve surgeries, and injuries sustained from being hit by a car. Despite his own pain, “the Mayor of San Jacinto Street” protected refugees from the crime-infested streets of Dallas’ Little Asia, carrying a long wooden stick to scare away thugs and crack dealers. A struggling produce market in the neighborhood bears his name.

From the stoop of his shoe-repair shop at 2642 Elm St., Clarence Spain saw a lot of history walk by. When his father opened the Spain and Son Shoe Store in 1919, Deep Ellum was a bastion of jazz and blues. The area would rise and fall and rise again, but Spain would stay for 71 vears in that same location. He died at age 91.

Phillip Willis made history on more than one occasion before dying of leukemia at 76. Patrolling the beaches of Hawaii the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he captured America’s first prisoner of World War II. More than 20 years later, Willis brought his daughter and his camera with him to watch President John F. Kennedy drive through Dealey Plaza. The photographs drew the interest of the Warren Commission, which heard Willis’ testimony about what he saw that day.

Long before his death from cancer at 68, Reece Overcash Jr. became an icon of corporate America. A skilled motivator, he transformed his struggling company, the Associates Corp. of North America, into a $35 billion consumer finance business. Overcash, a successful United Way leader, also made sure the Associates shared his sense of community service. The company recently received Dallas’ Corporate Volunteer of the Year award. A radio man by trade and a church music director by hobby, Nonrell Slater, 87, brought us “Hymns We Love” every Sunday morning for more than 40 years. He began hosting the WFAA radio show in 1952. He retired in 1993, after the program moved to KAAM.

Joseph Merton Jr., a decorated veteran of World War II, died after heart surgery at age 71. With the Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first all-black squadron of fighter pilots, he flew 28 combat missions in his P-51 Mustang. Merton, who served as a national director of the Boy Scouts of America, came to Dallas when the organization located its national headquartersi in Irving.

Roses Sabatini Perry, who passed away at 85, was the first woman to sell insurance in Dallas and the first to work in a men’s clothing store, E.M. Kahn’s. There she demanded and won wages equal to those of her male counterparts, raising her salary from $12 to $37 a week. During World War II, Perry served as a welder at North American Aviation, and the decorative helmet art she produced during lunch breaks boosted her to the national limelight through articles and photos in Time and Life magazines. In 1952, after her two children reached school age, she began substitute teaching in Highland Park, and in 1958 became a full-time teacher in Irving.

Known by many as “Mr. Texas Agriculture,” Eugene Butler, founder and longtime editor of the Progressive Farmer Texas edition died at the age of” 100. Through his work in agricultural publishing, Butler crusaded for more accessible rural health care, better schools, water and soil conservation, and crop diversification. In 1966, he also helped his company found that quintessential guide to the good life, Southern Living.

When Joseph Jones “J.J.” Pearce became superintendent in 1946, the Richardson Independent School District consisted of 351 students and a single red-brick schoolhouse. When he retired in 1977, he had transformed the district into one of the top school systems in the state, serving more than 37,000 students in 44 schools. Pearce, 88, died in a car wreck that also took the life of 25-year-old Brian Thomas. Police say that Pearce, who made an improper turn, was at fault.

In the early 1950s, lawyer Henry Klepak effectively challenged the constitutionality of the law that had kept Dallas dry for years after the repeal of Prohibition. He created the private-club concept, providing an exemption to the dry laws for restaurants wanting to serve alcohol. His clients included celebrities such as Liza Minnelli and Mickey Mande. Klepak died at 83.

The ongoing tragedy of AIDS took the life of Matthew Allen, 13, born with the AIDS virus after his mother contracted the disease through a blood transfusion. Matthew’s life was a testament to courage, grace, and good humor for his classmates at Lakewood Elementary.

EDUARDO MATA

By Patsy Swank

EDUARDO MATA DIED AT THE DAWN OF THIS YEAR, TOO EARLY IN his life and with a flamboyance not characteristic of it. He was beginning new work that had been awaiting his time and attention. And he was flying his own plane-his great liberation from the strictures of the podium. It was this passion that betrayed him.

Eduardo Mata was a cultured and worldly man, deeply proud of being Mexican. Though essentially shy and reserved, he could unfold with fire before an orchestra, and was possibly the most profound musical scholar the Dallas Symphony ever had. During his tenure, the longest in the organization’s history, he devised challenging programs, interspersing repertory pillars with new or little known works. Typically, he was fascinated with the musk of Gustav Mahler-complex, intellectual, full of vitality and life, and constantly demanding new insights. He loved Latin American music and programmed and promoted it with the same vigor he gave to bringing forward its young composers.

The music he made demonstrated-and his orchestra members will attest-that Mata knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it: Hire the best players, work with them tirelessly, be their loyal friend but tough leader, and trust them, often with extremely difficult music, to play the pure text-what the composer wrote, There would be no cover, no tricks to win audience approval. The music had to take the house.

Mata had played the trumpet and guitar as a child-at his home and in the streets of his native Oaxaca. He made his conducting debut at age 14, leading the town band in the public square. Eight years later he was music director of a symphony orchestra. In between were grueling years of work and study with his teacher/mentor, Mexico’s great composer, Carlos Chavez. Steady and increasing recognition in the Americas and Europe brought him to Dallas in 1977.

This was a city poised and ready to build and house a major symphony orchestra on a 77-year-old foundation. Mata wanted a first quality, consistently important musical organization with the capacity and support for touring. He achieved, perfectionist that he was, much of that ambition.

With the planning of the Meyerson Symphony Center, in which he was deeply involved, and its completion and recognition as one of the great concert halls of the world, Mata’s career in Dallas drew to its apogee. He was ready for a full but less stressful future, though he would still conduct in guest appearances. He would compose, an increasingly urgent priority. He would work with a youth orchestra in Caracas that had been a special activity, on snatched time, over some years, He would give back some of what he had been given.

That all ended in a Mexican ravine on January 4,1995.

At the beautiful and moving memorial service at the Meyerson Symphony Center, the closing number was Jose Pablo Moncayo’s “Hupango,” said to be Mexico’s unofficial national anthem. We heard its exuberant rhythms being played and, in a silent descant, we remembered the last work he conducted as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Past and present merged in recall-and thanks.

Patsy Swank is a Dallas journalist, arts critic, and consultant.

Mickey Mantle

By Norm Hitzges

“WHAT IF…?”

So many comments and questions about Mickey Mantle begin with that phrase. What if Mantle’s knees hadn’t been so bad? How many homers might he have hit? How many more Triple Crowns might he have won besides the one in 1956? (Actually, that one qualified as a “Quadruple Crown”-Mantle led the American League in homers, RBIs, batting average, and runs scored.)

What if he had played during the era of the designated hitter, enjoying the luxury of hitting each day without dragging his aching body onto die field to play defense? How many years, how many more home runs and hits might that have added to his career?

But please-and this request comes from a fan whose childhood idol was Mickey Mantle-leave him back in the 1950s. Don’t play “What if” with him. Let him remain what he’s always been for us products of the World War II baby boom-a fantasy hero, a square-shouldered, blue-eyed blonde who never seemed to age on his baseball card photo.

Mantle broke into baseball at age 19 in 1951. More than 40 years later, that’s still the Mickey Mande I remember-the one frozen in time in the early ’50s. Please leave him there. He was a hero there. Had he been born later, he’d have had a longer career, hit more homers, made more money, but he’d never have been the fantasy player. Had he broken in 30 years later, the press would have quickly reported that he was a drunk. Imagine the pictures, the stories. In that way Mantle is luckier than some of today’s stars. Jose Canseco with his marital problems, Doc Gooden with his drug habits, Darryl Strawberry with his personal demons-these stars might have slipped through the permissive ’50s and ’60s almost unnoticed. Their dark personal secrets hidden from us, we’d have worshipped them as so many of us worshipped the Mick.

As we children of the ’50s grew older and approached our own fifties, we learned that our hero had battled some of the same devils we had encountered. Mande, and then pretty much his entire family, succumbed to alcohol. The image we all cherished of this boyhood idol was fading-going, going…until he became a hero all over again. Past the age of 60, Mantle conquered his alcohol addiction. Then, just days before cancer finally beat him, Mantle committed his life to God.

If you wish to ask “what if” about Mickey Mantle, that’s where the question truly fits. What if he had never kicked alcohol? What if he had drunk himself to death? What if he had never found God?

Oh, he would still have been a hero for his athletic exploits. He would have always been that square-shouldered, blue-eyed, blonde-haired slugger on the Topps card. His name would still decorate baseball’s record books.

But now the Mantle legend has grown ever larger. Now there’s a second Mickey Mande to regard as a hero-an athlete who, on the dark side of 60, accomplished his greatest feats as a human being.

JOE M. DEALEY

By Felix R. McKnight

THIRD-GENERATION HEIR TO A CAREFULLY CRAFTED JOURNALISM image, Joe M. Dealey captained The Dallas Morning News and its parent company, A.H. Belo Corp., to the threshold of hill national recognition. His successor, a youngish and able Robert W. Decherd, who also grew up in the Belo corporate family, walked them through the door.

Joe Dealey inherited the same interests, the same instincts possessed by founding grandfather George Bannerman Dealey and father E.M. (Ted) Dealey. He just fine-tuned them to fit his time period.

He came home from World War II service as an eager learner and slipped into a lower rung on the family ladder. Father Ted, outdoorsman and all man, charted a learning course for son Joe-six months of interning in each of the newspaper’s various departments. Like his dad, Joe favored the editorial side but presided over all in strict equality.

He got his first tided post in 1953, and in 1960 became president of the entire operation. He served as a benevolent boss for the next 20 years-taking Belo from private to public ownership and making the institution big box office on Wall Street. The Belo fortunes increased six-fold during his watch.

Along the way he posted significant markers for community, state, and national professional services. He held the presidency of every major local worthy cause, sat on the board of the American Red Cross, and still had time to work in the hierarchy of journalism.

He was a quiet sort, a team player who supported the Bob Thorntons, the Erik Jonssons, the Jack Evanses in their mayoral duties as Dallas boomed during his newspaper stint. He was a trusted lieutenant type with the elected leadership-but he also kept them on track with gloves-off editorial reminders if they strayed too far from their campaign promises.

Mostly, he liked newspapering. His most rewarding moments came when he passed the fire test during the weekend of the Kennedy assassination. His managing editor, Jack B. Krueger, was sitting on a federal grand jury when the crisis began-and you are not released from that assignment for any reason. So Boss Dealey regrouped the news team and stayed with it all weekend, day and night.

He was crisply articulate, possessor of an extensive and finely honed vocabulary he used with comfortable ease. He had a quiet style of leadership around the office, where he could say “ain’t” in one area just as easily as he could hurl a megaword as he moved next door.

Joe Dealey tried to hold together and pass on the same kind of gutsy conviction grandfather G.B. Dealey showed back in the ’20s when he editorially attacked and beat down a Ku Klux Klan that tried to burn down his building. Some of today’s subscribers to The Dallas Morning News, upwards of 800,000 of them, charge that there has been an erosion of traditional conservatism in the newspaper’s columns; that the more than 100-year-old flagship veers off course too often. But the navigators who took over from Joe Dealey counter that it still sails steady-as-you-go, following G.B. Dealey s pledge, inscribed on the facade of the building, to give “both sides of every important question.”

FRANK X. CUELLAR

By Betty Cook

THEY CALLED HIM MR. FRANK.

They hadn’t always. Born plain Frank X. Cuellar back in 1903, he began life as one of five sons in a farm family hard put to wrest a living off the land in South Central Texas.

But when he died in April of this year, Dallas marked the passing of a culinary legend, a trailblazer who built a tamale stand he helped his mother run at the 1926 Kaufman County Fair into a family-owned chain of 98 El Chico restaurants in nine states.

Mr. Frank influenced the careers and ethics of dozens of restaurant professionals in this city, Mariano Martinez, owner of Mariano’s restaurants in Dallas and Arlington, is one of a number of prominent proprietors, chefs, and waiters and waitresses who got their start working for El Chico. “Frank was my grandmother’s brother, and my mom worked at the first El Chico in Kaufman,” Martinez says. “Mexicans and blacks there sat in the back of buses and restaurants then. But early on, Frank and his brothers broke the barrier between Mexicans and Anglos. Watching them, I learned that you didn’t do it by forcing yourself on people-you do it by being a good citizen, and then people will ask you to join them.”

When the family sold the El Chico chain in 1977, Cuellar stayed on as chairman of the board for a year, then launched a real estate holding company with his sons. “They didn’t call it networking then, but Frank did a lot of it and stayed active in volunteer and charity work as well as business,” Martinez says. ” I saw him in a downtown elevator in his eighties, carrying a full briefcase, with his son and his lawyer. ’Frank,’I asked him, ’What are you doing here?’ ’Oh, you know me-I’m still trading pocket knives,’ he said and laughed. He was still doing deals, you see, still a big thinker, a big-picture man until the very end.”

Betty Cook writes about dining for D Magazine.

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