Last summer I received an email from a woman named Harriet Gross that began: “We don’t know each other, but I’ve been freelancing in Dallas for a long, long time and in the distant past did some feature stories for D and for the late-lamented DMN Sunday magazine.”
A check of our archive brought me a story Harriet had written for D in 1992, the year I graduated from college and basically took to loitering at D’s office, hoping for work (I’d interned the previous year and knew most of the staff). And that DMN Sunday magazine? The first story of any real length that I wrote for money was published in 1993 in that magazine by the great Bill Minutaglio, who was then its editor. Harriet and I had a few connections, it seemed. I was surprised our paths had never crossed and was happy they finally had, because she had a great story idea.
Her 91-year-old friend Max Glauben, she told me, was going to subject himself to some high-tech wizardry that would make it possible for people to interact with his image and voice in perpetuity, asking him questions about how he survived the Holocaust. This 3-D holographic version of Glauben will be an installation, if you can call it that, at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, which will open later this year. Glauben’s story is fascinating. Shepherding it into print, especially with Harriet’s long connection to the magazine, was a real honor.
