Business Bits: Restaurant on the Way In, Banker on the Way Out, Change at 13?

Just what is that building going up next to Dallas’ only waterfall-the Stemmons Freeway billboard? It’s a restaurant, more precisely, one of the restaurants to join 45 others opened by a former Dallasite. The restaurant is Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine and the restaurateur is David Tallichet Jr., 52, who left Dallas some years ago eventually to become chairman and majority stockholder of Specialty Restaurant Corporation, California.

The restaurant is named after a legendary Leadville, Colorado, mine, and will feature an early mine motif, including a basement bar and discotheque, complete with shafts and water dripping from the ceiling. Approximate cost of the new nightspot: $750,000. Opening date: early 1976. Tallichet’s company has one other little project underway – it has the master leasehold on the Queen Mary, now moored at Long Beach.



Out after only five months is Jim H. Jones, chief executive officer of the Bank of California and once a colorful executive vice president of Republic National Bank. Jones gained a Dallas reputation for being a hard-driving, outspoken banker, a reputation he took with him to become chief executive of New Orleans’ First National Bank of Commerce. Jones once told New Orleans businessmen that if Dallas had them, and New Orleans had Dallas’ business leadership, New Orleans would be a prospering giant and Dallas wouldn’t be much of anything.

California Bank’s chairman, Charles deBretteville, sent a private memo to bank officers directing them “not to volunteer any statement with respect to the resignation of Mr. Jones.” One week before he resigned at the director’s meeting, Jones had announced plans to eliminate the corporation’s non-banking activities. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Jones’ swift departure came after he issued dismissal notices to several long-term senior officers, who took their cases directly to the board of directors, and obviously won. Jones left without making any comment publicl



Dallas’ two leading banks are happy today that they didn’t take much of a position in New York City bonds, Republic of Texas told its stockholders that the corporation has only 1.3 per cent of the company’s investment portfolio in New York municipal issues, and that it has no Big MAC bonds. First International hasn’t mentioned the subject to its stockholders, but told the SEC it has only 1.4 per cent of its investment portfolio in New York bonds, and no Big MAC’s.



The grapevine says that Channel 13 station manager Robert Wilson is about to resign. Wilson is said to have plans to start his own ad agency, with the Alan Steelman senatorial campaign as a possible first client.

For some time Wilson haswanted to enter the advertising business, and the timing for such a move wouldbe right, a few weeks afterthe station’s major fundraising event, the Channel13 Auction.