EDITORS’ NOTEBOOK

Bill Porterfield has been my friend for about three years, though sometimes it seems more like ten. I say that because Porterfield is the sort of fellow you get to know quickly and intensely, as much through his prose as through conversations over sour mash on the rocks.

Not that I’m that special in my friendship with the man. Anyone who’s ever read a Por-terfield essay or profile, or listened to one of his whimsical conversa-tions with himself on Channel 13, knows some part of him. That’s part of the Por-terfield style: each piece of his writing, from the most personal essay to the most detached reportage, is imbued with his own warm and wry view of the human condition.

It’s my pleasure to announce that with this issue, Bill will begin making a host of new friends each month on the back page of this magazine. His regular column will be titled simply “Back Page,” if only because the physical setting of Porterfield’s monthly mini-essays will be the only predictable thing about them. Bill says he wants to write about people, and Dallas, and Dallas people. His first offering this month on page 120, a touching and warm essay about an old man and modern times, perfectionism and passion, among other things, should give you some taste of what Bill will be offering you in the months to come.

Porterfield, a perennial 39 years of age, joins us at a new peak in his career of letters. Two Porterfield books are slated for publication next year: The Book of Dallas, which he is co-editing with Evelyn Oppenheimer, a thick and glossy compendium of pictures and writings by major Dallas figures such as Stanley Marcus and Erik Jonsson, on various aspects of Dallas life; and a biography of the late H.L. Hunt, to be published by Viking.

Porterfield is sandwiching the books between his frequent writings for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor and other national and regional publications, and his frequent commentaries on KERA-TV’s “Newsroom.” Though Bill probably first came to the attention of Dallas when he joined Jim Lehrer at “Newsroom” in 1970, he was making friends through his writing long before that.

He started as a club reporter for the New Braunfels Zeitung in 1953. In 1955, he joined the Houston Chronicle, and stayed there for ten years, building a healthy reputation for his extraordinary feature writing.

He went on from the Chronicle to the Detroit Free Press and The Chicago Daily News as a special assignments feature writer. Between those stints, he accepted the first J. Frank Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and retreated to the legendary Texas writer’s ranch for seven months to see what he could learn from the old master.

Porterfield has published one book, LBJ Country, a collection of profiles of fascinating characters in the Texas Hill Country. His major writing awards include: two Texas Institute of Letters Stanley Walker Awards for outstanding newspaper feature writing; the Ernie Pyle Award from Scripts-Howard; gold medal from the Atlanta Film Festival.



Lest you puzzle freaks worry what will become of Peggy Oglesby’s mind-benders, now that Porterfield has taken over the back page of D, let me set your mind at ease. Peggy’s ” Puzzling” page will move forward one page, the next to the last page of the magazine, the back of “Back Page,” if you will. Peggy first came to our attention by submitting the only correct solution to our first puzzle, an import from the London Times. She claimed, to our surprise, that she could contrive even more difficult puzzles, which her growing number of fans attests to. Peggy, a math scholar, is the wife of Dallas architect Bud Oglesby.