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Dallas, the City of Confidence
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From my office window I can see seven huge construction cranes outlined against the sky. They loom over three building sites on the north and east sides of downtown Dallas. I look at those cranes every day. If anyone wants to gauge the confidence of this city in its future, they tell the story: There’s not an inner city in the country (outside of Manhattan, which they’ve never quite finished, and never will) with this kind of activity. And, as we report in our 1979 Business Review and Forecast, there’s more activity to come.

Is Dallas a boom town? Yes. Will the boom last, given the turbulence and hesitancy of the U.S. economy? Undoubtedly, although we’ll have our ups and downs. Is the boom mentality good for Dallas? Once I would have shaken my head. But we’ve learned a lot in this city; we’ve been through our share of con artists and promoters and fast-talk-make-a-million-on-leverage deals. (Nobody I know has forgotten the “land boom,” although a good many would like to.) We know that our local economy doesn’t need to get into a boom-or-bust cycle; we can take it steady, plan confidently, and look to the long run. Dallas is becoming a strong city. I’ve never applied that adjective to a town before, but it fits: We’re feeling our strength.

But I’m not the one to give you an economics lesson. I don’t understand economics. (I shouldn’t feel too bad about that, since the President doesn’t seem to understand economics either.)

I understand Dallas more clearly through the lives of people I know. Alberto Lombardi, for one. Alberto is from northern Italy; his wife is from England. They spent several years working on an ocean liner before settling in Dallas in the early Seventies. Alberto was brought here to manage a new restaurant, but before it opened he took a temporary job waiting tables at a restaurant owned by my wife and her partner. He went from there to the Fairmont and ended up as manager of the Venetian Room. Obviously Alberto has talent; he proved it by opening Lom-bardi’s three years ago. It quickly became one of the city’s best Italian restaurants. But that must have been a little too easy for Alberto because six months ago he purchased another place down the street, Ciro’s. He bought it from the two women he had waited tables for only a few years before.

That’s not a Horatio Alger story, not anymore; that’s a Dallas story. Sure, success stories are told in other cities every day. But here they’re not isolated events; rather, they seem to be a part of the social fabric. We’re a city still being built, by the big guys with their huge investments in new office towers, and by the small entrepreneurs with their new restaurants.

Back in the Fifties, someone decided to call Dallas the city of excellence. The city fathers, in a flurry of self-delusion, grabbed the idea and plastered it on billboards. In the Eighties, we can call Dallas the city of confidence, and not worry about promotional campaigns. Confidence is in the air around us.



Saving the old

The view outside my window results from our having moved, finally, into our new quarters in downtown Dallas, at 1925 San Jacinto. No sooner had we moved into the building than the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects bestowed its Honor Award on our landlord, Bud Oglesby, and his associates at The Oglesby Group, as well as our space designer, Nick Glazbrook.

The jurors were impressed by the lengths Oglesby and his associates went to restore the building, and then to save it, when the city decided to condemn a part to make room for a new street. Originally constructed in 1928, the building was a cotton-grading plant; natural light was needed, so it was built on a step-up plan that included skylights on every floor. The award makes special sense to me, not only because of the affection for the building that I’ve come to share with the architects, but because it gives impetus to the re-use of structures, like the Magnolia Building, that have outlived their original purpose. We’re proud to be a small part of the effort.

Now, Bud, about the air conditioning. . .



Brief Opinions

● My wife and I attended several events the night of the run-off election between Woodie Woods and Hugh Parmer in Fort Worth, so we weren’t able to get the results till quite late. After trying several “all-news” AM stations with no success, I turned to television: A newscast on Channel 11 was scheduled for 12:30 a.m. How great, I thought, I can get the results first hand from a Fort Worth station. We flipped on the television and sat through a 15-minute newscast ripped right off the AP newswire. Channel 11 featured no election results from the most controversial hometown political race in decades. The station is required by the Federal Communications Commissioner to provide local news broadcasting, but as we learned, no one requires that it be good, or even competent. If they did, good ol’ friendly Channel 11 might well be off the air.

●Independent producer Martha Stuart’s encounter session on abortion, aired last month as part of Susan Caudill’s “Voices” series on Channel 13, was a moving and sensitive program. Twenty women of different races, ages, and backgrounds talked candidly about why each had made the decision, when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy, not to have an abortion. Channel 13 resisted the temptation to be trendy: The program avoided feminist cliches to drive to the heart of a woman’s moral and emotional dilemma in the choice between life and death. It was an experience the viewer could not take lightly, and that made it public television at its toughest and best.

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