City Lights

“Dallas” isn’t Dallas, but Dallas is “Dallas”

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us . . .

– Charles Dickens



Do you watch that show “Dallas” on TV? Well, the episode last Friday was the last show of the season, and they’ll be in reruns the rest of the year. And they ended the season with J.R. Ewing getting shot in his place there at the Ewing Condo. Well, J.R. has so many enemies there’s about 10 people who coulda done it. Joe Holstead, here at the station, thinks it was Miss Ellie. Maybe you have another idea. Give us a call on open line at seven four two fifty seven hundred. Or maybe you have an opinion from that story on “60 Minutes” about the mother who’s lost custody of her children because she . . .

– Ed Busch



The television show “Dallas” became a hit on television while I wasn’t watching. Literally. I caught a few episodes the first season, and it wasn’t just the palm trees they show in downtown Dallas, it wasn’t the expanse of blue ocean visible out the window of One Main Place, or the hurricanes that pummel the city that bothered me about it. It was the way the characters, in their unrelieved greed and debauchery, managed to wander from crisis to crisis without ever getting caught in traffic like those of us in the real, problematical Big D. Surely one of the Ewings must occasionally be forced to take Central Expressway somewhere. It happens to Lamar Hunt and Clint Murchison all the time. Hell, it even happens to Willie Nelson.

Another thing that irks me about the continued success of “Dallas” is that it finally has become so popular that people here watch it. It can be a bad influence. A person very dear to me is a recent backslider who used to join me in scoffing at the idea of J.R.’s finding a wolverine in the culvert. There aren’t any wolverines south of Fort Madison, Iowa. Now this backslider not only watches “Dallas,” but keeps up with it, enjoys it, wallows in it. She kept it from me for some time. I happened to overhear her discussing a plot twist on the phone with someone. She thought I was asleep.

When Dallas watches “Dallas,” we may have a serious case of life imitating art. It seemed to me we were doing fine until a couple of years ago, vibrant jewel of the Sunbelt, beckoning to big airlines and even the Boy Scouts as a place for corporate headquarters. We were renowned for our pristine municipal politics, enticing all the vigorous newcomers down here to mate with our natives and to dilute the bloodlines of the Ewings, to stamp out moral hemophilia. Then “Dallas” caught on, reflecting J.R. as he really would have been able to be about 15 years ago. J.R.’s villainy, churlish though it is, lacks the bloated flair of some of his role models from the old days. Would J.R. think to machine-gun ducks on a Preston Hollow residential lake? Would J.R. slip a motel bellman $300 (at today’s rates, make that about $800) and ask him to go kill a pig with a tiretool when he’d decided to have a luau by the pool?

As the show caught on, reflecting our almost dispelled image of the worst parts of wheelin’ and dealin’, we were becoming a more complicated city with a broader base of movers and shakers. Many of them must have started watching “Dallas,” because suddenly Dallas began acting like “Dallas.” Except for the traffic.

The two-year primacy of “Dallas” in the ratings has coincided with a stunning increase in the qualities it reflects – trickiness, greed, and meanness – in Dallas.

We never had invoice scandals in the school district before Larry Hagman offered inspiring examples. We never had clusters of civic leaders signing up as stockholders in a demolition derby leading up to the awarding of a cable TV franchise.

Even those minions who aren’t greedy or tricky are getting mean. Somebody at City Hall decided that the new residential tax assessments, the ones that are going to skyrocket, should be mailed out on … April 15th. Now that’s mean. “Heh-heh, let J.R. Ewing top this,” is the sort of thought that might slither through the sort of mind capable of that decision.

According to Channel 8’s acclaimed series on purchasing hanky-panky in the Fort Worth Independent School District, they may even be watching “Dallas” in Fort Worth.

In some ways it might be a relief to live in “Dallas” instead of Dallas. There wouldn’t be any of these embarrassing tug-of-equity fights for a cable franchise, because one of the Ewing companies would already own it. The writers wouldn’t permit Too Tall to quit the Cowboys for boxing, Councilwoman Elsie Faye Heggins would occasionally get a second for one of her motions, downtown businesses would make change for buses, and the Rangers would be serious pennant contenders so that J.R. could have some Hungarian countesses in for the World Series parties. Occasionally we could pause during a noontime stroll under the palm trees to reflect upon how cool it is to live in a city whose writers have given us a Foundation for Quality Education to teach children of illegal aliens.

A Case of Chocolate

Sam Lauderdale’s great-great-grand-mother-in-law was Mary Horton, who had 17 children and a fruitcake recipe so highly thought of that it has been passed down to Mary Horton Lauderdale, who is Sam’s wife. Mary has the title role in the Mary of Puddin Hill enterprise in Greenville, an hour up I-30.

They bake fruitcakes and sell them by mail-order catalogue in all the states and 28 foreign countries. They ship other confections as well, and as they kept adding new things to the catalogue they eventually encountered a name shortage. In 1975, Sam and Mary added some nugget-shaped can-dies made of butterscotch, peanuts, and raisins and named them Whatchamacallits. They were boxed and labeled that way, as was another new line of caramel and pecans dipped in white chocolate and called Thingamajigs.

The plot thickened a few months ago when a Hershey salesman called on Sam and Mary and, while browsing through their Country Store, noticed the Whatchamacall-its. He did a little double take when he saw them, since he knew that up in the land of Big Chocolate, his company was tooled up and test marketing a new candy bar. The packages all said Whatchamacallit. It was a bar of chocolate-covered peanut butter, peanuts, and crispies.

A Hershey lawyer called the Lauderdales at Christmastime and said since he just happened to be in Texas on a visit to his parents in Bryan, would it be okay if he dropped in and they talked about this unfortunate duplication of a candy name that Mary of Pud-din Hill seemed to have, er, the earliest use of.

The Hershey lawyers (are they members of the Hershey Bar Assn.?) and the Lauderdales’ lawyers got it all settled very civilly, for certain considerations. One consideration was well into five figures, and another was free use of the Hershey computer in conducting a title search for whatever name Sam and Mary come up with for what used to be Whatchamacallits. Presumably Hershey has retired the computer that blew the what-chamacallit search the first time around.



Obituary For a Living Legend

The way it goes in the cabaret sketch format is, “Good evening, this is the news. Russian missiles have been sighted in the Bering Strait and are headed this way. But first, this word from…”

The way it went on Channel 4’s 10 o’clock news was, “Good evening. In the top of the news, one of the most popular players in the history of the Dallas Cowboys announced his retirement today. And President Carter warned the Iranians this evening that unless…”

Rarely has a story that didn’t involve ambulances dominated its day in the news as thoroughly as Roger Staubach’s retirement. In fact, the story had momentum from the weekend when it finally happened on Press Conference Monday. All day Saturday and Sunday the sportscasters had been saying that Staubach was pretty certain to be announcing his retirement, or else why hold a press conference? Monday morning the countdown to the noon media event was all across the radio dial. Many stations were promising to broadcast the event live from Texas Stadium.

There were 200 reporters present. The podium bristled with a spiky burst of 50 microphones clustered in a common connection. Staubach peered at them in momentary wonder, as if about to address a large blowfish.

At 10 o’clock Channel 4 had a lengthy tape story of the retirement announcement, interviews with Staubach’s colleagues, polls of bar customers on what it all meant. In the sports segment there was an approximately 6-minute montage of Staubach in action on old tape footage, shown over a musical track of Willie Nelson’s My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.

Channel 5 had Staubach and Retirement Reaction in the news bloc, more footage in its sports segment, and then a 30-minute Retrospective that included tape montages of Staubach in action over a musical track of Willie Nelson’s My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys. Channel 8, its 10 o’clock newscast shoved back to 11 by network programming, had an abbreviated newscast and seized the opportunity not to show a tape montage of Staubach over a musical track of Willie Nelson’s My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.

The Times Herald had stories on Staubach’s retirement on page one of its news, metro, living, and sports sections, as well as a 12-page tabloid supplement on Staubach’s career, underwritten by KRLD radio. (Channel 5’s 30-minute special was sold to the Morning News and Tom Thumb-Page.)

There was so much past tense in the narrations and interviews (“Roger was, gee, I dun-no, a heck of a guy”) and such a valedictory quality to the montages that it was hard to escape the feel of a dirge. Sportscaster Bob McLain, in fact, added a reminder at the end of his sportscast that Roger was alive and well and planning to stay in Dallas in the real estate business.

It was easy to forget this while watching Jim Brinson on Channel 5 emerging portentously from the shadows of the players’ tunnel at Texas Stadium to say to the camera, “. . . Roger Staubach will never run through this tunnel again . . . .”

Roger’s retirement ritual itself was typically Staubachian, done with a competent flair and containing just the right pinch of human frailty. His voice broke when he acknowledged Tom Landry. It was an ingratiating moment of humanity to add to the list of vulnerabilities that make him more heroic: the interceptions, the concussions, the weird and battered little finger on his left hand that points to Florida when his other fingers point to Michigan. 1 can’t think of any other hero I’ve had who is younger than 1. Next time you’re seeking a poignant sensation, try watching your youthful hero retire.

Staubach finished his retirement speech with a scramble. After a rambling preface about Navy and Lamar Hunt and Tom Lan-dry, he was emotionally sacked for a moment, his voice halting. Then he threw the bomb and said, “1 thank the Cowboys and I’m retired.”

Bam, that was it. He didn’t make it look easy, which is one of his most impressive qualities. Ever since he returned from Vietnam and a four-year layoff to try the NFL, Roger Staubach has been the epitome of skill and determination and the ethic of hard work that is so dormant in America’s Team’s country. Number 12 was, is, at once verity and vestige. While you and I would go ahead and take the Barracuda we won as Most Valuable Player in the Super Bowl and think of some way to wedge our kids into it, Roger asked if he could have a station wagon instead.

On and off the field he did a lot of thingsthat were so hard they even looked hardwhen he did them, which may be the ultimate standard of a real pro. Why, it’senough to make one glad that Roger Staubach is alive and well and planning to stay inDallas in the real estate business.