From Here to Obscurity

ONE DAY YOU’RE BEING WRITTEN ABOUT in Jann Kelso’s gushily chi-chi society column in The Dallas Morning News and the next day you’re out there in the trash bin with the paper.

Yesterday’s news. History. What follows is an Honor Roll, compiled over the last decade and a half or so, of the best and the brightest that Dallas has had to offer in the ranks of the Flash In The Pan. (Speaking of which, whatever happened to Jann Kelso?)

Don Walker-Mr. Condo. Mr. Development. Mr. Dallas Grand Prix. Mr. Everything To Everybody. Now he’s better known as Mr. Chapters 7, 11, and 13, being sued by everybody but the Salvation Army. Jeez, whoever would have suspected that he was playing the game with other people’s money?

Brad and Twinkle Bayoud-Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Brad. . . How Can Things Have Gone So Bad? I mean here we had Dallas’s Dremier fun couple, the ultimate, last word in yuppiedom. Brad was heralded as Dallas’s most progressive architect, and Twinkle, his support unit, was the highlight of each and all of the “everybody who is anybody” parties in town. And just as they were being celebrated in a “what-it’s-like-to-be-young-rich-and-successful” cover story in a Texas magazine, the divorce papers were being drawn up. Brad has now fled to New York, leaving behind several empty condo projects, the most prominent being that multicolored eyesore at Douglas and Newton, as his legacy to the good life in Dallas.

Rex Cauble and Cutter Bill Western Wear-This was the in place to shop when the Texas Chic boom found its way even to Dallas, and it suddenly became fashionable in some circles to dress up like Hopalong Cassidy and Calamity Jane and two-step the night away. Cutter Bill’s is no longer with us, now that Texas Chic is deader than Judy Garland. And Cauble, of course, is looking as elegant as he can under whatever dress code they have at the federal prison at La Tuna, where he is serving out his term for racketeering and marijuana smuggling.

Ted Tedesco-If anybody was going to straighten out this DART mess, it was Tedesco. Or so he thought. That was before he was introduced to the charms of the various factions of our DART board, with its insatiable love of nasty infighting. After a few short weeks, Tedesco’s rich academic rhetoric became somewhat strained: after eleven months, the high-minded savior of Dallas mass transit just up and quit. It’s doubtful that the DART board has stopped bickering long enough to notice that he’s gone.

Brad Corbett-Back in the Seventies, they were using Corbett as the Small Business Administration poster boy. after he’d built his Fort Worth-based Robintech Company into something of an industrial giant. Plastic pipe and all of that. But then Brad, who came from humble origins back in some place like Staten Island, decided to become an ink freak and bought the Texas Rangers baseball team. Corbett himself negotiated many major trades, most of which exploded in his face. In his last days as a baseball owner. Brad was seen staring forlornly out from his private box high above Arlington Stadium while down below, a cluster of drunk fans chanted, “Jump, Brad, Jump!” Shortly thereafter, Corbett sold the team in order to devote more time to Robintech, which soon went bankrupt.

The King of Diamonds-Dallas needed a man like this, the crafty Zorro of the Night. The King, as the crime reporters anointed him, was a second story man par excellence back in the early Seventies. He hauled inestimable quantities of valuables from Highland Park boudoirs while Mr. and Mrs. Gotrocks were snug in their beds. But then, just as he was becoming the star of the “Metro” section, spawning all sorts of delightful rumors about his actual identity, the King of Diamonds just quit coming around. Nobody, to this day. knows who he was or what he’s doing. Or. if they do, they’re sure as hell not telling.

Chris Peddie-Members of the Channel 4 news team are especially renowned for their limited career-expectancy rate. Peddie, however, accomplished what must be a TV news record for short-ivity: three days. This was in 1984, when the station hustled him in from Baton Rouge, virtually unannounced, as the anchor replacement for Chip Moody. During his three-day stint, Peddie only appeared on the air for two days. He missed his third appearance after reportedly fainting in a downtown bank. “That presumably happened after he took a look at his paycheck.” says a TV news insider. The station explained his departure thusly: “Chris turned out to be violently allergic to Dallas.”

Joey Tornabenni-The art set in Dallas has seen a flock of them come and go, but none quite so peculiar as Joey, who blew into town with guarantees that his new gallery, which he called Art For Art’s Sake, would capture a captive Dallas market. In 1981, he opened the place on Oak Lawn, just up from Cedar Springs. He began with a series of dynamic openings featuring what were supposed to be some of the leading art personalities from either coast, but suddenly one morning, the gallery was empty and Joey had vanished from the face of the earth. Nobody remembers him except one guy in New Mexico, and he doesn’t know where he is. Now that’s a flash in the pan.

Iola Johnson-Proclaimed “The Most Popular Woman in Dallas” by a certain local city magazine in 1974, Miss Johnson may now be one of the least popular women in Denton County. After a high-speed police chase, Johnson was charged with unlawful possession of a weapon.

The SMU football team- Weren’t they supposed to win a national championship or something? Weren’t they going to put SMU on the collegiate map? Well, they did just that by getting their entire program canceled for a year. Most of the players are packing for other schools, former coach Bobby Collins and former athletic director Bob Hitch went slinking into obscurity, and the former president, Donald Shields, did the greatest disappearing act since Houdini. About the only people still in town from that ill-fated program are the generous SMU boosters who created the mess in the first place.

Gary Hogeboom-Even Tom Landry was convinced, finally, that the Boomer was the man to quarterback the Cowboys out of the swamps of mediocrity. Six days before the regular season opener in 1984, Landry stunned the public by announcing that he was replacing Danny White at quarterback with the Boomer, a decision based entirely on some hidden mystic force that Landry described as “The Feel,” After about four games, “The Feel” had pitched enough interceptions to put White back into the lineup. Hogeboom was last seen just coming off the injured reserve list of the Indianapolis Colts.

The Medders of Muenster-The lavish parties that this quaint old couple pitched at their ranch northwest of Dallas made anything the script people at Lorimar Productions might devise look like “Tobacco Road.” Every other week, there was another big barbecue, dutifully attended by the president, various potentates, and perhaps a pope or two. And that wasn’t even the A list. But then the caterers and decorators and high fashion houses finally started asking some embarrassing questions about several million in unpaid bills, and then.. .Whoa! Hey!. . It turned out that the Medders never really had a nickel to begin with. They taught a great lesson that most of Dallas society has adhered to ever since-the facade is the only thing that really matters.

Nikki Finke Greenburg-Miss Greenburg was imported from Houston, via impressive social connections in the East Hamptons, to write all of the “High Profile” features for the Dallas Morning News. A fullfigured woman, she made her presence felt through the newsroom with her frequent, bellowing temper tantrums that left her section editor, Mark Weinberg, temporarily deaf in his left ear. She left the News after about a year and is now with the Los Angeles Times.

David Clyde-Everybody remembers the eighteen-year-old pitching phenom whose career was sacrificed by the Rangers to fill the stands a few times while his novelty value was worth something to a last-place club. Clyde, rushed from the spotlight and into oblivion, was invited to a Ranger player reunion recently. He told the team to stuff it.

Candace Montgomery-The bloody story of how the little Collin County housewife and Sunday School teacher committed an ax murder and got away with it was transformed into a pretty good book. But what has she done for us lately? Just kidding, Candy. Just kidding. Shhh.

Troy Post-He was associated with every-thing that was grandiose in Dallas throughout the Sixties. Perhaps the beginning of the end came with his fabulously luxurious Tres Vidas development in Mexico, where the upper crust of Dallas society would spend their holidays. It is rumored that a tribe of local Indians took up residence on the fairways of the golf course, however, and a Mexican magistrate ruled that Post had no right to ask them to leave.

Shannon Wynne-Throughout the early Eighties, the “in” situation for the affluent social butterflies was to show up fashionably drunk, around midnight, first at Shannon’s 8.0 Bar and later, at his Nostromo. The motif called for a young gentleman in tux jacket and jeans with a pronounced case of post-nasal drip to enter, attached to a young woman with a hair arrangement that suggested that she’d just stumbled out of a natural gas explosion. But then Shannon over-extended his checkbook in the renovation of a lower Greenville abortion clinic that was to become known as Tango, which would eventually gag itself to death and drag poor Shannon down with it.

Lance Rentzel-The ultimate flash in thepan. The Cowboys football star, who wasmarried to Joey Heatherton, decided to flasha little girl, and that was about the last goodlook anybody ever got of him.