Years ago, as their kids tore up the yard on dirt bikes, Rick Fairless and his buddies would flip on the stereo, pull cold ones out of an icebox, and hash out their motorcycle nirvana: a custom shop with a bar where they could drink alongside their choppers instead of leaving them out front to be tampered with by passersby. Fairless had put in 20 years selling paint for Glidden before he decided to make a couple of calls, just to get the stupid idea out of his system. He opened his shop a year later, in 1996.

Strokers Dallas encompasses 2.5 acres off Harry Hines, offering everything necessary to get into the motorhead subculture. In the retail store, you’ll find the whacked-out Rick Fairless custom bikes on glorious display, plus plenty of gear and get-ups. Grab a pair of chaps, but don’t forget to cover your ass: Strokers is a licensed Allstate agent.

Strokers mechanics service American-​made bikes and produce five to 10 custom builds each year. A Rick Fairless design doesn’t come cheap. His kaleidoscopic Woodstock bike would set you back about $100,000. If you have a classic auto that’s been collecting dust, Punch Wally Garage will get it car-show ready. Taz’s Detail makes your hog sparkle, and outdoor vendors will accessorize you with silver skull rings and custom-designed patches.

Behind Strokers Ice House, the asphalt courtyard fills with everything from Big Dog V-twins to Stella scooters and, of course, a hell of a lot of Harleys. The clientele isn’t discriminatory. You’ll find old-timers and infants, Southwest Airlines’ white-collar staffers who cross the street for after-work drinks, babes as hot as the decal on a mudflap, tattooed outlaws, and fresh-faced tourists who may have caught one of Strokers’ reality shows, Texas Hardtails and Ma’s Roadhouse (the latter spotlighted Fairless’ salty-mouthed mother, rest in peace). If you’re looking to witness a barstool-shattering brawl, however, ride elsewhere. “A lot of bike clubs come here, but we’re all cool,” one full-patched 1-percenter told us. “This is neutral ground.”

The sprawling complex off Harry Hines includes plenty of ephemera, and will introduce an 80-foot tie-dye carpet to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

Elizabeth Lavin

We spent a recent Sunday at Strokers to knock back a few beers, eat the Herschel Walker-raised chicken (the football great is their most loyal custom bike client), and experience the Rick Fairless pipe dream in full-color high definition. It turns 25 years old on October 1, and Stroker’s is celebrating with a weekend full of events, headlined by Warrant.

Tonight history will be made (and talked about) in Deep Ellum. For the rerelease of The Accommodation, the most dangerous book in Dallas, Deep Vellum Books and the Communities Foundation of Texas are staging what they are calling “a cause-minded conversation with Jim Schutze and John Wiley Price” on the book. Noelle LeVeaux will moderate. The event will take place in a ballroom at the historic Pittman Hotel, formerly the Knights of Pythias Building. In short, this will be a big deal.

If you don’t have tickets, you’re out of luck — mostly. The gig has sold out. You can watch a livestream that starts at 7 p.m. BUT!! Your buddy Tim has two tickets to give away right here on FrontBurner. So how should we do this? First person to send me a selfie taken in front of the Juanita Craft House? First person to give me the full text of the inaugural post on FrontBurner? I’ve got it!

Call the front desk at D Magazine. 214-939-3636. If a human answers, that will be Jacob. Ask to be transferred to my voicemail. Or do the keypad thing if Jacob is busy. Either way, get to my voicemail. Then record a few bars of your favorite Dallas-related song. The artist might be from Dallas. The lyrics might include the word Dallas. Whatever. Your call. Just sing it. Best singer wins the two tickets. Be sure to leave a name and email address at the end of your song. Contest ends at 1 p.m.

Hope to see you tonight.

As many people reunite with family this summer, I’ve been thinking about how important parents are. Every interaction between parent and child influences how those children grow up. You can argue that history is shaped with each parent-child interaction.

The photographs in the gallery linked above are historical images of Dallas history that depict parents and children. They are part the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Collection and many are available through the library’s online catalog. They include images of everyday life at swimming pools, family gatherings, running errands, and more. They include photos of infamous outlaws Clyde Barrow and Ray Hamilton with their mothers.

Travel back to 1951 to see a mother and son waiting to swim at a local pool. There is the family of Dallas resident Kenneth Smith’s mother, taken in the 1940s at the home of Hallie Atkins. Another image depicts a West Dallas mother and her son in 1993 showing battery chips and slag on their family property. A few members of this family were impacted by the high lead levels in the air caused by lead contamination in the area.

A June 1951 image shows the proud grown children of Mrs. Cacy Ann Cole as they adjust their mother’s graduation cap. In 1952, Charles Hayes is shown being comforted by his mother, Faye Wallace, at Parkland Hospital after suffering a broken thumb in an accident where he slid between the wheels of a moving locomotive tender and out the other side. The same year, Sandra Anderson was depicted in a Parkland Hospital bed after jumping from a second story burning garage apartment in her mother’s arms and taken to safety. A circa 1962 photograph depicts Mrs. Callie Butts, mother of Marion Butts Sr.

Her son was an African American commercial photographer and editor of the Dallas Express newspaper, who recorded events and community life from the last half of the twentieth century in Dallas. His work chronicled civil rights, segregation, religious and social life, education, entertainers, and more.

Last week, developer and incremental growth enthusiast Nathaniel Barrett posted a couple old newspaper clippings to Twitter. They are both reports on Deep Ellum, one from 1966 and another from 1971, and they are about the same thing: the death of the neighborhood.

The timing of the articles is curious. In between 1966 and 1971, much of Deep Ellum was leveled to make way for what one of the stories describes as a “10-lane freeway leg,” which we know today as I-345—or that little stretch of concrete that separates Deep Ellum from downtown about which we have made such a fuss over the years. These two old news stories help explain the fuss.

In fact, taken together, the articles offer a unique and valuable historical document. They don’t merely capture the look and feel of the neighborhood during this pivotal – and fateful – stretch of its history, they also reflect some of the attitudes and mentalities that surrounded the tumultuous construction of the highway. Reading them, one thing stands out: this city’s almost immediate obliviousness toward the violence and devastation wreaked upon its historic neighborhoods by highway construction.

Just how "Dallas" are you? Well, we have 101 facts about sports, food, culture, politics, history, and the arts that will settle exactly that.

Spoiler alert: the contents of this blog post will answer one of the trivia questions in the May edition of D Magazine. It has to do with Liquid Paper and the Dallas secretary who invented it. Her name was Bette Nesmith — later Bette Nesmith Graham — a single mom who, in 1956, tried to find a simple way to make her life at work easier.

In her Richardson garage, Nesmith Graham mixed a concoction consisting largely of white tempura paint. The solution could blot over typewriter mistakes and dry quickly, allowing for fast changes. But it wasn’t the invention of the substance that was Nesmith Graham’s real genius. As this piece in The Hustle explains, it was her flair for marketing.