If you haven’t yet watched the HBO documentary United Skates, you should. But be prepared: it’s no Roll Bounce. I mean, it’s got all the good feels that come from combining James Brown, modified skate wheels attached to Chuck Taylors, and choreographed nutcracker splits on a hardwood floor. But things get dark.

Going to Ohio Skate as a kid in a white suburb of Toledo, I was oblivious to the history of racism that has pervaded roller rinks pretty much since they were first introduced to the American public in Rhode Island, shortly after the end of the Civil War, in 1866. Nor was I aware that, despite their history of nearly a century of overt segregation, they had become a cultural touchstone for African-American communities across the country, complete with coded inclusive language (“Adult Night”) to counteract the coded exclusive language (“No Saggy Pants” as well as the more obscure “No Small Wheels”).

What brought on the waterworks was the surprisingly emotional impact that the wave of recent closures is having on the people who have relied on them for generations for safe and low-cost exercise, entertainment, after school recreation, and socializing. Not to mention the loss of a one-of-a-kind art form.

The documentary blames the trend less on changing millennial interests and more on the rising value of land that these low revenue, high square footage businesses sit on (not unlike boxing gyms). It made me curious about the state of affairs in Dallas, so I took a look back at Alice Laussade’s feature from a couple of years ago about the best roller rinks in town. I was heartened to find that of the eight she included, only one–Mid-Cities Skateland–has closed. And that another one that we didn’t include, Southern Skates Roller Rink, which happens to be owned by the city, still offers an Adult Skate on Thursday nights.

Before they changed the game of bridge, before they captured the United States’ first world championship in more than 15 years, before the million-dollar computer and celebrity hangers-on and discipline imparted by a former Air Force colonel named Moose, the Dallas Aces needed to fire their boss.

Ira Corn was a unique presence, a 300-pound multimillionaire with a proclivity for throwing his financial weight around. “He was large, so he had to live large,” says his daughter, Laura. There were conventional luxuries: fine art, rich food, cigars the size of Lincoln Logs, a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. But he reserved his most grandiose spending for his passions. He loved American history, so he purchased an original copy of the Declaration of Independence for $404,000, the highest price ever paid for a printed document at the time. He loved to read, so he subscribed to dozens of periodicals and finished a new book each night.

Most of all, in 1968, he loved bridge. So he decided to bankroll a professional team—even though one had never existed before. He had designs on toppling Italy’s famous Blue Team, the game’s great juggernaut, winners of 12 of the last 13 world championships. Not only that, he intended to defeat them himself.

“He thought if he got five good players, he could play with them and win anything,” says Mike Lawrence, one of the team’s original members. “That was the furthest from the truth imaginable.”

Which is what led Bobby Wolff, the team’s first recruit and Ira’s handpicked partner, to pull his benefactor aside on a Tuesday in late August. They were in Minneapolis for one of the most important events of the year, the Spingold national bridge championship. Five days in, their team was treading water, eking out victories over opponents they should have dismembered. It had been that way ever since the Aces were formed that February, a collection of world-class talent lugging along an amateur. Finally, after one close call too many, “the time had come for truth,” Wolff says now.

Wolff broke the news in a hotel hallway, as Ira puffed a typically giant cigar: The Aces will never become what you want them to be—what they can be—if you keep playing. Ira said nothing. Wolff half-expected Ira to dissolve the team, and perhaps that wouldn’t be the worst thing. Ira had the best of intentions but he was dragging his creation down. And then, as Wolff began to plot out his next endeavors, Ira spoke.

“Well, you better win,” he grumbled. They lost the next day.

One year later, they routed the field. By then the Dallas Aces were in the throes of one of the most audacious experiments the game had seen, an unprecedented and mostly unduplicated attempt to build a better bridge team. When they dissolved after 15 years, the Aces had collected four world titles and numerous domestic championships. Two of their stars formed one of the most decorated partnerships in history. Along the way, they prototyped strategies that are now ubiquitous in modern sports culture.

The story of the world’s first full-time professional bridge team is one of Dallas succeeding where the rest of America failed. It all owes itself to a large man who chased an appropriately huge dream.

The history of Dallas is incomplete without the images, stories, and original artifacts that document the lives of African Americans in Dallas. In these final days of Black History Month, take note of an important figure in African-American life in Dallas: the late Lee Marion Butts, Sr., who lived from 1924 to 2002. Butts was a commercial photographer and editor of the Dallas Express newspaper, who recorded events and community life in Dallas during a career that spanned the last half of the twentieth century.

The Dallas Express was a weekly African-American newspaper founded by W.E. King. It was published from 1893 to 1970, and provided coverage not often found in the Dallas Times Herald or Dallas Morning News of the time.

The Marion Butts Photograph Collection is part of the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History & Archives Division.  The collection includes a number of historic photographs, some of which are available to view in the library’s online catalog.  For those interested in reading issues of the Dallas Express, the Archives Division has the newspaper on microfilm with dates ranging from 1919 to 1928, 1934 to 1963, and 1965 to 1970.

Butts’ body of work documents not only segregation and civil rights, but also business, civic, religious, educational, and social life, as well as visits by famous leaders and celebrity entertainers.

Two years and two task forces later, the city of Dallas has edged a little closer to removing a 65-foot Confederate War Memorial that sits next to the convention center in Founders Park downtown. At a briefing today, the Dallas City Council signaled to the city manager that they would like an item placed on their next meeting agenda that would allow them to vote to dissemble, remove, and store the monument.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen. What the council will technically be voting on is a referendum that says the Confederate War Monument is a non-contributing feature of the Founders Park historic overlay, and so it should be removed. If it passes, that will send the item to the Landmark Commission, which must vote within 65 days on whether it agrees that the 124-year-old monument is a non-contributing hunk of junk in an otherwise historic park. If the commission rejects the council’s motion, the city will automatically appeal the decision to the city plan commission. That body will have another 65 days to vote on the item. If they also reject the council’s push for removal, the city will sue, and the whole thing will end up in court.

Then again, if the Landmark Commission backs the council there will likely be suits seeking to keep the monument—just as before. In other words, this thing isn’t done yet.

Last summer I received an email from a woman named Harriet Gross that began: “We don’t know each other, but I’ve been freelancing in Dallas for a long, long time and in the distant past did some feature stories for D and for the late-lamented DMN Sunday magazine.”

A check of our archive brought me a story Harriet had written for D in 1992, the year I graduated from college and basically took to loitering at D’s office, hoping for work (I’d interned the previous year and knew most of the staff). And that DMN Sunday magazine? The first story of any real length that I wrote for money was published in 1993 in that magazine by the great Bill Minutaglio, who was then its editor. Harriet and I had a few connections, it seemed. I was surprised our paths had never crossed and was happy they finally had, because she had a great story idea.

Her 91-year-old friend Max Glauben, she told me, was going to subject himself to some high-tech wizardry that would make it possible for people to interact with his image and voice in perpetuity, asking him questions about how he survived the Holocaust. This 3-D holographic version of Glauben will be an installation, if you can call it that, at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, which will open later this year. Glauben’s story is fascinating. Shepherding it into print, especially with Harriet’s long connection to the magazine, was a real honor.

We posted it online today. 

The news is said to be our first crack at writing history, but generations without the internet could hardly make use of it while working on subsequent drafts. Enter Jeremy Spracklen and Scott Martin, who, over the last year and a half, have been turning a large, cold warehouse filled with old local news reels into usable, digital footage, providing us glimpses of the goods along the way.

The archivists, who work at the G. William Jones Film & Video Collection at SMU, started with the collection’s WFAA stash. It contained a wealth of big-haired, mustache-y video footage from the 1960s and 1970s. Their days are filled with loading up the 16mm films in a machine that would’ve cost about $1 million new in the 1990s, watching hours of old news clips while tweaking coloration and condensing blank air.

The best stuff gets put on Twitter and YouTube, some of it eventually bouncing around the internet and ending up on blogs like FrontBurner. Spracklen recalls how an unbelievably 1970s interview with English rock band Uriah Heep spiked traffic in Eastern Europe.

Whereas past Jones curators have focused solely on SMU’s old movie footage, Spracklen, who has worked in theatre and film but is educated in history, took an immediate interest in the news reels. Most of it hasn’t been viewed since it aired some 40 or 50 or more years ago. “This is one of a kind,” he says. “There’s no other collection. No other copies of this stuff exists.”