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Dallas History

D Magazine’s 50 Greatest Stories: The Tragic End of Architect George Dahl’s Life

Matt Goodman
By |
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George Dahl oversaw the design and construction of 26 Art Deco buildings at Fair Park, including the Hall of State. Josh Blaylock

George Dahl was one of the architects who built Dallas. He certainly was the drive behind Fair Park, leading the planning and construction of 26 Art Deco-style buildings ahead of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. He divided the park into four sub-districts, centered upon the 700-foot-long Esplanade that led to the ornate Hall of State.

The Neiman Marcus building downtown, the First National Bank building, the Statler Hilton, the old Dallas Morning News ‘Rock of Truth’ building, the News’ new digs in the old library, WFAA’s low-slung modern structure next door—all Dahl.

Which is part of why this magazine commissioned the writer David Bauer to follow the messy family saga that capped off the end of his life. His daughter, Gloria, and her husband, Ted, asked a court for guardianship of the 83-year-old architect in 1978. The Akins didn’t believe him to be competent to manage his finances and other business, and were concerned that his decision to marry the younger Joan Renfro was fueled by her manipulation. Dahl argued that his family was coming after the trust belonging to his late wife, of which he was the sole trustee.

The Akins wanted a court to remove Dahl as the trustee, which ultimately failed. A lower court affirmed the decision. Ten years ago, when we featured this piece as part of our 40 greatest stories package, my former colleague Jason Heid dialed the Dallas lawyer and judge Ted Akin, Dahl’s son-in-law.

He called the decision “one of the most tragic miscarriages of justice,” one that “changed precedent that dated back to 1750 in England.” The ruling resulted in the dissolution of the trust, and Dahl took control of its millions of dollars. Akin argued that the judges were hemmed to a Supreme Court ruling that made it “easier for plaintiff’s lawyers bringing similar suits in the future than in the true merits of the case.”

Here’s how Jason summed up the end of Dahl’s life, in the years after Bauer’s story was published:

Dallas History

John ‘Lucky’ Luckadoo Is a Master of the Air

Mark Dent
By Mark Dent |
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Maj. John "Lucky" Luckadoo, WWII pilot, 100th Bomb Group, holds his hand on his chest as the the US Air Force Color Guard from Joint Base Charleston presents the Colors on Friday. May 26, 2023 during the Flags for the Fallen opening ceremony at the National Museum of the Mighty 8th Air Force. Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News / USA TODAY NETWORK

John “Lucky” Luckadoo may be the most popular man in Dallas. In January, he met Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg at the Hollywood premiere for Masters of the Air, an Apple TV+ miniseries depicting World War II’s 100th Bomb Group. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, actor Austin Butler named-dropped Luckadoo. “I’m sorry — what’s his name?” Colbert responded. “Yeah. Amazing,” Butler said. 

Luckadoo is one of the last living members of the 100th Bomb Group. Some 80 years ago, he flew 25 combat missions in Nazi-occupied Europe in a B-17 Flying Fortress, acting as pilot and co-pilot in near-impossible circumstances. The 100th Bomb Group earned the nickname the Bloody Hundredth from its severe casualty rate. Around 77 percent of its original members were wounded, killed, or captured. The total number of casualties of the group’s parent division, the Eighth Air Force, was 26,000 — a casualty rate of about 67 percent. 

“What the 100th lacks in luck, it makes up for in courage,” 100th Bomb Group leader Lt. Col. John Bennett once remarked.  

Luckadoo, like his peers, had courage. But he also had luck (his biography is titled Damn Lucky). He turns 102 on March 16, can still drive, and lives independently at Presbyterian Village North in North Dallas, where he’s been watching most of the episodes of Masters of the Air with the community. The show’s finale is set for March 15, the same day Apple TV+ premieres a Hanks-narrated documentary about the Bloody Hundredth, featuring Luckadoo.     

I met up with Luckadoo in early March to talk about the grim realities of serving in World War II, his life in Dallas, and how it felt to have his story told by Hollywood. (Our conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Dallas History

For One Night Only, the Kessler Theater Turns Into the Starck Club

Danny Gallagher
By Danny Gallagher |
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The scene at the Starck Club during its peak. Photo courtesy of The Dallas Morning News

New York City had Studio 54, London had the Hippodrome, and Dallas had The Starck Club.

The West End venue, named for its Parisian designer Philippe Starck, defined the nightlife scene in Dallas throughout the 80s and reveled in the excesses of the decadent decade, powered by a new and curious drug called ecstasy. DJ Mark Ridlen says there’s more to The Starck Club than meets history’s narrow eye, a cultural touchstone that meant far more than the unchecked libido of the clubgoers.

“All they talk about is the drug busts, ‘Who shot J.R.?,’ and the 80s but you’ve never seen a club with such an eclectic lineup over the years whether it was a band, fashion shows, plays, performance art,” Ridlen says. “You name it. They had it.”

The Kessler is bringing back The Starck Club for its 40th anniversary reunion by transforming into the venue for five hours on Sunday May 12 into a new version of the influential Dallas nightclub. Kessler Artistic Director Jeff Liles said the event sold quickly: it took less than a week to sell out. It is not dissimilar to the venue’s tribute to the long-gone Video Bar, a room that was influential in the avant-garde scene of the 1980s.

“We love paying homage to the venues that made Dallas culture what it was,” Liles says. “It was happening right at the same time as the emergence of the Deep Ellum scene.”

Dallas History

D Magazine’s 50 Greatest Stories: The Hockaday School’s Long History in Dallas

Matt Goodman
By |
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Ela Hockaday, the founder of her namesake school.

The Hockaday School has been a fixture of Dallas for the last 110 years, ever since a group of wealthy parents brought Miss Ela Hockaday to the city and charged her with starting a college preparatory school for their daughters.

In 1978, the writer Prudence Mackintosh, fresh off teaching at the school, explored its history and place in (what was then) modern Dallas. Miss Hockaday knew how to curry favor in the city: she built a board consisting of the city’s “most powerful civic leaders,” folks like Herbert Marcus, father of Stanley, and the businessman and philanthropist R.W. Higginbotham. In later years, the board would be filled with a mayor (J. Erik Jonsson) and a co-founder of Texas Instruments (Eugene McDermott).

“Most of them had daughters,” Mackintosh wrote.

The school’s first classes took place in a small home on Haskell Avenue on September 25, 1913, with just 10 students. (Hockaday opened just four days after its namesake got to town.) It eventually moved to a campus on the Caruth farm near Greenville and Belmont before finding its longtime home off Forest Lane, in a building designed to resemble the work of architect Mies van der Rohe.

Tuition in 1978 ran $1,075 for pre-kindergarten ($5,300 adjusted for inflation) and $3,205 for a high school senior (which would be $15,800 in 2024). Current tuition is now $32,095 for pre-K and $38,082 for grades 5 and up. Its $160 million endowment is, per Private School Review, the highest in the state. The endowment has grown from $3.5 million when Mackintosh wrote her story.

Things have changed at Hockaday. The boarding program will end in 2025, and students no longer have to wear white dresses to graduation. Mackintosh’s story is also about exploring how the school’s long history had lingered on its campus, which is surely relevant today.

“Why Hockaday Girls Are Different” is one of our 50 greatest stories, and you can read it here.

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Dallas History

D Magazine’s 50 Greatest Stories: Heartbroken at the Stoneleigh

Matt Goodman
By |
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The lions and the Stoneleigh. Photography by Leah Clausen

The Stoneleigh Terrace Hotel in 1977 sat across from a pharmacy that had been turned into a bar and grill, the Stoneleigh P, a few years prior. The P seemed to be where the action was, populated by “a real cross-section of humanity,” as “an earnest-looking fellow at the bar” described to a Dallas Morning News reporter around that time. Timothy Leary gave an interview at the P to a young Mike Shropshire. Retired Cowboys legend Duane Thompson sipped coffee with Randy Galloway.

Across the street was a different scene. Stoic, a little strange, sometimes sad. Two stone lions stared out at the 2900 block of Maple Avenue from beside the steps leading to the hotel. KSKY, the “station in the sky,” had broadcast from the penthouse for more than four decades, packing in 25-piece orchestras to record in the 1940s and hosting interviews with Bear Bryant and Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s.

And down on the ground level of the hotel was the Lions Den, the smoky hotel bar where “the really cute people” started filing out around 7 p.m. and left the lovelorn divorcees to their scotch and sodas. The writer A.C. Greene spent weeks drinking alongside these men, then turned it into one of the greatest stories we’ve ever published: “Heartbreak Hotel.”

This is a story about the past, one of those great moment-in-time pieces that captures a different stretch of Maple than the one we have today (not to mention the version that’s coming). Greene was good at that sort of thing; he was a columnist at both the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Morning News, and was unofficially known as “the dean of Texas letters” upon his death in 2002.

And so his snapshot is intimate and full of little details: “The Lions Den is, therefore, the bar at the Stoneleigh; dark interior with funny little red lights that twinkle dimly near the ceiling, so that you are tempted to sit and look at them for hours, speculating whether they are hooked up to some electrical relay that makes them blink, or if they were improperly installed and merely blink from a poor contact.”

The Stoneleigh, which was built in 1923, was purchased by the hotel chain Le Méridien in 2013. Marriott bought Le Meridien in 2016. And so the Lions Den is long gone. The hotel bar still is strangely connected to the lobby, but the space is flooded with light and the little nooks and hiding spots and the regulars have disappeared. It feels like a hotel bar, not like the Lions Den.

Change is coming to this block of Maple. The Stoneleigh P, which burned down in the early 1980s and was rebuilt, will move to the nondescript highway known as Lemmon Avenue after its landlord refused to renew its lease. It will replace a restaurant called Eggcellent. Maple Terrace, a historic location itself, will soon be a collection of expensive boutique office and residential space. Uchi is doing good business down the block, and Nick and Sam’s is seemingly always humming.

Cities change. Maple already looks radically different than it did when Greene was chatting up divorcées, and the departure of the Stoneleigh P will buff away even more history. But those two stone lions out front remain, watching the buildings and people come and go, go and come.

“Heartbreak Hotel” is one of our 50 greatest stories, and you can read it right here.

Most mentions of the Starck Club are slick with a sweaty layer of nostalgia. How Grace Jones opened the place. How you entered through shiny black doors into a countercultural touchstone that blew the minds of New Order and whose curios even attracted a Young Republicans fundraiser attended by George W. Bush and Maureen Reagan. Weekday fundraisers with Ross Perot Sr., weekends with “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” And ecstasy. Lots and lots of ecstasy.

This week’s edition of our 50 greatest stories is “Ecstasy & Agony at the Starck Club,” the writer Richard West’s chronicling of the club’s collapse. Starck opened in 1984 under a Woodall Rodgers overpass, near the West End, and quickly became the epicenter of ecstasy, (also known then as MDMA, and now as molly). It shuttered four years after the Drug Enforcement Agency made MDMA illegal, in July 1985.

West chronicles the end of the club through the story of 23-year-old Rodney Glenn Kitchens, a kid from Waxahachie who moved with his family to Dallas and was reborn as Dino in the Starck Club. He and his co-conspirators flooded the space with MDMA, well past the point in which it was legal to sell.

The story, from October 1989, is not a nostalgia bomb. It’s a portrait of decline, how the party ends even if people aren’t ready to leave the unisex bathrooms. There isn’t a single mention of the club’s namesake, the exacting French architect Philipe Starck, nor any navel-gazing at how the club changed lives as it changed the city 20 years after the assassination of JFK.

Here’s a taste:

Dallas History

D Magazine’s 50 Greatest Stories: The Murders That Changed Fort Worth

Matt Goodman
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Cullen and Priscilla Davis, in the early 1970s.

In early 1977, this magazine asked: “Is Priscilla Davis’ story true?”

The murder trial for her husband, Cullen, was set to begin that February, when he would defend himself against allegations that he shot to death his 12-year-old stepdaughter and his estranged wife’s new live-in lover inside their mansion in Fort Worth. Priscilla was shot and wounded, too, and a family friend at the scene was left paralyzed.

Cullen and Priscilla Davis were well-known socialites—he a millionaire businessman, and she his bride. As Tom Stephenson wrote for us then, “As people tried to forget the killing of a 12-year-old girl, the murder became not a whodunit, but a gleeful trespass into the private lives of Fort Worth’s rich black sheep.”

There would be numerous magazine articles, books, and one made-for-TV vehicle starring Heather Locklear. The late Gary Cartwright wrote his own Texas Monthly story in the March 1977 issue, too, and it remains a great read. But Stephenson’s feels urgent and unsettled, a portrait of a town turned lurid, yes, but also an attempt at peeling apart the many narrative threads to try and find some semblance of truth. It begins and ends with Priscilla, first on her velvet couch and then on her newspaper-covered bed, trying to both explain herself and make sense of her new life.

The case largely hinged on her testimony. That she believed Cullen was the strange man in her home, wearing the woman’s wig holding the gun with a black plastic bag wrapped around his hands. They never found the murder weapon—or the wig, or the bag—and recovered no prints or bloody clothes from the scene: “Without tangible evidence, the prosecution must depend almost solely upon eyewitness accounts—essentially, the testimony of Priscilla.”

Stephenson’s story is one of the 50 greatest we’ve published. It doesn’t proclaim to know the truth, but does lay out how the puzzle could make sense—and how it might not. It also captures Fort Worth at a time when someone like Cullen Sr., the oilman, could confidently proclaim to Amon Carter, “You take Fort Worth, and I’ll take the rest of the world.”

Cullen was famously acquitted, and in the years since, his father-in-law admitted in a Star-Telegram report that he bribed an investigator within the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office during the original trial. Priscilla sued for wrongful death in 1986, but the matter ended in a hung jury. She died in 2001. Cullen was never tried for the murder of Stan Farr, the live-in boyfriend and former TCU basketball standout.

Cullen found God in the 1980s and went to work selling hand cream in Colleyville. He’s 90 today. As for the mansion: it was turned into a Mexican restaurant and then a wedding venue. In 2021, a housing developer acquired the property and the surrounding 250 or so acres and turned it into a 30-lot development of single-family homes. Cullen returned to the house for a WFAA segment that year, reflecting on how he snipped pages from home magazines and handed them over to an architect to design in 1972. There was also an underground tunnel that stretched more than 100 yards beyond the boundary of the home, for, Cullen said, “keeping stuff that made noise away from the house.”

He told reporter William Joy that he remembers little from his years living there, and he also cares little about the people who believe he got away with murder. “I didn’t care about that either,” he said. “They want to believe that, fine. What happened was unfortunate.

“History is history. Can’t change history.”

You can read Tom Stephenson’s story from March 1977 right here.

Dallas History

At the Reborn Longhorn Ballroom, Bob Wills Is Still the King

Bill Sanderson
By Bill Sanderson |
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Jason Roberts with the Texas Playboys. They'll play the Longhorn for the first time in decades on February 3. Longhorn Ballroom

The Longhorn Ballroom began its life as Bob Wills’ Ranch House, where the eponymous king of Western swing would sometimes ride his horse, Punkin, out on the dance floor before his Texas Playboys began performing. The Longhorn, which celebrated its long-awaited resurrection last year, has not hosted an act with that famous handle in decades. That changes on Saturday night.

Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys, under the direction of fiddler Jason Roberts, will make its first appearance at the cavernous venue on Feb 3. The show is in partnership with the Austin-based nonprofit Texas Dance Hall Preservation.

These are near mythic boot prints for the new Playboys to stand in, and its twin fiddles, pedal steel, and other instruments may summon the musical ghosts as the Playboys perform 99 percent of Bob Wills’ Western swing. “I want to play his music where Bob would give us a little ahhh-haaa holler if he walked in the door,” says Roberts.

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Dallas History

From the Archives: Finding the Wild Things of Deep Ellum

S. Holland Murphy
By |
d magazine march 1987
Matthew Bailey and Suzanne Boisvert were both suburban teens on the Deep Ellum scene in the 1980s.

By the generations still alive to argue the case, the years 1984 to 1988 are most often cited as Deep Ellum’s heyday, a time and a place where you might find a suburban 16-year-old checking IDs at the club door and ecstasy on every corner. It was a scene captured by a young Skip Hollandsworth for this magazine’s March 1987 cover story, whose subtitle read: “Underground in Deep Ellum: a generation of kids searches for identity. Are they part of a new counterculture? Or are they rebels without a cause?”

That outside-looking-in take was, at the time, a sore point for some on the inside. “With all the creative types in the scene—writers, poets, and songwriters—it seemed like D Magazine could have gotten somebody that was more in touch,“ says David Adriance 36 years later. He appeared in the story as a skateboard punk known on the streets as David Dude. “All these kids, even the wealthy ones, were considered black sheep and kind of lost themselves, and we all found unity with creativity.” 

Those creative connections would serve as David Dude’s ramp into many adventures. He rubbed elbows with rock stars around the world while working as the merch manager for Dallas’ Reverend Horton Heat. Once, while visiting his Starck Club-investor girlfriend in Paris, he met a pair of French artists who negotiated the sale of his orthopedic cast—which had been drawn on by graffiti-art legend Keith Haring. The proceeds funded a summer of European surfing. 

At the time of the article, though, David Dude was living at the Theatre Gallery, a warehouse-turned-illegal event space that many young bohemians called home over the years. The Theatre Gallery’s founder, Russell David Hobbs, was more or less Deep Ellum’s master of ceremonies, presiding over a three-ring circus of visual, theatrical, and musical artists who were given free rein inside the space. “At that moment, it was really about real, convicted artists, painting and spilling their guts out onstage through theater and live music,” Hobbs says, “and the street scene was an exploration into art and reality and social experience. We were all trying to break on through to the other side.”

Media

D Magazine’s 50 Greatest Stories: When Old East Dallas Was Home to Native Americans

Matt Goodman
By |
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Peak and Bryan Streets, which, in the 1970s, was known as "The Corner."

In the early 1970s, Dallas was one of about six cities in the country that established field offices for the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Native Americans often relocated to these cities in search of jobs. Bob Beames, the former director of the bureau, told the Dallas Morning News in 1973: “Except for eastern Oklahoma, few places offer Indians work where they live. Job opportunities are simply better off the reservation than on it—in the cities rather than in the country.”

News editorial writer Jim Hawkins reported that most of the Native Americans who came to Dallas voluntarily were in their early 20s, “already married as often as not.” There is only one reference in his editorial to what was called “The Corner,” a “favorite rendezvous” for these newcomers located at Peak and Bryan streets. In part, because they were dropped off in parts of town that didn’t have easy access to jobs, transit, or housing without much support. The Corner was where they gathered.

That’s where writer Doug Holley spent some time in 1975 for “The Cement Prairie,” our second of the 50 greatest stories we’ve ever published. We’re highlighting one per week throughout our 50th anniversary this year.

The center of Holley’s story is Tom & Jerry’s Lounge, maybe three blocks north of Peak, at 4536 Bryan St. This section of Bryan is now part of the Uplift Peak Preparatory charter school complex, and where T&J’s once stood, you’ll now find a parking lot. Peak and Bryan is home to longtime restaurants Vietnam and Bangkok City, which opened in the 1990s, as well as new apartments. Its history as a gathering place for Native Americans has vanished.

In the 1970s, “The Corner” was adjacent to a block filled with bars, a few of which were once highlighted by this magazine in another feature from 1975 titled “The Meanest Bars in Dallas.” Two years after Holley’s story, the News reported that a man wounded a few patrons with a .25-caliber automatic gun inside Tom & Jerry’s on a Tuesday night. The fight had apparently spilled over from Pinky’s Lounge, one block away.

Holley himself narrowly avoids violence at one point of the story. But that isn’t his focus. Offensive language aside—and the similarly offensive framing and stereotyping, for sure—the story is largely told through the Native Americans who decided to make a life in what an employee at the American Indian Center described as “the cold-blooded city.” The story illustrates how difficult it was to find work, housing, and other basic necessities, despite the promise of such coming from officials like Beams.

In fact, the News editorial that quotes the former director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs is a cold view from above, all numbers—there were 6,000 Native Americans in Dallas in 1973, according to the Census at that time—and admonishments. Holley’s story is an intimate look at what it took to make a home in a strange place. It also introduces readers to the services that gradually sprouted up around the city, including the Urban Inter-Tribal Center of Texas, now known as Texas Native Health. In 2022, the organization announced plans to triple its space near the Medical Center to 15 exam rooms.

“The Cement Prairie” captures Old East Dallas at a very different time, and it’s one of the 50 greatest stories we’ve published.

You can read it here.

Dallas History

New Exhibits Place the History of Deep Ellum at the Center of Its 150th Anniversary Celebration

By James Russell |
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A map shows the old businesses that populated Central Track and Deep Ellum before the highway came. Matt Goodman

The exhibit Facing the Rising Sun: Freedman’s Cemetery opened in 2000 at the African American Museum in Fair Park, chronicling the history of the thriving Black community just north of present-day downtown. Curators Phillip Collins and Alan Govenar expected it to be up for only a year.

Two decades later, it’s still on display. It serves as the inspiration for two new exhibits in adjoining exhibition halls, Central Track: Crossroads of Deep Ellum and Seeing a World Blind Lemon Never Saw, which opened last week and commemorates the 150th anniversary of the historic neighborhood. Both, again, are organized by Collins, a curatorial advisor and former museum staffer, and Govenar, founder of Dallas-based Documentary Arts and a longtime chronicler of Deep Ellum.

“They’re an outgrowth of that exhibition,” Govenar said, exploring the same themes of trauma, racism, violence, resiliency, and geography as the original show. He also curated three accompanying pieces: When You Go Down in Deep Ellum and Unlikely Blues: Louis Paeth and Blind Lemon Jefferson at the new Deep Ellum Community Center; and Invisible Deep Ellum, an installation under the I-345 overpass that memorializes the Black-owned businesses that were destroyed when the highway was built.  

The freeway replaced what was known as Central Track, the main corridor of the roughly seven block neighborhood between Elm Street and Swiss Avenue. Govenar described it as full of life as well as diversity. It’s a place where Jewish, Italian, Greek, and other European immigrants joined freed slaves who “came together if not by choice then necessity.” For a city whose power structure often claimed membership in the Ku Klux Klan, it was a safe space away (for a while) from strife.

The show highlights the reprehensible depiction of Black life in the 1920s by the Dallas Morning News, juxtaposing racist news clips with posters for minstrel shows from the same era. They’re all offensive, Govenar said, and that’s the point. But the subject matter is also the result of the limited depictions of Black life in the area.

Even as his book Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas, co-written with longtime journalist Jay F. Brakefield, has just been published in its third edition by local publishing house Deep Vellum, no additional photographs have emerged from collectors or archives.

“It’s astounding,” he said.

Dallas History

Reporter Darwin Payne Opens Up His Old Notebooks to Tell a New Story About JFK’s Assassination

Bill Sanderson
By Bill Sanderson |
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The Sixth Floor Museum, where Darwin Payne will speak about his new book, Behind the Scenes. iStock

Few could have captured President John F. Kennedy’s death and the immediate aftermath like veteran reporter and historian Darwin Payne in his new book, Behind the Scenes, Covering the J.F.K. Assassination. He returns to the murderous weekend that ended with the deaths of President Kennedy, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit, and accused killer Lee Harvey Oswald.

Payne will speak at 1 p.m. Nov. 17 at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, in the former Texas School Book Depository where the first bullets rang out 60 years ago.

The large museum space freeze-frames Nov. 22, 1963 with the same view, from the sixth-floor southeast corner, that the sniper had. Payne and a handful of other reporters and photographers inspected it soon after the shooting. Earlier that day, after sprinting four blocks from the Dallas Times Herald, the 26-year-old newsman had begun interviewing eyewitnesses at street level.

Behind the Scenes — part memoir, part reporter’s stream of consciousness, part history of presidential visits to Dallas and an overview of presidential assassinations — is loaded with back stories and details to which few were privy. Its immediacy comes from Payne’s notebooks and an unfinished manuscript he discovered in a closet during the pandemic lockdown. The reader feels the urgency of the moment and is reminded of the tragedy’s moving parts that alternately fascinated and horrified. 

The account brackets three days that riveted the world as the police, print and radio reporters, and ascendant broadcast television sorted out the signal calamity of the century in real time, piece by piece.

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