Tim Dickey

Imagine a Dallas with no impressive new Museum of Art, a Dallas without the world-class Meyerson symphony hall, and no Arboretum,--a Dallas bereft of a national quality convention center, with no D/FW airport--just tiny Love Field.

What if Parkland were just a medium-sized county hospital and Southwestern Medical Center was primarily a place for churning out new doctors, with no world-class medical research being done, and not a single Nobel laureate!

Sounds pretty bleak, huh? That's the Dallas I grew up in, in the 1950's and '60's, and guess what? For this public-school-educated Northwest Dallas kid, whose parents both worked and never managed to buy their own home--in many ways THAT Dallas beat the pants off the Dallas I'm living in now, the Dallas in which I raised my own children.

In the summer, I was left alone at the house when my parents went to work. I could go down to Foster Elementary School where the Park and Recreation Department, in conjunction with DISD, moved in a shed full of basketballs, volleyballs, dodge balls, checkers, chess and other games, and hired a college student to oversee the whole thing. All the home-alone neighborhood kids could congregate there and spend the whole day.

I learned to play chess there and spent countless hours playing dodge ball in the gym. I still remember the name the Rice University student who the city hired to run the place -- Chuck Schamel. He was a student of opera and would entertain us by singing opera in the echo-ey gym, in Italian.

Or, my parents could drop me off at Bachman Lake, at the YMCA-run summer day camp, Camp Kiwanis. I LOVED that place! All day long, we'd play capture the flag or take three-mile hikes around the lake. Camp Kiwanis was run by a family that lived on-site -- the Brooks family. There were lots of arts and crafts. I made countless lanyards and popsicle stick houses. There were even boxing and fencing lessons from the college-student counselors there. My favorite counselor was Bailey Phelps, a university student who lived in a cabin on the property. He was the one who brought the fencing foils and masks. Great memories and strong, positive influences, all.

Next to Kiwanis was the Hugeley Rec Center, where kids from all over the Bachman area hung out in and around the old World War II era building. In those days, it seemed there was always plenty of inexpensive recreation available.

So, what happened?

When did the city stop putting resources and energy into these kinds of activities for kids from regular working families?

How come in this "bigger and better" "living large" Dallas of 2004, with a much larger tax base, poor kids don't have these kinds of great character-building programs going on in Northwest Dallas?

Working parents get little help when it comes to providing that kind of 9 to 5 activity for kids in the summer.

With all the growth we've had since then, with all the great new civic facilities that have been built in the intervening years, isn't our tax base and economy supposed to grow and make everything better?

Dallas is cursed with a rotten "ruling class". With the exception of a handful, the "haves" in this town are overwhelmingly a bunch of crass, grasping, insecure "me-first" money grubbers who don't give a hoot about the quality of life for Dallasites who don't own a tuxedo--or three.

I'm talking about the bold-face names in Alan Peppard's column.

Oh, they'll pony up hundreds of millions so Kern Wildenthal can better chase after another Nobel Prize winner at Southwestern Medical Center. Or, they'll give twenty or thirty million to put their name on a new opera house. They're all over high-profile big-ticket, preferably taxpayer-funded projects that will make them feel less inadequate as they talk about Dallas when they hobnob with their Manhattan friends at Christmas, and their Santa Fe and Rancho de Mirage friends in the Spring and Summer.

When it comes to taking care of the little things that make big differences in the lives of everyday folks--forget it.

Hey -- it's their money and they can give it to whomever or whatever they want to, but don't ask me to respect them, and their works.

When it comes to deciding what's best for the city, they'd damn sure better not look down their new-rich noses and tell me that I just don't understand enough about the way things "really are" when they're putting their hands in my pocket, and drinking deeply from the public trough for their "signature" projects.

Maybe we never should have built all that fancy stuff in the first place.

Are the little folks in Dallas REALLY better off than we were thirty years ago?