Five stories that have North Texas talking: revisit JFK’s visit to North Texas in 1960; Texas’ voter ID trial is underway; Jerry Jones gets a big profile in ESPN’s magazine; and more.
New film footage shows John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson campaigning through Dallas and Fort Worth in 1960. Texas Archive of the Moving Image has posted the rare footage on its website. The film shows Kennedy “stopping in parks and parking lots as [he] addresses overwhelmingly large and enthusiastic crowds,” TAMI’s website says. “Though most of the footage is silent, a portion of Kennedy’s speech in Fort Worth’s Burnett Park can be heard. In it, Kennedy responds to Republican accusations that he is not a true member of the Democratic Party by saying: ‘We do not need members of the Republican Party to tell us for what the Democratic Party stands!’” Also seen in the film: House Speaker Sam Rayburn, U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, and Barefoot Sanders, who was later appointed as a U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas. Revisit KERA's coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in our online series "22 Days in November." (Update: The Sixth Floor Museum informs us that the old film is from KXAS-TV.) [h/t The Dallas Morning News]
Watch the film:
- A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge Tuesday that Texas’ voter ID law was motivated by racial discrimination and should be struck down. Opening statements began Tuesday in a trial in Corpus Christi over the measure Gov. Rick Perry signed into law in 2011. Opponents call it the most stringent voter ID measure of any adopted by conservative states in recent years. Experts estimate that nearly 800,000 registered voters in Texas lack an acceptable form of ID under the law. Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Westfall says blacks and Hispanics make up a disproportionate number of those voters. The Texas Tribune has more. [Associated Press]
- The Dallas Zoo’s elephants are getting a special treat Wednesday: root balls. Temple Emanu-El is donating eight huge red oak root balls that it says will “stimulate the elephants’ natural behavior.” The balls come from 43-year-old red oak trees. They were excavated from Temple Emanu-El’s campus. Temple Emanu-El calls it the balls the “breakfast of champions.”
- Being a barbecue critic for a prominent magazine sounds like a pretty sweet gig. But there are some hazards – stuffing yourself silly, weight gain, elevated cholesterol, and long drives around the state. That’s according to Daniel Vaughn, the barbecue editor at Texas Monthly. He writes about his adventures in the magazine’s September issue. Vaughn writes: “Eighteen months after taking the leap, this mutual decision to go sauce-deep into ’cue culture seems to have been a sound one. … People romanticize the notion of being a food critic, but the challenges of covering a state as vast as Texas and a cuisine as niche as barbecue are something I wasn’t really aware of until I entered this world.”
- Just in time for football season, ESPN profiles Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. “Standing 6 feet, ½-inch tall, Jones is, like his stadium, modernized by creative vision and formidable resources -- his face lifted, his scalp fortified and his teeth capped to gleam,” Don Van Natta Jr. writes in ESPN The Magazine. “No team owner in American sports is more famous and infamous, more revered and reviled, than Jones. … Although Jones has made nearly all the right moves as the Cowboys' owner, he has made just as many wrong moves as its general manager, the job he gave himself when he bought the team.” One choice quote: "He's the luckiest guy I've ever seen -- in business and in life," Larry Lacewell told ESPN – he’s one of Jones' closest friends and the Cowboys' former head of scouting. "His football team has been the unluckiest thing I've ever seen. How can you be that unlucky that long?"
