An entrepreneur captures customers in public rest rooms. A high-tech plant moves from oil to medicine. Space and biomedical manufacturing are finally off the drawing boards. And a former union boss becomes a bingo mogul.
San Antonio is shameless over Shamu and Sea World.
Times are rotten for refineries.
Once an oil-field service boomtown, Alice doesn’t live well anymore.
Despite all the mewling from the oil patch, there are still ways to make money at $15 a barrel. Here’s our guide to surviving the terrible teens.
For years Jamail’s was the queen of Houston grocery stores. Now the Jamail family is at odds, and two rival chains are getting ready for a major food fight.
As the president of Texas’ largest private grocery chain, Charles Butt learned that in order to be nice to his customers he had to be tough on his competitors. And vice versa.
Up in the sky, it’s a plane, it’s a helicopter—no, it’s a tiltrotor, the Texas hybrid that will soon revolutionize air travel.
Megadeveloper Trammel Crow bought farmland in Louisiana, but can his company’s big-city savvy make it pay?
Going broke is for poor people. Here’s a whole chapter of Texans who have found ways to clear the books without losing their ranches, Rolls, or Rolexes.
Don Dixon ran Vernon Savings the way the Romans ran orgies, equating excess with success, until his empire collapsed.
Texas developers are snapping up land, putting together deals, and building like crazy—in Washington, D.C.
When newspaper entrepreneur William Dean Singleton bought the ailing ‘Dallas Times Herald,’ people thought he was crazy. When he bought the ‘Houston Post,’ they were sure of it.
Houston discount whiz Elias Zinn sees nothing nutty in his big-bucks bid to take over raving high-tech retailer Crazy Eddie.
Las Colinas was supposed to be Can-Do City. So why couldn’t it?
We have seen the future of Dallas nightlife, and it is called Dallas Alley.
For 68 years, Rosengren’s Books in San Antonio gave personal service, sought out both arcane and popular titles, and fostered a love of reading. It wasn’t enough to keep the store in business.
When eighty-year-old Decker Jackson gives financial advice to Texas public officials, nothing in life is certain but debt and taxes.
For some entrepreneurs, the dark cloud of AIDS has proved to have a silver lining
The rich and eccentric heir to a rich and eccentric Galveston family, Shearn Moody, Jr., craved an empire all his own. But his lack of self-restraint cost him his bank, his insurance company, his fortune, and now, perhaps, his freedom.
Maybe as much as $20,000, if Lee Ballard of Dallas has anything to do with it.
In the early eighties, some Dallas savings and loans reaped profits in real estate investments while land was flipped, appraisals were inflated, and property was developed. Now the land deals have flopped, property values are deflated, and there are empty buildings all over town. And some S&Ls are broke
My father’s Panhandle grape patch gives him a new cash crop and a new pride as a farmer.
Texas Air chief Frank Lorenzo took an airline with no profits and limited prospects and built it into the country’s largest. How? By betting like the sky’s the limit.
At first he couldn’t stand the strain of trying to get rich. Then he couldn’t stand the strain of being rich.
The death of an oil well keeps an oil-field service company alive.
Will deprivation, humiliation, and confrontation lead the way to a better, more confident you? A new self-help craze sweeping Texas wants you to think so.
In his dream to create a dynastic empire along the Rio Grande, Chito Longoria went against the wishes of his family and the values of his native land.
The world’s hottest restaurant chain turns into Texas’ hottest restaurant feud.
Texans are always looking for a new frontier, a place where business people can do business without worrying about a lot of bureaucrats. Want to make it in Texas today? Come to Belize.
At a time when Texas seems to have lost its gift for creating fortunes, there has emerged a group of entrepreneurs who are making money by catering to the needs of people who are going broke.
They have done it all: saved New York City and Massachusetts, written economic classics, created new companies, and turned old ones around. Now, at our request, they’re fixing Texas.
One school of thought holds that when the economy is in a nosedive, that’s the time to go into business. At least that’s what a farmer, an oilman, a developer, and a banker believe.
We gave a bunch of smart Texans $50,000. (Okay, we didn’t really, we just said we did.) The money comes with these strings attached: it has to be invested in Texas now, and the investments have to pay off by 1996.
The departure of MCC’s chief signals a new beginning for the company—and an end to Austin’s high-tech boom.
In boom times, John Connally and Ben Barnes used their political magic to build a sprawling real estate empire. Now they’re in a desperate struggle to keep themselves afloat.
A new class of self-styled experts called prosperity consultants say they have the solution to Texas’ economic bust: the bad times are all in our heads.
Let’s hear it for Dallas’ Northwood Institute, where entrepreneurialism is second only to high society fundraising.
Their business may read like a sci-fi script, but these aging astronauts, former Nasa engineers, technocrats, and high-risk junkies are serious about selling space.
North Texas bands face a tough choice: living to make music or making music for a living.
So long, OPEC. So long, $27 oil. The Merc is king now.
The continuing saga of the Hermann estate scandal was a shocking lesson in how Houston’s most-respected philanthropists, civic leaders, and biggest deal makers had abused their power.
From the heights of the Dallas social heap, they leaped to the national celebrity circuit. Rich, young, and fashionable, Twinkle and Bradley Bayoud are a case study in how to rise to the top.
The Hermann estate scandal exposed Houston’s most powerful deal makers, most respected philanthropist, and leading lawvers to the harsh glare of publicity. It was a shocking lesson in the abuses of power.
Robert Sakowitz set out to be a retail Renaissance man. Like his hero Leonardo da Vinci, he was going to do everything. And he did—including something he never imagined: fail.
People who have watched a certain prime-time soap opera think they know what goes on at the Petroleum Club. They don’t.
The real Texas technology picture is much more intricate than either the mad hype of two years ago or the dire headlines of today make it out to be.
It seems practically impossible to choose the best deal from the multitude of services offered by all the new long distance phone companies. But we’ve got their number.
A new recruit to the ranks of Mary Kay beauty consultants struggles valiantly to do his part in reaching the woman of the eighties and keeping the company in the pink.
An old hand at Pickens-watching reveals the key to the Amarillo oilman’s corporate-takeover antics.
