Beefing and chewing the fat about a rare pleasure that’s almost done for.
January 1980

Features
Once Texas was a land of fabulous, ornate county courthouses. It still is, but today they’re flamboyant relics in our streamlined urban landscapes.
At Houston’s Jefferson Davis Hospital, the wonders of modern medicine collide with the raw realities of birth, poverty, neglect and hope.
Don’t despair, learn to Think Positive! Success and happiness are only a seminar, a cassette library, and several hundred dollars away!
Miscellany
A helicopter plague descends on Dallas; is the Texas environmentalist an endangered species?; cattlemen won’t be cowed.
Columns
Galveston has withstood tidal waves, hurricanes, gamblers, and tourists. Can it survive a superport?
When Stage #1 opened as a halfway house for theater graduates from SMU, the participants weren’t pitied but applauded.
Houston and Dallas opera companies could fudge on shoe sizes when it came to casting Cinderellas, but the voices had to fit just so.
By reputation Dallas is a staid city. But there is one strip where Dallas is fevered, excessive, and lascivious, and where every night is party night.
A Dallas rabbi says Christmas is a form of persecution for Jews; a Disciples of Christ pastor discusses suffering with equanimity.
Two questions about school desegregation: Is busing the only way? Are integrated schools inferior?
John Updike’s problems are our pleasures. Mean Scrooge McDuck returns in a nostalgic comic-book collection.
New records from Texas’ die-hard country, rock, and punk musicians.
The Panhandle is home for the country’s only H-bomb assembly plant. Aren’t you glad we told you?
A boy and his horse reach great heights in The Black Stallion. The Rose, with Bette Midler, is no American beauty.
Reporter
George Bush wants to shake your hand; Rita Clements wants to paint your Governor’s Mansion; Dallas wants to bring you art, lots of art.
