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Blow by Blow : A Collection of Steve Blow's Award-Winning Columns from The Dallas Morning News
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October 30, 2018
"As I understand our history, old John Neely Bryan picked this spot because it was a good place to do business. And that's still our reason for being."
As a new Dallasite (492 days, as of this writing), I have devoted a not-insignificant amount of time to trying to understand the history of this city and, frankly, determine exactly how I feel about it. It's not easy to do.
Go to your local hipster coffeeshop, take a stroll along the Katy Trail, stop by on any weekday afternoon at Klyde Warren Park and ask passers-by where they are from. Chances are pretty good they'll say some place other than Dallas.
In March of this year, the U.S. Census Bureau sent out a press release claiming that 150,000 people had moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex over the past year. The past year. One year. More people relocated to DFW in 2017 than to any other metropolitan area in the United States. They came primarily from California, Florida, Illinois and New York (at least two came from Alabama), and they (likely) came because corporate relocated here. They touched down at DFW Airport – which occupies more square footage than the island of Manhattan (and has its own zip code) – and dispersed from there to Dallas, Tarrant or Collin counties.
The first time I touched down in Dallas – at Love Field – I couldn't determine whose skyline was whose. Is that Fort Worth? That's too close to be Fort Worth. Maybe it's Arlington? No, the stadia are in Arlington and I can't seem them. Oh, Irving. Wait, Irving is large enough to have a skyline? Well, I'll be damned – more people live in Irving than Birmingham, Ala. And more people live in Garland than Birmingham? What the hell is Garland, Texas? Is that its skyline? More people live in Fort Worth than Boston or San Francisco or Miami or Atlanta? How the hell is that possible?
So DFW is big and that's its appeal. It's big and getting bigger – like the Red Sox fanbase. Approximately half a million more people live in Dallas today than when J.R. got shot. People want to be part of something big. Corporations do, at least. But the cost of all this non-native immigration and relocation – aside from the insidious traffic – is that the history of our glowing city gets hazier as fewer transplants take the time to learn, absorb and understand it.
I can't abide this. When I took Strengths Finder back in 2011, my primary strength was revealed to be Context. I'm a 5 on the Enneagram. I'm ideally suited to be a bar trivia grandmaster. I could not relocate to one of the ten largest cities in the United States – a city where a president was shot and killed in cold blood, for God's sake – and not immerse myself in its context.
But what context? Hell, we don't even know where the name "Dallas" comes from! Ol' John Neely Bryan – who wound up in a lunatic asylum, don't you know (no, actually, you probably don't) – didn't leave any clues as to why the city of Dallas is called Dallas. That's a gap in the narrative, you could say. Our skyline – which was named world's best earlier this year by USA Today – is shiny and sparkly and comes at the expense of older, historical structures that, though they are not wrapped in programmable LED displays, had the benefit of historical significance. Now, they gone.
We've become the Frankfurt of Texas. We're built to perpetually serve the present, not to preserve the past. Houston has petrochemicals and NASA and the bayou and is the most diverse city in the United States. San Antonio is 300-ish years old and has a downtown river that is there every day (what?!) and the missions (Alamo!) and what not. Austin is the capital and has bats and Whole Foods' headquarters and assorted hippies. Fort Worth is quintessentially Texas with its stockyards and the big hats and all. Dallas is – well, the skyline is really sharp.
Hell, Lee Harvey Oswald himself relocated here from New Orleans.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is this: The best a transplant like me can do to soak up the history of their new city is find the answer to these questions: Who is (or was) the venerable local newspaper columnist? And have they pulled their favorite columns into some sort of book or database?
In Dallas the answers are "Steve Blow" and "yes, a book called 'Blow by Blow.'" It's a rabbit hole of Dallas history and a snapshot of life in Big D from the late 1980s through the end of the 1990s. Those were heady times to live in Dallas. The eponymous TV show was nearing the end of its long run. Robert Tilton was prophesying over in Farmers Branch. Jimmy Johnson was coaching the Cowboys (and winning Super Bowls on a regular basis). The city's tallest building had just been completed. Heady times indeed.
Blow, who had regrettably retired just a few years before our relocation, was indeed your prototypical, venerable newspaper columnist. (I know the type – I was a columnist of questionable venerability for a spell at an alt-weekly in Birmingham.) He's curious, soapbox-y, moralistic on occasion, highly contextual – but mostly curious. And a hell of a writer.
If you're a Dallas native (!) – I recommend "Blow by Blow" as fond, memory lane stroll. If you're new to town and tested out as highly contextual and a 5 on the Enneagram and a grandmaster at team trivia and you care about Dallas – you should definitely give it a read.
As a new Dallasite (492 days, as of this writing), I have devoted a not-insignificant amount of time to trying to understand the history of this city and, frankly, determine exactly how I feel about it. It's not easy to do.
Go to your local hipster coffeeshop, take a stroll along the Katy Trail, stop by on any weekday afternoon at Klyde Warren Park and ask passers-by where they are from. Chances are pretty good they'll say some place other than Dallas.
In March of this year, the U.S. Census Bureau sent out a press release claiming that 150,000 people had moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex over the past year. The past year. One year. More people relocated to DFW in 2017 than to any other metropolitan area in the United States. They came primarily from California, Florida, Illinois and New York (at least two came from Alabama), and they (likely) came because corporate relocated here. They touched down at DFW Airport – which occupies more square footage than the island of Manhattan (and has its own zip code) – and dispersed from there to Dallas, Tarrant or Collin counties.
The first time I touched down in Dallas – at Love Field – I couldn't determine whose skyline was whose. Is that Fort Worth? That's too close to be Fort Worth. Maybe it's Arlington? No, the stadia are in Arlington and I can't seem them. Oh, Irving. Wait, Irving is large enough to have a skyline? Well, I'll be damned – more people live in Irving than Birmingham, Ala. And more people live in Garland than Birmingham? What the hell is Garland, Texas? Is that its skyline? More people live in Fort Worth than Boston or San Francisco or Miami or Atlanta? How the hell is that possible?
So DFW is big and that's its appeal. It's big and getting bigger – like the Red Sox fanbase. Approximately half a million more people live in Dallas today than when J.R. got shot. People want to be part of something big. Corporations do, at least. But the cost of all this non-native immigration and relocation – aside from the insidious traffic – is that the history of our glowing city gets hazier as fewer transplants take the time to learn, absorb and understand it.
I can't abide this. When I took Strengths Finder back in 2011, my primary strength was revealed to be Context. I'm a 5 on the Enneagram. I'm ideally suited to be a bar trivia grandmaster. I could not relocate to one of the ten largest cities in the United States – a city where a president was shot and killed in cold blood, for God's sake – and not immerse myself in its context.
But what context? Hell, we don't even know where the name "Dallas" comes from! Ol' John Neely Bryan – who wound up in a lunatic asylum, don't you know (no, actually, you probably don't) – didn't leave any clues as to why the city of Dallas is called Dallas. That's a gap in the narrative, you could say. Our skyline – which was named world's best earlier this year by USA Today – is shiny and sparkly and comes at the expense of older, historical structures that, though they are not wrapped in programmable LED displays, had the benefit of historical significance. Now, they gone.
We've become the Frankfurt of Texas. We're built to perpetually serve the present, not to preserve the past. Houston has petrochemicals and NASA and the bayou and is the most diverse city in the United States. San Antonio is 300-ish years old and has a downtown river that is there every day (what?!) and the missions (Alamo!) and what not. Austin is the capital and has bats and Whole Foods' headquarters and assorted hippies. Fort Worth is quintessentially Texas with its stockyards and the big hats and all. Dallas is – well, the skyline is really sharp.
Hell, Lee Harvey Oswald himself relocated here from New Orleans.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is this: The best a transplant like me can do to soak up the history of their new city is find the answer to these questions: Who is (or was) the venerable local newspaper columnist? And have they pulled their favorite columns into some sort of book or database?
In Dallas the answers are "Steve Blow" and "yes, a book called 'Blow by Blow.'" It's a rabbit hole of Dallas history and a snapshot of life in Big D from the late 1980s through the end of the 1990s. Those were heady times to live in Dallas. The eponymous TV show was nearing the end of its long run. Robert Tilton was prophesying over in Farmers Branch. Jimmy Johnson was coaching the Cowboys (and winning Super Bowls on a regular basis). The city's tallest building had just been completed. Heady times indeed.
Blow, who had regrettably retired just a few years before our relocation, was indeed your prototypical, venerable newspaper columnist. (I know the type – I was a columnist of questionable venerability for a spell at an alt-weekly in Birmingham.) He's curious, soapbox-y, moralistic on occasion, highly contextual – but mostly curious. And a hell of a writer.
If you're a Dallas native (!) – I recommend "Blow by Blow" as fond, memory lane stroll. If you're new to town and tested out as highly contextual and a 5 on the Enneagram and a grandmaster at team trivia and you care about Dallas – you should definitely give it a read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review