Dallas / Fort Worth and Me

Mmmm, good barbecue. Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has become a Dallas tradition, for all that it’s spread to other parts of the country as well these days. The Dickey’s Barbecue empire began here with a single store in 1941, and in fact that first store on Knox/Henderson in downtown Dallas is still open, original building and all. My understanding is that the chain took a while to get started; it didn’t expand to three stores until 1969, back when I was three. After about 1971, the rise was pretty much meteoric.*

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In keeping with the culinary trend I set with the last entry,* in this exciting episode I’m going to sing the praises of one of my favorite local restaurant chains. If you like burgers you can’t do much better than Scotty P’s, and I know I’m not the only one with that opinion. They regularly win rewards for the best burgers in town, whichever town a particular restaurant happens to be in. 

Scotty P’s named for Scotty Pontikes, the gentleman who launched his first restaurant in Plano in the 1990s.  Since then, the chain has spread to Frisco, Allen, McKinney, Dallas, and Garland. While they’ve opened only seven stores so far, they’re well worth seeking out. The burgers are just that good, and so is the service.

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If you head over to West Dallas, off Olive Street, you’ll find an interesting place called Victory Park. It’s only a few years old, but it’s definitely worth visiting when you’re in town. Not only does Channel 8, WFAA-TV, maintain a broadcasting studio there — with glass walls, so you can gawk at the local news personalities as they work — but American Airlines Center, our newest and most expensive sports stadium, anchors the far end. 

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Addison is a relatively small town imbedded deep within Dallas County. It’s all city, more or less; the only way you can tell when you’ve crossed over from Dallas or Richardson or wherever is when you see the street signs, which are all labeled Addison! in flowing script. I used to work there  once upon a time, and I’ve gone to quite a few events in this little “Mid-City”, as we call the prosperous burgs between Dallas and Forth Worth.

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There was a time — up until last year, actually — that Garland was well known in the area for its extravagant, multi-day Star Spangled Fourth celebration. It used to be three days of festivities scattered over several venues, including the Old Downtown, and the city went all out to support it. As you may have gathered from my groans in several previous entries, however, those days are past. This year, the SSF was diminished to one location, one day: July 4 itself, at the sprawling shopping center called Firewheel on the north side of town, nearly in the neighboring city of Sachse. While I’ve made no bones about the fact that this annoys me — I used to own a business in that now-ignored Old Downtown — I guess I shouldn’t blame the city too much. They’re probably under a budgetary crunch in these days of $4 gas and mortgage meltdowns, and Firewheel has got to bring in substantially more tax money than the Old Downtown does. Heck, the Barnes and Noble alone probably does that.

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In Part I of this exciting episode, I introduced you to my favorite state park: Dinosaur Valley, which is located just outside the town of Glen Rose, fifty miles southwest of the DFW metroplex.  Not only can you camp, hike, and ride horses here, you can also enjoy the current wildlife, and look for traces of wildlife more than 100 million years dead — the dinosaurs of the park’s name. The park offers three specific areas where you can view dinosaur tracks impressed in the mudstone eroding out of the riverbed. It costs $5 each for adults over 12 to get in; kids are free.

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Happy anniversary, Constant Reader! I started writing this blog on June 29, 2007, and this is my 101st post. That’s a lot of writing, when you come to think about it, especially almost all my posts have exceed 500 words — often by a good bit. So let’s see; assuming I’ve written something like 800 words for each of those entries, that’s about 80,000. Zounds! As they say, words fly when you’re havin’ fun.

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