Jim Schutze, the legendary city columnist for the Dallas Observer, announced Monday he’s leaving the paper.
“My 22-year career with New Times, now erroneously called Voice Media Group (as if), comes to an end today by mutual cordial agreement that they told me about this morning,” Schutze wrote on Facebook with his signature snark.
Schutze was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald in the 1980s and wrote about this city’s struggle with race in his book, “The Accommodation.” Over his career, he wrote about every corner of town. Here are four times he focused on our neighborhood.
- In May 2017, Schutze weighed in on the school board runoff election between Dustin Marshall and Lori Kirkpatrick. He made his position clear. “Marshall has ideas and programs he helped put in place for saving the lives of lost children,” he wrote. “A vote for Kirkpatrick is an endorsement of sleazy campaigning, but far worse, it’s a vote to abandon school reform.”
- In April 2014, Schutze defended White Rock Lake activists who opposed commercial interests. “The people who love and defend White Rock Lake Park are not idiots and nutcases,” he wrote. “The people who wanted to build a parking lot at Winfrey Point were the idiots and the nutcases…The friends of White Rock Lake never sleep. They see you coming. And they are street fighters.”
- In January 2019, Schutze wrote about neighborhood gardener extraordinaire Mariana Greene, who also happens to be his wife. Greene is known as a pioneer in urban chicken keeping. In his column, Schutze wrote about the time he came home to find his wife sampling mouthfuls of dried mealworms to feed to the chickens. Turns out, she was just toasting almond slivers for a salad. But his concern shows just how far Greene might go to pamper her pets.
- In April, Schutze grieved the death of his neighbor, Thomas Hogue, who was found dead in his home on Bryan Parkway earlier that month. Hogue died amid the coronavirus pandemic, but testing of his body showed he didn’t have COVID-19. Schutze wrote, “Our grief for Tommy would have been simple and pure, had it not been for the virus. His family insisted on a test not to satisfy their own curiosity but out of concern for the neighborhood. The test itself, then, was the perfect way to honor and commemorate the life he lived among us.”
