Farewell, Fairfield Lake

Fairfield Lake State Park has been an oasis of tranquility in North Texas for the last 50-ish years.   With a 2400-acre lake, 126 campsites, ten miles of trails, piers, a group hall, an amphitheater, a bird-watching platform, lots of bathrooms and even a historic cemetery, there was something for almost everyone to enjoy.  In fact, over 80,000 people came to the park just last year.  They came to camp, hike, fish, geocache, sail, ride horses, or just sit back and listen to the sounds of the waves interrupted by the calls of dozens of birds.

Soon, though, chain-link fences will go up around the park, and the only sounds will be the rumble of bulldozers and the buzz of chainsaws, as the park is converted to an exclusive housing development. 

How did this happen?  

In 1969, a utility company built a dam on the Big Brown River, creating Fairfield Lake.  They leased 1460 acres to the State of Texas at no charge.  (Such arrangements are common, as the public recreation benefits help mitigate the environmental and economic effects of the land lost to the lake.)  Texas built the park, and for the next 50-ish years, power generation and camping coexisted peacefully, even symbiotically.  The lake, warmed by the power plant, became a haven for winter fishing, teeming with redfish, stripers, catfish, and largemouth bass. 

But the power plant closed in 2018, and the owner, Vistra, sold all of the property, including the park, to a developer. That’s when the public learned that the park exists under a lease that allows the owner to evict them with only 120 days notice—which they just did.  In just two weeks the park will close for good.

A few state officials made some efforts to buy the park property or even the whole parcel.  But the owners have no interest in that.  Not only will they make more money chopping it up into individual multimillion-dollar homesites, but the new gated, golf-course community can boast a private lake.  They don’t want ordinary riffraff like you and me gallivanting around their exclusive neighborhood.  The developer will undoubtedly appreciate the millions of dollars Texas taxpayers have invested building utilities, roads, bridges, drainage, docks, playgrounds and other improvements, which they now get for free.

Aside from a few officials associated with the park service or the local area, state leaders have ignored the issue with a thunderous silence.  No one in government dares speak up to protect the park, as that would go against two interests most Texas lawmakers hold sacred:  Private property rights and big energy companies.   Any effort to acquire privately owned land “for the people” could be portrayed as socialist, or even (gasp!) environmentalist —  political suicide in this ultraconservative state.  Heck, they might even encourage privatization of the state parks - economic development, yay!  I wrote to my state representative and senator, Craig Goldman and Phil King.  Neither bothered to reply.

Are the rest of our state parks safe?  The Dallas Morning News reported that 14 other state parks are also leased, meaning the landlord could potentially sell the land and evict them in a similar manner.  Leased parks include Cedar Hill, Lake Whitney, Lake Ray Roberts, Eisenhower, Lake Tawakoni, and Lake Whitney State Parks.  Each of these is within a two-hour drive from the DFW Metroplex, making them attractive targets for real estate developers.  I’m sure the precedent set by Fairfield Lake has left other developers foaming at the mouth to get their hands on other state parks. Do these parks have 120-day eviction clauses? We need to know.  We need to demand that our state officials to review those contracts now, and start making plans to ensure the remaining parks are protected in perpetuity.  Fairfield Lake is a harrowing cautionary tale of how badly these “public-private partnerships” can go awry.

     

A Farewell to Sears

Everyone loves Sears.  It’s an American icon who once used the tagline “Where America shops.”  When is the last time you shopped at Sears?

*crickets*

Exactly.

At one time, Sears commanded a vast retail empire that included some 3500 stores and a dizzying array of subsidiaries.  Sears created Allstate Insurance and the Discover Card, and bought many other companies, including Coldwell Banker Real Estate, Dean Witter Securities, Budget Car and Truck Rental, Pinstripes Petites, Western Auto, National Tire and Battery (NTB), Lands’ End and more.  Sears sold just about anything one could imagine - even actual houses as ready-to-build mail-order kits.

Through its correspondence school, the Sears Extension Institute, employees could take courses on dozens of topics including electrical wiring, salesmanship, and refrigerator repair.  Sears had a testing lab to study defective products, and a research lab to develop better paints.  Sears owned Chicago radio station WLS (“World’s Largest Store”) and its headquarters, the Sears Tower (now renamed the Willis Tower,) stood for two decades as the tallest building in the world.  At times in history, Sears has been the largest retailer and the largest employer in America.

And in a few days, it will likely begin liquidation proceedings.

I’m a little nostalgic because I grew up around Sears. I was the Sears Generation, and I’ve followed the sad saga of Sears unraveling over the last two decades. My mom spent hours shopping for Toughskins school clothes there while I munched on the incredible Sears popcorn.  Our house, like most middle-class American homes of the 1970s, was full of Sears appliances, Sears paint and deep shag Sears carpet.  We had a Sears fence, a Sears air conditioner and Sears towels. As kids, we eagerly awaited the Sears Christmas catalog (“Wish Book”) with its stunning assortment of toys.  

I even worked at Sears while I was in college. I dreamed of punching my time card in the tool department, a vast wonderland of amazing and innovative items.  Instead they stuck me in the linen section, where I spent countless hours folding thousands of towels, in the most boring job I ever held.  The only benefit:  My wife appreciates that I’m still the best towel-folder in the west.

Sears had the elegance of a fine department store, with real ceilings and carpet on the floors, with prices people could afford, and practical items people needed.  Our store manager, Mr. Arnold, ran a tight ship, making rounds, checking that everything was spit-and-polished, and pointing out the freshly painted walls.  “You won’t find fresh paint at Walmart,” he said with obvious pride.

But even as an employee in the late 1980s I could see Sears was falling behind.  The stores looked boring:  beige landscapes stuffed with equally dull merchandise.  As credit cards proliferated, Sears refused to sign on with the major credit cards, accepting only the Sears card and its home-grown Discover.   In this era before debit cards, checks remained a major method of payment. Most other stores accepted checks by comparing names and account numbers against a database of known bad-check writers, but Sears used a complex and irrational system based on the check number and whether the customer had a major credit card. Any check under $100 received almost no scrutiny, while checks over $100 required approval from a manager, a pointless and time-consuming hassle.  Customers couldn’t understand why they could use a Visa or MasterCard to write a check, but not to pay for their purchases.  Nor could they understand why it took 10 minutes to pay by check at Sears, while it took 10 seconds at Target.  The mighty Sears catalog didn’t even have a central phone number for ordering; instead, you had to call your local Sears store, during business hours, to place an order.

In one particularly impressive gaffe, Sears sent out a coupon for 15% off any regularly-priced item.  At the same time, they held a weekend sale event in which everything in the store was on sale.  That’s right, you couldn’t buy a single item with that coupon.

Sears failed to keep up with competition from big-box discounters like Walmart, Home Depot and Lowe’s, who offered a bigger selection, lower prices and a more streamlined shopping experience. 

Sears would have been perfectly poised to soar as Internet shopping started to take off.  With a vast catalog infrastructure integrated with a huge network of retail stores, a well-loved brand, and a mind-boggling selection of merchandise, Sears might well have become the world’s premier online merchant.  That is, if they hadn’t shut down the whole catalog business just before the rise of the Internet.  The decline of malls and the rise of online shopping only heaped more pain on the struggling behemoth.

The end of Sears began in 2004, when Kmart acquired the company.  The once-mighty World’s Largest Store was degraded to a Blue Light Special, purchased by another has-been retailer you probably thought didn’t even exist any more.  When was the last time you saw a Kmart?  Kmart has only one store in the entire state of Texas. (It’s in McAllen, if you were curious.  For comparison, Walmart has 408, up from 380 when I wrote the first draft of this article.)

Hedge-fund billionaire Eddie Lampert engineered the takeover and appointed himself CEO, in a completely hands-off role in which his only interaction with the company is periodically yelling at managers by video conference from his 288-foot yacht.  Lampert has kept Sears (barely) alive with huge personal loans, massive store closures and layoffs, and by selling off virtually everything Sears owned. Sears has sold or spun off all its associated companies.  Sears sold the Craftsman brand and is looking for buyers for the Kenmore and Diehard brands.  The company even sold all the real estate that houses its stores, so now it’s paying rent on space it used to own, a huge new expense. Quite simply, Sears has almost nothing left to sell at this point. Sears has been (unofficially) liquidating itself for the last 7 years, a truly amazing duration that only a company of its once-vast size and scope could accomplish.  

In the last few years I’ve occasionally visited a Sears store, when I felt like having a surreal experience.  I could stroll through huge expanses of empty space, look through half-empty shelves and merchandise piled on the floor, never interrupted by an employee attempting to help me.

In March 2017, even Sears finally admitted the inevitable.  After years of insisting that everything was just fine, the company quietly filed a routine government report with the statement “our historical operating results indicate substantial doubt exists related to the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”  Although company officials publicly continued to tout an imminent turnaround—Sears is going to displace Amazon any day now—it was obvious that after 7 years of straight losses, the end was at hand.  Which brings us to this week, when, according to media reports, Sears’ many creditors are pushing for a liquidation as the company scrambles to scrape up cash for its latest debt payment.

Sears won’t disappear entirely.  In the bankruptcy auction, someone will buy the rights to the name and operate an online store with it, hoping to attract nostalgic shoppers, just like its one-time archrival Montgomery Ward or the more recent Circuit City.  Stanley Black and Decker will still sell Craftsman tools, which are now showing up at Lowe’s and Ace Hardware.  New owners might pick up other strong brand names such as Kenmore and Diehard, and continue them at other stores.  But the Sears of our childhood will be gone forever - in fact, it already is.

10 Drugs That Aren't as Bad as You Think

Some drugs just sound wrong.  These 10 drugs tend to get a bad rap, but they have their merits.  Perhaps they're just misunderstood...

1.  Children’s Viagra – Okay, it’s actually called Revatio, but it’s just a liquid formulation of sildenafil, the very same drug found in the famous blue pill.  It’s used to treat pulmonary hypertension, a type of heart disease.  (Viagra was originally developed as a cardiac drug, until researchers noticed a certain side effect.)  Sorry kids, Revatio suspension is not currently available in the United States.

2.  Fentanyl lollipops – What better way to calm a fussy child than with a nice lolly laced with a narcotic 100 times as potent as morphine?  Actually, they’re plain white, called “lozenges” (but they’re on a stick) and they’re only approved to treat cancer pain in patients 16 years and older.  Distribution is very tightly regulated, and patients must receive extensive training on keeping them locked up and out of reach of children.

3.  Cocaine – Cocaine is an excellent topical anesthetic, and hospitals and dentists used to keep plenty on hand.  Today, we have many similar agents without the abuse potential – some, such as lidocaine, are even sold over-the-counter.  Pharmaceutical cocaine is still legal, but with all the permits, record keeping and security required, it’s seldom used in medicine.

4.  Marijuana – All the debate over legalizing medical marijuana overlooks the fact that a legal, FDA-approved “marijuana pill” has been available in all 50 states for many years.  Marinol (dronabinol) is a synthetic cannabinoid that works like marijuana.  Put that in your pipe and...oh, never mind.

5.  Warfarin – Would you like to take a drug originally used as a rat poison?  It’s so effective, virtually all rodent poisons on the market today are derivatives of warfarin.  Unlike prior rat poisons (think arsenic or strychnine), warfarin-like compounds kill slowly, and can be reversed by giving vitamin K, a lifesaving treatment in case of accidental ingestion.  But warfarin also prevents fatal blood clots, and it’s the most widely used anticoagulant (“blood thinner”) in the world. 

6.  Thalidomide – Giving this drug to pregnant women to treat morning sickness became one of the most tragic mistakes in the history of medicine.  Thalidomide causes severe birth defects, and horrific images of children with missing or deformed limbs led to sweeping changes in what was then a grossly inadequate drug regulation system.  However, if you’re not pregnant, thalidomide is actually beneficial in some devastating diseases, such as AIDS and leprosy.  It is now available to treat these conditions, with very strict oversight of prescribing and distribution.

7.  Cytoxan – Even the name of this early cancer chemotherapy drug, a distant relative of World War I chemical warfare agents, sounds toxic.  I imagine if it were developed today, the marketing department would name it something like “Sorbesse,” and it would have a pink logo showing a happy person surrounded by flowers.  Cyclophosphamide remains a staple in cancer treatment, and it’s one of few traditional chemotherapy drugs used to treat several noncancer conditions, including kidney disease and lupus.  It actually has relatively few side effects, especially at the lower doses used for non cancer conditions.  I will argue all day that it’s less toxic than prednisone, which is much more widely used to treat many of the same conditions.

8.  Clindamycin – In medical school, we were taught this drug was synonymous with a side effect called pseudomembranous colitis, due to a bacterium called Clostridium dificile.  We were led to think it would cause near-certain doom for any patient receiving it.  Actually, that side effect is rare, and can happen with any antibiotic, not just clindamycin.  This drug is superbly effective against a frightening superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA for short,) which is spreading like wildfire, and is impervious to most other antibiotics. MRSA is becoming so common that clindamycin is often the first choice for treatment of skin infections.  It’s also the drug of choice to treat invasive group A Streptococcus infections, better known as “flesh-eating bacteria.” 

9.  Phosphate supplements – For some reason, the FDA continues to churn out dire warnings about  over-the-counter phosphorus supplements, as if they actually existed.  Years ago, you could buy an oral sodium phosphate laxative (Fleets Phospho Soda) at any drugstore.  Then some doctors began prescribing massive overdoses of it as a bowel cleanout prior to endoscopies.  Many patients suffered serious effects, such as kidney failure, from this unapproved misuse of the drug.  The manufacturer, fearing lawsuits, pulled it off the market, even though the problems didn’t occur when it was used as directed.  Today, phosphorus supplements, even prescription forms, are almost impossible to find.  Patients with certain phosphate metabolism disorders who need these drugs struggle to obtain them.

10.  LSD – Lysergic acid diethylamide arguably has less toxicity, a low potential for violence, and a much lower risk of fatal overdose, compared to many common street drugs.  LSD or a derivative of it might have some potential for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, other psychiatric diseases or even autism.  Some studies in the 1960s showed promise, but they were not conducted using modern research techniques, so we can only view them as inconclusive. Proper research today is hindered by regulatory hurdles and the general stigma attached to the drug.