The Lewisville Texan Journal

"So You Think You Know Lewisville?" Trivia Contest - The Answers

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:00:00 -0100

200) this.width=200" />70) this.width=70" />By Brandon Cooper

Admittedly, my questions for the first-ever "So You Think You Know Lewisville" trivia contest were a bit too difficult. I deliberately made the questions "ungooglable", because I wanted to see if anyone would do the research legwork and find some unorthodox sources.

Apparently, nobody did. That's no big deal, though. A few people made an effort to look up the answers, so that's good enough for me. In case you were wondering, here they are, along with where you can find them yourself:

What was Lewisvilleâs property tax rate in 1936?

According to the Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide from 1936, the rate was set at 1.1%.

Bonus: What is it today?

The rate today is .44021%, which is one of the lowest rates in the metroplex. It's worth noting, however, that prior to around 1980 or so, properties were taxed at around 60% of their value, rather than the 100% we tax today. Lewisville's rate between 1978â1980 was 1.25%. By 1981, it had dropped to .75%; however, that number used the new 100% formula, which meant there really wasn't a change in how much people actually paid.

Enter the "So You Think You Know Lewisville?" Trivia Contest

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:50:00 -0100

300) this.width=300" />So you think you know the ins and outs of Lewisville, eh? Here's your chance to prove it. The Lewisville Texan Journal is hosting a trivia contest. The winner gets their own Mount Lewisville t-shirt (and acknowledgement of Grand Lewbah status, of course).

Oh, and did we mention you can still buy one of the shirts for just $10?

Each question is worth 10 points, and bonus points are worth one point each, for a maximum total score of 105. You donât have to get the original question right in order to get the bonus point, and partial credit may be awarded. Entries should be submitted via email to runfellow@gmail.com, and will be accepted until February 28. With the exception of anyone who might be an answer themselves, anyone may enter, including city employees.

What was Lewisvilleâs property tax rate in 1936? (Bonus: What is it today?)

What motto did the Lewisville Chamber of Commerce use to market the city in 1953?

What former president of the American Mathematical Society hailed from Lewisville?

What Lewisville resident wrote an open letter to Michael Jackson in 1988, convincing him to change the pricing system for tickets to his world tour?

Who was the richest man in Lewisville in 1940? (Bonus: How much was he worth?)

Who solved a major controversy in Lewisville when he visited Lewisville Lake between 1978 and 1980? (Bonus: What controversy did he solve?)

Who has received the most votes for Lewisville City Council since 2010? (Bonus: How many votes has that person received?)

What odd thing did city leaders propose for the countryâs bicentennial in 1976 that earned the title âBest Bicentennial Excessâ from Texas Monthly?

What individual performed just about every job in Lewisville (finances, maintenance, etc.) at various points between its inception and the 1970s?

Who is this guy? (Bonus: Why is he important to Lewisville?)

Some advice: It doesn't really make sense to post your answers in the comments, now does it? I suppose if you want to drop some hints here and there, though, we wouldn't mind.

Parallel Development: One Year Later

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:31:19 -0100

70) this.width=70" />By Brandon Cooper

A year ago today, on Lewisvilleâs previous birthday, I began writing a column titled Parallel Development about the history of this city. As I envisioned it, the series would cover Lewisvilleâs history as it related to contemporary issues. Over the past year, Iâve added a few infrequent columns about various issues, some more serious than others. During that time, my purpose has clearly changed.

I initially approached this task using that same tired line weâve heard from history teachers our entire lives: âThose who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.â Though the quote is often attributed to either George Santayana or Edmund Burke, the irony here is that there is no historical evidence that either man actually said it. Santayana perhaps gave us the closest version in The Life of Reason, Volume One, Chapter XII:
Quote:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

As I sifted through newspapers and documents long forgotten, I began to understand the difference between our commonly used aphorism and what Santayana actually refers to. His message in this context is not necessarily about societal progress through recalling historical events; rather, it regards personal progress as each individual matures through experience.

"Images of America: Flower Mound" Misses the Mark of History

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 02:16:40 -0100

70) this.width=70" />By Brandon Cooper300) this.width=300" />

Images of America: Flower Mound by Jimmy Ruth (J.R.) Hilliard Martin is, much like Robin Cole-Jettâs book about Lewisville published last year, about the history of smaller communities in North Texas that boomed in recent years to become their own metropoleis of sorts. The books share essentially the same basic structure: a few brief introductory paragraphs, followed mostly by archival photographs and captions. Thatâs about where the similarities end.

It shouldnât come as any surprise that local historians sometimes whitewash their communityâs history. To some extent, I expect that in something like the Images of America series. That said, Cole-Jettâs portrayal of Lewisville is perhaps the most trustworthy in-print source of information about the history of the city. It isnât perfect, but it makes for a great coffee table book. Better yet, itâs a great âglove compartment bookâ, something you can take with you around the city to compare photos with todayâs buildings.

Admittedly, Martinâs book, released late last month by Arcadia Publishers, had less history to cover; Flower Moundâs history as an incorporated community only goes back to 1961. What little history the town has, however, is barely covered in the bookâs 127 pages. Instead, the book is rife with random portraits of families, many of whom arenât even identified. The picturesâ captions are of little help to the reader, often listing countless names instead of providing context for the photographs. Additionally, the author ends many of the captions with what could only be pure speculation on her part; assumptions about the photographsâ subjectsâtheir feelings, preferences, and opinionsâpermeate almost every page.

The Potential Perils of Premeditated Progress

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 21:57:31 -0100

70) this.width=70" />By Brandon Cooper

For the last half century or so, Lewisvilleâs motto has been âgrow first and ask questions later.â The city has anticipated wild growth, and for the most part, we havenât been disappointed.

Like most cities, businesses, and awkwardly eager college students, Lewisville produces or revises a long-term âcomprehensive planâ every few years in an attempt to map out the cityâs potential, including areas of concern and population estimates. These are important; under- or overestimating growth can have serious consequences on a cityâs infrastructure that can last for decades.

By correlating our population growth rate with that of Dallas Countyâs in 1964, the consulting firm Henningson, Durham, and Richardson (now HDR, inc.) predicted in the 1964 General Development Plan that Lewisvilleâs population count would reach 25,000 by 1983. Sure enough, it reached 24,273 by 1980.

300) this.width=300" />But when the same firm returned to Lewisville in 1969 to write the 1971-1991 Comprehensive Plan, things were a little different. Despite their remarkable accuracy in the earlier plan, this time they used a more complex series of formulasâincluding various logarithmic, geometric, and arithmetic calculationsâto predict that the cityâs population count would hit at least 25,000 by 1980 and perhaps 60,000 by 1990. In 1976, the city even revised that estimate to 69,525. Even for a booming city like Lewisville, which had grown by around 150% every decade since Lewisville Lake was finished in the 1950s, it was an aggressive estimate to say the least.

By 1980, however, city leaders must have known that an average annual increase of over 3,000 people for 15 years wasnât feasible. The 1980-2000 Comprehensive Plan used a completely different formula to estimate population growth. Using then-unpublished census data, the city arrived at a much more modest prediction of 38,325 for 1990. Other sources also varied widely on their predictions. (See right.)

The population of Lewisville in 1990 turned out to be 46,521. Thatâs 23,004 less than the 1976 plan predicted and 8,196 more than the 1980 plan predicted. This raises two important questions: What caused everyone to change the predictions so drastically? and If the city still expected rapid growth, why did it lower the population estimate?

Shattered Ceiling: Lewisville's Working Women

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 03:55:06 -0100

Note: Parallel Development is a column by contributing writer Brandon Cooper about Lewisvilleâs rich (yet often untold) history and how it relates to the issues weâre facing today.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the New Deal in Lewisville and included some information on government employment that surprised even me. After going through the database I created again, a few more things caught my attention, this time regarding gender and employment.

It shouldnât come as any surprise that a gender gap exists here and elsewhere. According to the American Community Survey from the US Census Bureau, full-time working women made about 91% of what men made in Lewisville as of 2010. Thatâs actually not that bad compared to the statewide average: According to a 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics report (PDF, page 37), women in Texas made 84% of what men made in weekly pay; men averaged $714 per week and women averaged $611. Economists, statisticians, and sociologists have spent the last 40 years arguing about why this gender gap exists, but since thatâs not my field, Iâm not going to try to figure that out today.

But hereâs the interesting part: In 1939, female employees in Lewisville made about $16.42 per week ($257.60 in 2010 dollars), while male employees earned around $16.83 ($264.02 in 2010 dollars). Think about that for a moment: Women in Lewisville made almost 98% of what men made in average weekly pay in 1939.

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Tue, 29 May 2012 02:50:00 -0100

Duplicate post removed. See "That Old New Deal" here.

That Old New Deal

Tue, 29 May 2012 02:48:52 -0100

Many people assume that residents in this area have always favored a âsmall governmentâ political philosophy, especially regarding fiscal issues. Around election season, it seems as though local campaigns are often a competition between those who promise to do more with less and those who swear to do less with less.

Historically, though, Lewisville has not always been this way. The recently released 1940 United States census rolls paint a very different image of this city than the one we commonly hear. According to those records, which I have transcribed into a public database,* almost 30% of Lewisvilleâs workforce held government jobs in 1940:

Key:
oa = own account (business owners)
pw = private work (paid employees)
gw = government work

Letâs put this in perspective: Greeceâs government, often used as an example of a bloated bureaucracy, employed 15% of its workforce in 2008. Norway has the highest percentage, with 29.3% of its workforce government-employed. In 1940, Lewisville had a higher percentage of government employees than most of these âleftistâ governments today.

Forgotten History of the Black Community in Lewisville, Part 4: Progress

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:40:00 -0100

Note: Parallel Development is a column by contributing writer Brandon Cooper about Lewisvilleâs rich (yet often untold) history and how it relates to the issues weâre facing today. This entry is the final part of a four part series. The first part is here. The second part is here. The third part is here.

Quote:

[...]rather we should be content if we can furnish accounts that are inferior to none in likelihood, remembering that both I who speak and you who judge are but human creatures, so that it becomes us to accept the likely account of these matters and forbear to search beyond it.
-Plato, Timaeus

After Lewisville schools integrated in 1964, history got better for the black community in Lewisville, even if historians did not. Writers in Denton County, as they did elsewhere in the south during this period, frequently examined historical events from a defensive perspective, one that passive-aggressively attempted to "reclaim" history. In his otherwise well-researched History of Denton, Texas From Its Beginning to 1960 written in 1978, C.A. Bridges frequently refers to the Civil War as the "War for Southern Independence".

As mentioned in the last entry in this series, black residents were not counted as part of Lewisville in the 1940 census. This remained true for the 1950 census, and the 1960 edition only counted 74. The 1970 census included 504, and in 1973, Lewisville elected its first black councilmember, a clergyman named Lenard Levosha Woods. Today, L.L. Woods Park is named for Woods. Bobbie Mitchell, the first black mayor of Lewisville, was elected in 1993.

Forgotten History of the Black Community in Lewisville, Part 3: Perspective

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 04:10:09 -0100

Note: Parallel Development is a column by contributing writer Brandon Cooper about Lewisvilleâs rich (yet often untold) history and how it relates to the issues weâre facing today. This entry is the third in a four part series. The first part is here. The second part is here.

Quote:

No, I forgot that. I might remember that some day, but I donât want to to talk about that right now.
-Laura Butler White Lewis, responding to a question about the Ku Klux Klan in Lewisville, 1995.

Very often, the people at the heart of an important subject choose not to address it, which is understandable. But the kind of selective memory that often pervades local history only demeans their cause. After writing the first two installments of this series, I hit a wall. I found it hard to read about these things, and even harder to write about them, so it went on hiatus. This week, I received the impetus to continue the project: After 72 years in the vaults, the U.S. Census Department released every page of the 16th census from 1940. The first thing I did was look up Lewisvilleâs records.

The black community in Lewisville wasnât just considered second-class; it wasnât even considered part of the city. As I mentioned in the second part of this series, Lewisville excluded the part of town where the black community was forced to live, referred to as âScrougeout,â when it incorporated in 1925. For the 1940 census, that portion of the city was split into two enumeration districts, 61-16 and 61-17, described as âoutside Lewisville town.â The count of Lewisvilleâs enumeration district (61-15) became the official population of the city, which was set at 873. Thatâs the number repeated by most histories Iâve read, but since it only counts the âofficialâ residents (all 873 were white), it is completely erroneous.