Here are the stories on Texas Standard for Tuesday, May 4, 2021.
It’s the final month of the 87th Texas legislative session. It’s been a historic year for state lawmakers, including the first global pandemic since 1918 and a deadly winter storm that exposed massive failures in our state’s electrical grid. Where do Texans stand when it comes to how the state and its elected leaders handled these issues? New polling data from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas is giving us a glimpse. Here to tell us more is its director, Jim Henson.
Houston is known as an affordable place to live, with home prices below the national average. But as Houston Public Media’s Florian Martin reports, prices have grown so fast recently, it’s becoming more challenging for Houstonians to afford their dream home.
Scouting Court of Honor Ceremony
Roughly a thousand girls have made history this year by becoming the first in the nation to earn the rank of Eagle Scout through the Boy Scouts of America. KERA’s Bekah Morr has been following a few young women from North Texas who received their Eagle Scout rank this week.
Melba Huber: Texas Dancer’s Legacy
Some teachers leave a lasting impression on their students. When asked to describe their former dance teacher Melba Huber, students described her as “a magnificent force,” “monolithic” and “like Dumbledore in Harry Potter.” Huber’s life took her from Beaumont to Broadway to the Rio Grande Valley, where she founded her dance school in 1958. She died this past week at 93. Here to tell us more about her legacy is Colleen Guzman, who wrote about Huber for the McAllen Monitor.
The pandemic has changed the way many of us eat. Restaurants were hard-hit by shutdowns and some closed permanently. A lot of us started doing more cooking at home and even started experimenting with techniques like bread-making – in part due to early shortages at the grocery store. It was a big change for Leslie Brenner, who spent a good portion of her career as a restaurant critic for The Dallas Morning News. She now focuses primarily on her web site “Cooks Without Borders,” which is nominated for a prestigious Webby award. We’ll hear from her today.
The Standard lacks sufficient time to lay out the entire saga of Lubbock’s Reagor Dykes Auto Group; it’s a long story, filled with murky details and convoluted legal wranglings. But the broad strokes are these: in the summer of 2018, the Ford Motor Credit Company sued Reagor Dykes, claiming that the dealer owed Ford over $100 million. The next day, Reagor Dykes filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That was the end of the dealership – but the start of the legal troubles for some of its associates. Sarah Self-Walbrick, senior reporter for Texas Tech Public Media in Lubbock, joins us with the details.
All this and Texas News Roundup, plus Social Media Editor Wells Dunbar with the talk of Texas.
