When Ruthless People Try to Seize an Institution They Didn't Build: A Case Study

A portrait of ruthless people in Dallas who are trying to seize a flourishing community club that my father and his friend built.

In 2002, my father, Sam S. Leake, and his friend, John Mullin, hatched the plan to convert the old, abandoned, graffiti-defaced, and dilapidated filter building on White Rock The Filter Building on White Rock Lake (see images before conversion) into a world class rowing club.

They raised the money, oversaw the construction, and built the institution, thereby creating a flourishing rowing community in Dallas.

A few years later, a group of covetous parents, including a plaintiffs attorney, in my native town of Highland Park, decided THEY wanted the boat house for their rowing program.

These people joined forces with Chip Northrup -- an original donor to the project who apparently became unhappy with how the institution developed without his control -- and have been trying to seize control of the institution ever since.

On August 6, Dallas sports reporter and broadcaster, Richie Whitt, wrote a devastating portrait of this grasping coterie titled “DALLAS’ ROWING ROW: GOOD PARTNERS VS. BAD PEOPLE.

Whitt paints an ugly portrait of self-serving, egoistic, and ruthless people. He has also assembled solid documentary evidence that -- in addition to being shockingly rude--Chip Northrup is loose with the truth about himself and the facts of this saga, including his mischaracterization of my father as a former “Marine Corps drill instructor” (he was a Marine Corps helicopter crew chief).

To me, the story is an expression of a larger social and cultural development that I have observed since I graduated from Highland Park High School in 1989 -- namely, our society is conspicuously long on money, self-assertiveness, and striving, but increasingly short on class.

Click on the image below to read Whitt’s report.