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.
These type of stories leave me with mixed emotions. You have a building that fell into disrepair and a few people have a vision to bring it back to life. It happens. That’s great. Then another group wants to seize control of it and tells lies about those who brought the building back to life. Not good. Ideally there should be a polite meeting of the two groups to come to somekind of agreement. One with legal counsel on both sides to get something in writing. As you say, we no longer live in a polite society. Especially since the Covid era abuses and lies from 2020 to 2022. Almost nothing is considered unacceptable behavior any longer.
Wasn't that a TV show about JR Ewing? Maybe something in the water down there?