Saturday, August 20

            The July published Texas unemployment rate of 8.4% (the national average was 9.1%), as recorded by the Texas Workforce Commission was the highest it has been since July, 1987 when the state was gripped by a energy, banking and real estate crash.  I was in my second year of law school at SMU then and had moved to Dallas because of its entrepreneurial climate and go-go business attitude I had felt when visiting during the early eighties.  This is also when SMU’s football program was given the “death penalty” and for two years there was no football, a scandal that reached to then Governor Bill Clements, a SMU alumni and member of the school’s governing board.