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Rule’ Raga international Headquarters C9 Come Visit us for LUNCH! In addition to our organic coffee, pizzas, empanadas, pastries and pies, we now prepare made to order sandwiches, salads, and even black bean gazpacho. 3601 S. Congress off E. Alpine Penn Field under the water tower check our site for monthly calendar pretty, planned communitiesand to raise money. As Main writes, “[P]lanning consultants are far too polite and well trained to come right out and say what a city needs is fewer poor people and more people with a lot of money to spend.” Hence, the prevailing formula for implementing eminent domain. Bellow “blight:’ Bid “adios” to the lower class. Seduce the wealthy with buzz phrases like “urban renewal” and “revitalization:’ Watch the cash come. It’s a multitiered process for generating municipal revenue. To demonstrate, Main uses the Gore family and its legal fightwhich at times seems more akin to a barroom brawl. The Gores wanted to keep their waterfront land and keep running the Western Seafood business there. One moment, they were running a business on land that had been in the family for three generations, paying taxes, contributing to the community. The next, they found themselves trying to fend off a city council that had solicited a commercial developer to build a marina on their property. Main asks, and the Gores tell, how the American dream becomes a dystopia. When faced with eminent domain, the Gores had a choice, attack or acquiesce. After failed attempts to negotiate with the city and developer Hiram Walker Royall of Dallas, a descendent of the founder of Humble Oil, the Gores waded into the fight, taking the offensive by filing a countersuit against the city’s eminent domain proceeding. Main focuses extensively on the protagonists of this drama. The clan’s patriarch, Wright Winston “Pappy” Gore, was a self-reliant, self-made man who founded Western Seafood and made it a success. Growing up during the Depression, Pappy owned two pairs of overalls, one for weekdays and one for Sunday church. He lived in the fish house”a wooden structure that abutted the pier and wasn’t meant to be lived in”at river’s edge while building his business. As his family grew, he bought a trailer and parked it on the property. Running the business was life for Pappy and all the Gores. At 86, Pappy lay on his deathbed in a comfortable suburban home, unable or unwilling to succumb to death until he knew whether a court judgment would secure his family’s property rights. Isabel, the Gore matriarch, birthed babies, cleaned the docks, and deheaded shrimp, the quintessential multitasking woman. She was sufficiently no-nonsensical to manage a business and simultaneously nurture the Vietnamese trawlers who worked the river. They called her “Mama.” Isabel was life companion and business partner to Pappy, and later, a community leader. The local Chamber of Commerce named her Woman of the Year. Main repetitively mentions this award, as if to build some credibility for the Gores, to show that they were neither Freeport newcomers nor kooks hindering “progress” for personal gain. The Gores were just regular folks, except that they owned 330 feet of riverfront, land perfect for a private marina. Wright Jr. and Beth Gore, son and daughter-in-law to Pappy and Isabel, play a part in the story, but their son Wright III is the hero, the force behind the lawsuit. The reader sees the story from Wright III’s point of view. He’s part reactionary, gallantly dueling the city council, but mostly an unwitting and sympathetic, reg NOVEMBER 30, 2007 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 27