does Superman call when he needs help?’

JEFF PHILLIPS: GONE 20 YEARS, THE TEXAS SKATE KING’S INFLUENCE IS UNDENIABLE

Over the unruly wildflowers and native grasses coloring the crest of Flag Pole Hill towers a thicket of century-old trees; if they could talk, they might tell tales of a boy in a man’s 6-foot-2 frame who loved to scale their trunks, perch in their loftiest limbs and look out across White Rock Lake at the Dallas skyline. They might spill dark secrets about the revered Lake Highlands High School alum — three-time national skateboarding champ, household name, cherished brother and son, animal lover, faithful friend — and why he shot himself in the head on Christmas morning in 1993.

That treehouse on Flag Pole Hill was Jeff’s cherished reprieve from a difficult world, says Jimmy Coleman — Jeff’s friend and erstwhile business partner — the one place he could go to quench his thirst for nature, but it was nondescript, “just a normal tree with some wood planks nailed in up high,” Coleman says.

If it’s still there (Coleman thinks it might be, although it’d be tough to find), rest assured no child can climb its rungs to perilous altitudes, because Jeff was precise regarding their placement — close enough for he and his friends to shinny up, but too far apart for little legs to reach a foothold. That’s the kind of guy he was, says East Dallas skater Woody Sigrist, who grew up skating at Jeff Phillips Skate Park.

“He cared about things like [children’s safety]. I didn’t have pads, couldn’t afford them, so he gave me some from his shop. That’s what I remember about Jeff.”

Coleman says he and Jeff and their buddies would hang out here, about a quartermile into the woods from, and 60-75 feet above, Jeff’s Flag Pole Hill abode, which was funded by cash competition prizes, sponsorships and sales of his Jeff Phillips signature boards, stickers, T-shirts and gear. On sturdy platforms, they drank beer and

It’s no secret that Phillips indulged — he once outperformed Tony Hawk, “The Birdman,” skateboarding’s biggest name, while under the influence of hallucinogens, according to lore.

“I don’t remember that specifically but it seems entirely possible,” Hawk says. “If Jeff stayed on his board, he was tough to beat, on or off drugs.”

The White Rock Valley rental was a cozy pale-charcoal bungalow with a carport where Jeff and live-in girlfriend Alison hosted barbecues and cohabitated with several snakes, a monitor lizard named Lurch, a three-horned chameleon, a few geckos, four cats and a freshwater eel. Jeff and Alison regularly attended herpetological society meetings.

Jeff considered buying the place, which also was chock full of models he loved to construct and weapons he collected.

Alison moved out in 1993, but she told Rolling Stone in ’94 that she and Jeff never officially broke up.

Unlike many of the era’s young skate stars, Jeff did not pilfer away his earnings. He invested in his dream, the Jeff Phillips Skate Park, which he bought in 1991.

Business stress along with Alison’s the era was the most awful time in history to try to earn a living through skateboarding.

“Skate parks were closing, skate companies were going under and vert skating, as Jeff and I were mostly known for, was considered dead,” Hawk says. “I had just started a family as all of this came crashing down, so financial pressure was everpresent.”

Jeff started skateboarding when he was 10. Bill Dempsey, a classmate at Lake Highlands Junior High, remembers his friend as a kindred spirit, a fellow daredevil who loved flying through the air, up and over ramps, hanging at Wizards Skate Park, then located near the DallasRichardson border.

Wizards, by the way, was the worst of the worst parks, according to Dallas’ Guapo Skate Park proprietor Al Coker, who also owned Dallas’ first skate shop at Valley View Mall in the ‘80s. That he could skate the “awful” Wizards is a “testament to how physically talented Jeff was,” Coker deadpans.

This past spring, just before Guapo closed its South Side location (Coker plans to reopen elsewhere soon) many of Jeff’s old friends gathered and reminisced about him.

Charismatic, kind, generous, men to tears.

Hawk, speaking from California, says he first met Jeff at a competition in Del Mar, Calif., and “liked him a lot because he was clearly having fun and didn’t care about the contest element so much.”

“God, Jeff was smart,” Dempsey recalls. “You had to be to gauge some of the things he attempted.”

A guy once badly injured himself following teenaged Jeff’s lead.

“At Wizard’s there was this snake run, and Jeff gets this idea, instead of going the way its meant to be, why don’t we drop into the end? Well the end is like a crazy straight-up wall that launches you up in mid air, and it’s impossible. Just take my word. Impossible. But he goes, ‘No, I’ve figured it out.’”

An older guy there thought Jeff and Bill were little punks, and after witnessing Jeff pull off this move, he tried it,” Dempsey says. “He left in an ambulance that day. We heard later he’d busted his spleen. We never saw the dude again.”

To further illustrate Jeff’s unique skill, Dempsey pulls forth a black and white photo of himself, on his board, jumping a ramp. (See it on p. 28).

“That’s taken in Lake Highlands by our friend Gina Natho, for photography class. This picture of me, I am so proud of. You do not understand how many takes it took to catch me looking like this,” he says. “It wasn’t that way for Jeff. Everything he did was right. Every shot perfect, just like another day at the office.”

Though they had drifted apart once the fame began to escalate, Dempsey says he quit skating for 30 years in the mid ‘90s, following Jeff’s death.

“Hard for me to articulate, but I couldn’t look at a skateboard without feeling overwhelmingly sad,” Dempsey says.

“He was all power. He shook the ramp and made it feel like thunder,” Coker recalls. He stops mid-sentence when he sees a guy perform a Phillips 66. “There it is,” Coker says. After building up speed driving back and forth in the half pipe, the skater rides backward to the lip of the bowl where he plants a hand, swings his body upside down, twists all the way around and drops back into the bowl — a difficult maneuver that Jeff invented and few skaters attempt.

Everybody at the park talks about

Texas skaters and their reputation.

From afar, Hawk confirms. “‘F-you, we’re from Texas,’ pretty much sums it up. Jeff was Texan to the core.”

It’s almost impossible to imagine that this guy frequently referred to as a god and legend — who periodically graced the cover of Thrasher magazine, who appeared in dozens of advertisements and whose name alone was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000 a year by age 19 — was a virtual pariah when he started high school in 1980.

“Being a skater at a Dallas high school then meant being a distinct minority, being vilified by jocks and rednecks, as well as by parents,” wrote Peter Wilkinson in a 1994 article for Rolling Stone. “‘What are you going to do with that toy in class?’ football players asked skaters in the hall at Lake Highlands High School. Reveling in their new private rebellion, they vowed to skate forever.”

Jeff, his dad Charles, mom Hilda and older sister Kathy moved to Dallas after several years living in Asia.

Around the time Jeff began renting his house, his White Rock neighborhood was plagued by a series of driveway robberies, according to Rolling Stone, which cites the crimes as part of the reason Jeff bought a gun, to “keep at home for protection.”

A typical Texan, the article continues, Jeff had an affinity for guns and knives. In the summer before his death, the story goes, his infatuation increased, and he attended 20 gun shows in just a few months.

High school attitudes nonwithstanding, the ‘80s was skateboarding’s big boom. Skate culture flourished around the country and Jeff was a king. “I definitely took inspiration from him,” says Hawk, “and wished I had a style as smooth as his.”

For a while Jeff tried to attend Richland College, to appease his mom, but she told Rolling Stone that school was hopeless. “Skating was his life and he never outgrew it. He got hurt so many times it was ridiculous. Even after major surgery he’d get back up on that damn board,” she said in 1994.

His cohort Coleman came in to help run his 13,160-square-foot Northwest Dallas skate park. Despite support from friends and fellow pros like Hawk — who calls Jeff’s park “one of the few places I looked forward to skating on the first Birdhouse tours,” — by 1993, in the days leading up to Jeff’s suicide, they were meeting with parties interested in taking over, Coleman says. He thinks the suicide was a bad, split-second decision, which Jeff would have badly regretted.

“We all do these stupid things, especially when we’re drinking or whatever, and he just did the one dumb thing he can never take back.”

Coleman adds that one of the saddest realizations is that just a year or so later, X Games and extreme sports rose to popularity; it’s

“Who does Superman call when he has issues?”

Jeff and some friends spent the day before Christmas 1993 at just before Hilda came careening up the driveway.

“Nobody’s been able to get ahold of Jeff ...” Hilda clipped, mid-stride. Walgren tried to hold her, begging her not to go inside, but Hilda barreled past those struggling to restrain her, making a beeline for her son’s body and screaming, “Let me help him!”

Jeff was buried at Restland Memorial, in the Lake Highlands area, but a few years ago, after the site attracted too many visitors — fans piling skateboard wheels and plastic toys upon his grave — Jeff’s family moved him to an undisclosed location, his friends say.

The questions are unending: Why and how and what if? One thing all his friends seem sure of is that Jeff, if still alive, would be right out here with the so-called Old Man Skate Cartel.

“He’d love this,” Dempsey says, looking around Guapo Skate Park — crowded with skaters who are black, brown and white, clean-cut and dreadlocked, aged 8 to 65 — on its bittersweet closing day.

Greenville, according to the Rolling been treated if he’d grown up today.

“Medicated, maybe he’d still be alive. It’s pure speculation on my part, but I think it could’ve been different,” Coker says. “I was sad. He was a kid I had very fond memories of.”

Hawk says he wishes Jeff had “found a way to stay positive in those dark times. It would be incredible to see him at the ‘legends’ events that have gained so much reverence in recent years.” house in Lochwood, and he didn’t seem particularly drunk or despondent. He had dinner with his folks and sister, her children and husband. Kathy told Rolling Stone it was basically their happiest-ever Christmas dinner.

Dempsey says he understands how bad it hurts to have something you love become the source of stress. He adds that Jeff was such a hero to all that he might have felt he had nowhere to go with his problems.

But at 2:45 a.m. Jeff went home — reportedly the first time in eight years he did not spend Christmas Eve at his parents’ place.

His neighbor Judy Walgren discovered him on Christmas afternoon, sitting on his bed, slumped over, the .357 Magnum revolver near his body.

Some other neighbors helped break into the house, and they reportedly were all praying together

Most of these same people will gather together again later this summer for the annual Jeff Phillips tribute, which originated in 2011 and has drawn such celebrities as Christian Hosoi and Craig Johnson. Hilda and Kathy, Jeff’s mom and sister, both have attended the event, Coleman notes, a fact that initially shocked him, he says, and tugs at his heartstrings. They participated after 2014, when it became a fundraiser for the Suicide and Crisis Center of North Dallas. Through these get-togethers, as Woody puts it, “We keep his stoke going.”

(Visit advocatemag.com for updates on the tribute event.)

THE ODDSONS: NATURAL BEAUTY LIVES ON IN THE HEART OF LAKE HIGHLANDS THANKS TO THEM

Amid bundles of apartments, upscale subdivisions, a busy high school and emerging new developments such as the Lake Highlands Town Center lies a pastoral 14-acre remnant of Lake Highlands’ past.

Tinted by the rose-colored lens of time, many Lake Highlands natives associate the land with a childhood paradise.

They recall the green pastures, owned by the Oddson family, teeming with laughing children on recreational trips through fragrant pastures, drawn by horse or tractor.

“They gave rides through the park all the way to Flag Pole Hill,” recalls Harold Timm, a 1964 Lake Highlands graduate. His best buddy was Texas Oddson Jr., better known as “Scooter.”

“Everyone knew who the Oddsons were in those days,” Timm says.

The Oddson family patriarch founded White Rock Stables in ’48.

That was Scooter’s father, also a Texas, or “Tex.”

He was a genuine horse whisperer, the lore goes, who learned his trade from Minnesota cowboys, gravitated to Dallas/Fort Worth at 16, and made his early living training thoroughbreds at Arlington Downs racetrack in Fort Worth. Later, generations of White Rock area children learned to ride horses under Tex’s tutelage.

No one knows how the son of Norwegian immigrants came to be named Tex, his son told the Dallas Morning News in ‘94. “Texas was his destiny,” he supposed.

His time in Lake Highlands began with a training gig at long-gone stables located where the Moss Creek neighborhood now stands.

“He was a real man of the West. A real icon,” his attorney William P. Davis told the Dallas Morning News in ‘94. He worked miracles with the horses, he said.

“He could get on a troubled horse and the horse’s ears would come up, and the horse knew he’d met his match.”

Oddson had a saying that stuck with his students: “The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.”

The obit mentions that the elder Oddson holds a jumping record, to this day, set on a horse that supposedly was no jumper.

Scooter and his brother Terry had it a bit tougher than the neighborhood kids who came for riding lessons and horse-drawn treks. “Growing up I had a lot of work,” Scooter told the White Rock Weekly in 2010. “My brother and I worked seven days a week when we weren’t in school. We worked with the horses, maintained the barn, the fences and we mowed the grass … and unlike many homes in the White Rock neighborhoods of the day, we did not have air conditioning.”

Still it was a fantastic upbringing, he recalled.

Timm remembers Scooter’s mom, Louise McCamy Oddson, especially fondly.

“Ms. Oddson was a wonderful cook, a wonderful mother to all the kids in the neighborhood,” he says. “They were a real family to everyone. They went out of their way to remembers kids’ birthdays, things like that, would talk to kids having problems, just being like a second family.”

Scooter was a loyal, if polarizing, companion, Timm says. “Yes, you could say he taught me to ride,” he in the jungle for six weeks before he could escape,” Timm says.

He came home to a marriage and family, but post-war trauma got to him, Timm believes.

Timm doesn’t want to say why, exactly, on record, though he understands it, but in those years, Scooter forgot Timm. Literally, he could not remember his childhood pal, according to Timm.

“I lost my best friend in Vietnam,” says Timm, who is now married to a fellow LHHS alum and living in Clearwater, Fla.

But Scooter ostensibly recovered, and when his father died, he took over operations at the stables, to his obituary, published in February swath of natural beauty in a rapidly developing area is often used in commercial photo shoots — Neiman Marcus, Anthropology and Children’s Hospital are among recent companies who have shot ads on the land.

“My intent and purpose,” Facchiano says, “is to keep the property intact and help ensure that the legacy of this family lives on.”

JOHN LABELLA: A BELOVED VOICE WAS SUDDENLY SILENCED

The first time Dallasites missed John LaBella was in early April, 1986, when he left his job as radio DJ at KZEW 98 FM, the Zoo, that hard-rocking station whose logo’s blue wings and gold lettering — once plastered on bumpers and T-shirts aplenty — is forever emblazoned on many a middle-aged mind. “His departure marks the end of an era,” lamented the local press who covered LaBella’s April 2 going-away party. He and Zoo co-host John Rody wore matching pink tuxedos that night — a decade later a similar bit featuring Jeff Daniels and Jim Carey in “Dumb and Dumber” would garner giggles galore. Like many pranks, jokes and ironies of the past couple decades, these guys did it first.

preceded him in death,” according to the obit.

Today, Scooter’s brother Terry, a doctor who lives between Dallas and property in Little Rock, Ark., owns White Rock Stables.

Granddaughter Amelita Facchiano says she’s made it her life’s mission to maintain the acreage in its current form, seeking historical designation if necessary, she says.

Though horse-drawn rides and lessons are no longer part of the program (insurance to do such things these days runs about $150,000 a year, Facchiano says), the stables still board and care for more than 20 horses. The property itself, a rare

In their initial two years at the station “they became the most listened to rock ‘n’ roll morning show in the entire Southwest,” noted a TV reporter in 1982, who gushed about their unique brand of “banter and repartee.”

Twenty years later, LaBella had evolved into a permanent auditory fixture in the lives of many, though he spread his wit, wisdom and broadcasting acumen around. There were FM stations KZPS, KRRW, KBFB and, finally, KMEO, Memories 96.7, which he helped launch in 1998.

It was while driving home from his shift there that, at age 52, LaBella’s ubiquitous voice was forever quieted.

A freak accident March 4, 2002 on Interstate 30 left his family, friends and fans devastated. LaBella died instantly when a piece of a forklift fell from a truck into oncoming traffic, striking his car.

Radio personality Mike Rhyner, founder of KTCK The Ticket, played the yuk-monkey role supporting LaBella and Rody at the Zoo.

LaBella’s death sickened him, he says.

“That something like that would happen to him, of all of us, it was nearly impossible to wrap our heads around,” Rhyner says. “He was a sweet, gentle guy. Can’t think of a person who didn’t like him. He held no ill thoughts toward anyone. He was private, he probably did very well financially but you wouldn’t know it he lived in one bedroom on Melody Lane and drove a red Volkswagen. A couple margaritas would have been an indulgence for him.”

The 1980s media called LaBella and Rody “irreverent underdogs” a title that can easily be used to describe the talent at The Ticket, whose cheeky humor is clearly a nod to the old Zoo hosts.

“There is no doubt working with him and Rody had a tremendous influence on what I think of this business. I cannot attempt to explain the impact they had on me and how I looked to [John as an example of] what we all are supposed to do,” Rhyner says. “He was the consummate professional radio announcer, he did a super job and sounded great doing it.”

Residents of Lake Highlands, the neighborhood where LaBella and his family lived before his death, remember waking up with him.

“He came out of my radio every morning,” notes Scott Johnson.

And others knew him as a fellow parent at White Rock Elementary.

“I used to talk to him while we waited for our daughters to get out of school for the day,” Susie Logee Dale recalls. “He was so humble, I didn’t know who he was until my husband told me. When I mentioned this to John he said, ‘Yes, I’ve done a little radio work.’ But he was a genuine Dallas phenomenon at one time.”

The inadequately licensed truck operator responsible for LaBella’s death pleaded guilty later that year to criminally negligent homicide, stating publicly that he was “devastated” about the accident.

“I don’t know how to describe it — it’s unbelievable,” he told the Dallas Morning News in December 2002.

Everyone who was anyone in Dallas radio attended LaBella’s funeral, Rhyner says.

“People cast aside their grievances and there were some major grievances, we are talking some extreme, outsized personalities in this business — for that day,” he says. “It was one of the few things that brought everyone together.”

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