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testors, however, believed neither Winfrey Point nor the rest of White Rock Lake Park needed improving. They seem to find the notion of “improving” nature insulting.

“If you read the press coverage from 2012, there’s a lot derisive statements by arboretum people, the theme of which is, ‘Our opponents don’t know what they’re talking about, and it’s really none of their business,’ ” Jung says.

“It’s an undercurrent of, ‘How dare you interfere with what we want to do? Don’t you know who we are?’ ”

‘MUCH MORE’ THAN A GARDEN

Current arboretum board chairman Bill Graue likes to point out that the arboretum has been the top Dallas attraction on customer review website tripadvisor.com for five years running. He pulls out his phone during the interview just to double check.

“No. 1 out of 110 Dallas attractions,” he confirms.

In recent years, “we really have vaulted into the group of premiere gardens in the nation,” one of only 14 in the “large garden” category, defined by a budget greater than $10 million. Officials from those 14 gardens recently convened at the arboretum and were given tours, one of which was led by Shivers. The president of another garden who was part of his tour later told Brinegar she would never let her board chairman lead garden tours because he didn’t have the competence to do so.

But that’s just the culture of the Dallas Arboretum, Shivers says. The directors know the gardens inside and out. They wear their nametags when they visit, answering tourists’ questions and picking up trash.

“You will not see litter because somebody with a nametag is going to spot it and jump on it,” Shivers says.

Compared to the nation’s other top gardens, the arboretum provides considerably more educational experiences for children, Graue says, and has much lower operating costs per visitor, even though it receives only a small fraction of what other gardens receive in taxpayer support — last year, Dallas contributed roughly $270,000 to the arboretum’s $18 million budget.

The city loves to praise the arboretum as its most successful public-private partner- ship, Shivers says, and he likes to needle, “Yeah, ’cause you don’t give us any money, and we give you all this.”

The arboretum staff and directors built their garden empire from the ground up. They see themselves as a flourishing nonprofit rather than a run-of-the-mill city park. They don’t understand why a beautiful landscape that receives international acclaim elicits complaints from its closest neighbors. Some directors attribute it to the not-in-my-backyard factor, or the fact that anything as prominent as the arboretum will have detractors.

They’re missing the point, Jung says.

Residents who take issue with the arboretum “want it to stay within its bounds that’s the big one — and to a smaller degree, they want it to be a different kind of arboretum than it is,” Jung says.

The arboretum isn’t a nature organization, Jung says; it’s an arts organization. He gives the analogy of attending a concert at a symphony hall versus sitting outside and listening to birds sing.

“What does the symphony do? Humans manipulate musical instruments to create a performance. What does the art museum do? It displays objects where humans have manipulated canvas or stone to create a performance,” Jung says.

“I think the arboretum is a society devoted to the human manipulation of nature.”

Before it was the Dallas Arboretum, the land was simply a city park. And not just any park but dozens of acres along the shore of White Rock Lake, long treasured as the city’s jewel. Dallasites could enjoy a picnic, toss a Frisbee, play catch and enjoy the view. Today, residents need to fork over $15 for admission and $15 for parking to visit arboretum land they technically own.

Perhaps the city’s contribution to the arboretum wouldn’t be so meager, Jung says, if it were a nature preserve or another not-so-highly cultivated place “where you weren’t constantly switching flowers out of flowerbeds and pitching tents for a festival and buying insurance for the Chihuly glass.”

Ultimately, the conflict lies with two groups of people whose perspective depends on whether they’re sitting inside or outside the fence. The grass is greener, the tulips or wildflowers prettier, on their respective sides. It’s been that way for 30 years.

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Brinegar knows she has some enemies around the lake. She makes no excuses, however, for what the arboretum has become. It was the city’s intent to have a “world-class” arboretum and botanical garden, and that’s exactly what she believes that she and others have built.

“There were people at that time who didn’t want us to be here. Life was great before it became this,” Brinegar says. “They have the right to that opinion. Some have changed that opinion because they didn’t know what we would be.”

Nevertheless, she says, “here we are, and our role in stewardship is to do the best job we possibly can to make it worthy of the city’s name, to gain national attention for our city, and to be the best of the best.

“A lot of people use the words ‘world class’ too quickly,” Brinegar says, “but we’re really working at that level.”

Shivers says people have started asking what the board will do when Brinegar eventually retires (no retirement is planned at this time, Brinegar says). Will the board hire someone from another garden?

Maybe, Shivers says.

“But we’ll probably be just as likely to hire someone from Disney or something like that — someone who knows how to run a public attraction.

“Because while we are a garden, we’re much more than that.”

TheDallas Arboretum is not often mentioned in the late Ralph Rogers’ extensive list of accomplishments.

Along with the acclaim he receives for founding Texas Industries (TXI) and saving PBS during the Nixon administration, Rogers also is credited with turning around both St. Mark’s School and the Dallas Symphony, turning Parkland Hospital into a top medical institution, and being instrumental in finding the cure for rheumatic fever, from which he almost died in his 30s.

The list goes on. People who knew Rogers describe him as an indomitable force who would not take “no” for an answer. It’s both the reason he was so successful in his many philanthropic endeavors, as well as the quality that garnered him enemies. As chairman of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society, a role that lasted only from 1984 to 1986, Rogers set the tone for the garden’s future and was the driving force in fundraising efforts.

There would be no Dallas Arboretum if it weren’t for Ralph Rogers, said the late Robert Hoffman in Rogers’ 1997 Dallas Morning News obituary. Hoffman succeeded Rogers as society chairman.

“He had a vision for the garden, and he understood and appreciated how important it could become for Dallas,” Hoffman said.

Rogers had two natural connections to the arboretum. He was an avid gardener (the garden at his summer home in Maine earned a gold medal from the Massachusetts Horticulture Society as the nation’s best) and his wife, Mary Nell, was Nell DeGolyer’s niece. The Rogers family temporarily lived with the DeGolyers in 1950, when they moved to Dallas.

It was Rogers who purchased the Camp estate on behalf of the society. He didn’t just hand it over, however; the society had to raise the money to pay for it. In a 1978 letter, thenDallas Park Board president Sid Stahl details a conversation in which Rogers tells Stahl “he felt that if he just gave the property to the Arboretum Society, the society would never do what it needs to do in order to get properly on its feet.” At that point, the city had terminated its contract with the society on the arboretum land because the society had failed to raise the contingent $200,000. Rogers’ purchase of the Camp estate, which the city had been hoping to add to its arboretum land, was a way to get the society back in the game as well as a carrot to dangle in front of the directors.

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During his years on the society board, Rogers helped raise $16 million in donations and pledges, half of which he personally solicited from Ross Perot (though $6 million of the $8 million never materialized). Then in the scuttle of the late ’80s, Rogers left the board.

“I feel very sad, because when they made me chairman, they did it not because of my horticultural ability; they thought I could raise enough money to make this dream come true,” Rogers said in a 1988 story in the Dallas Morning News former Sunday magazine, Dallas Life.

The arboretum survived without Rogers, but it wasn’t until 1996 that another visionary came along who would push the arboretum to greater heights. After cycling through four presidents in 12 years, the society board hired Dallas legacy Mary Brinegar, the granddaughter of Dallas Mayor R.L. Thornton, as the arboretum’s president and CEO.

Previous presidents had backgrounds in botany, engineering and business. Brinegar’s expertise was fundraising and managing nonprofits. She didn’t know much of anything about horticulture when she accepted the job, she says.

“When I came here, even the man who helped me with my garden was scared,” Brinegar says, laughing at the recollection. It didn’t matter. What she didn’t know, she was determined to learn from the garden’s experts. And what she quickly learned is that the arboretum lived and died by its annual Dallas Blooms festival.

“If we had a rainy Blooms, we were in trouble,” says current board chairman Bill Graue.

Brinegar set out to make the arboretum a year-round attraction. A prime example is that the autumn festival that featured the fickle chrysanthemum gave way to a village of pumpkins — a much more dependable and enduring plant that has made the Autumn at the Arboretum festival even more popular than Dallas Blooms.

Brinegar’s aim to make the arboretum “beautiful all year long” created a domino effect of more visitors, more members, more wedding and event bookings, more publicity and more donors. When Brinegar was hired, the arboretum wasn’t known to many people outside of our neighborhood, says Graue, who grew up down the street on Garland Road.

“People didn’t really want to go east of Central Expressway,” he says. “This was kind of a scary place for them. It really wasn’t scary, but it was difficult to get people to come over here. To a very large extent, we’ve given people a reason to see East Dallas. We’ve put East Dallas back on the map.”

The arboretum’s annual budget was roughly $3 million when Brinegar arrived. Nineteen years later, it’s $20.5 million. She attributes the success simply to quality.

“We know bad when we see it; we know exciting when we see it,” she says. “We’re not flip. We don’t do anything quickly here.

“If you wait around long enough, and you get it right, and the quality is just outstanding, people believe in you,” Brinegar says. “They renew their membership because it’s a place you can count on. It’s going to be impeccably clean and beautifully attended to.”

Her reputation among the staff and directors is someone who does everything with purpose and precision. They chuckle about receiving Brinegar’s middle-of-the-night emails and joke about the litmus test for new arboretum employees — take them into the arboretum’s Rosine Hall and ask them to “look around and tell me what Mary would see,” says longtime board member Brian Shivers. Brinegar would spot cobwebs in the corner, a light bulb out, a stain on the wall, “the little details, not just the big obvious stuff,” he says.

When asked directly about her accomplishments, Brinegar deflects the praise onto “the passionate love that people have for this garden and the way so many people have worked together to make it successful.”

Her board knows better.

She was hired the same year her cousin, R.L. “Bob” Thornton III, was elected chairman of the board and began leading the arboretum in restructuring efforts and in fundraising for the Trammel Crow Visitor Education Pavilion.

But Thornton’s most important legacy, Shivers believes, is Brinegar.

“Mary has really turned us all into grownups,” he says.

Brinegar has no plans to leave or retire in the near future, she says, as long as the board wants her to stay.

Graue is grateful she’s planning to stay: If the arboretum lost her, he says, “I’d be run out of the state.”

Streetcars were part of the development of early East Dallas

The first modern streetcars in Dallas are coming to Oak Cliff and Downtown this spring. But streetcars were a big part of the history of East Dallas.

When Munger Place and Junius Heights were built around the turn of the century when only a handful of automobiles were registered in the City of Dallas — they were high-end streetcar suburbs. The Junius line, an extension of the Elm line, opened in September 1906, before homes were built in Junius Heights. Businessmen could hop conveniently on the streetcar to the central business district instead of hooking up a horse and buggy.

The old streetcar system, with its headquarters at Peak and Elm, ran until the 1950s.

It began with mule-drawn cars in 1872, when Dallas was a dusty little village with board sidewalks and a creek running down Main Street.

The first car, painted yellow and white, was purchased by Capt. George M. Swink of 431 Bryan and was pulled by the Swink family’s white carriage horse, Sam. Eventually, Swink and his 19 partners (each had invested $500) installed two cars, the Belle Swink, named for his eldest daughter, and the John Neely Bryan, named for the founder of Dallas, who was still alive at the time.

By 1886 the system had 18 mules and nine cars. The following year, the streetcar system upgraded when a group of Oak Cliff businessmen started the Dallas-Oak Cliff Steam Railway.

Electric cars came just two years later.

The Sunset Hampton-Second Junius line traveled from Peak and Elm through Downtown to Oak Cliff. It was the last to operate.

Buses dominate

More than 300 streetcars were running in Dallas by 1936, but that’s also the year that bus service began. Although the first buses were uncomfortable and noisy, bus service outnumbered streetcars by the 1950s.

The Dallas Transit Co. bought 55 new buses for $1.25 million in 1956, adding to its nearly 400-bus fleet.

The transit company’s vice president, George I. Plummer, told the Dallas Morning News in January 1956: “I wouldn’t