CAT-ELLITE NAVIGATION

Jack the well-traveled cat showed up like he owned the place.

Lanel Welsby, visiting from Colorado to get her mother’s Kessler Park house ready to put on the market, met him in the driveway.

“There was this cat that came running down the alley and meowing at us like he was our cat,” she says. “He wanted to eat. And we fed him packages of tuna salad. He ate three whole packages. But then he just wanted to hang out with us.”

They bought some cat food, and he kept hanging around. A week went by.

“Everybody was in love with him,” she says. “They were like, ‘he’s a great cat.’ ”

He must be somebody’s cat.

So they had his microchip scanned and found he belonged 20 miles away in Garland.

He had been missing for two years, and his family was devastated to lose him. Since then, they’d adopted two more cats and a dog.

How Jack spent those two years and how he covered so much ground is a mystery.

But when he arrived home, it was like no time was lost. Jack fit right in with the new pack and took up his same old sleeping spot at the foot of the bed.

“She had just been telling her husband that nobody had ever found Jack in all this time,” Welsby says. “She’d still been missing him all this time.

“It just seemed like he needed someone to help him find his way home.”

Dog On The Run

Life hasn’t always been so silly for Uma.

The 5-year-old greyhound had to work for her supper.

She ran 95 races in Florida from 2014-2016 as PJ Untitled.

George Baum of Oak Cliff took her in via the Greyhound Adoption League of Texas Inc.

“She is the sweetest, most loving dog you can imagine,” Baum says.

Uma joined Baum’s other dog, a mutt named Fizzy, who was given to a friend and then to Baum by an Oak Cliff family who could no longer care for her.

Senior Solvers

A few tech startups received help from Dallas ISD high school students in Oak Cliff who had internships with Capital One this summer.

They were given real challenges from startups including Doxa Collective, FactorZ, First Stream Clean and Bubbl . The students then worked together with Capital One mentors to find solutions.

Senior students from Sunset, Adamson and Kimball competed in a “Shark Tank”-style competition at the end of their internship on Aug. 10 to present their ideas.

The challenges included social media campaigns and mobile applications.

Brandon Parrish of Sunset said his project helped him feel more confident with digital skills.

“I’ve learned leadership skills and feel free to share my ideas,” he says.

The paid internship for a total of 90 students offered professional mentors who help with building professional skills and learning about college life.

Araceli Ramirez of Sunset says the internship helped her realize that she wants to be an entrepreneur.

“I’ve learned that it’s about how the customers feel, so you can learn from that and grow your company,” she says.

NO. 2 PENCILS, NO. 1 IN OUR HEARTS

City Plan Commission member Chad West rallied neighbors to raise dozens of boxes of school supplies for neighborhood elementary schools. The supplies were delivered to Hogg and Peeler elementary schools. The supply drive received help from the Rosemont Early Childhood PTA, Cooper’s Meat Market and Nice Ice Shop.

Bishop Barbers on West Jefferson also hosted a school-supply drive and back-to-school party on Aug. 12. The shop served hot dogs and nachos and gave free haircuts to dozens of Dallas ISD students.

Business Buzz

OAK CLIFF

Is A Beer Now

We’ve come a long way from dry Oak Cliff. Our neighborhood’s namesake brewery makes its debut this month. Oak Cliff Brewing Co. is the project of Oak Cliff native Joel Denton and partners, who built a brewery and taproom at Tyler Station. It is a 900-gallon capacity brewery on the second-story of a 100-year-old industrial building. It took 13 tons of structural steel to shore up the cavernous room that holds the brewhouse and its 10-ton tanks. “We knew coming in that it would be very challenging to put a brewery here,” Denton told the Advocate in December. Denton took up brewing in his garage in 2007, and he began winning home-brew competitions. Plans for a brewery started in 2015. The brewery is throwing a grand-opening celebration from noon-7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 1.

TEX-MEX FRO-YO

The Bishop Arts District recently attracted a couple of new ice cream shops, Azucar and Melt . Now comes a new frozen yogurt place specializing in flavors such as horchata and chile lime. Yaya Best Tex Mex Yogurt is taking a space at 408 N. Bishop Ave. Oak Cliff resident Ralph Isenberg is opening the shop with his wife, and they expect it to open in October.

A New Day For Wynnewood

The Wynnewood Village Shopping Center is finally having its moment of renewal. The shopping center’s owner, Brixmor Property Group, signed leases with a cinema and a gym. LA Fitness will build a 34,000-square-foot fitness facility near the entrance on Illinois Avenue, which Brixmoor is redesigning as the center’s main entrance. California-based Maya Cinemas is building a 73,000-square-foot “megaplex” with 14 screens at Wynnewood. It will be Maya Cinemas’ first Texas location.

NEWS & NOTES SEE YA, CARAWAY

Former Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway has a way of making headlines. He resigned from his spot representing Oak Cliff’s District 4 after pleading guilty to federal corruption charges last month. The plea, related to his illegally accepting about $400,000 from a City of Dallas vendor, means that he won’t serve more than seven years in federal prison. Here are five Dwaine Caraway moments worth remembering.

5. When he proposed a Dallas River Walk Dwaine Caraway has occasionally mentioned flooding main street to create a river walk Downtown. He wasn’t the first Dallas leader to do so (Ron Natinsky can be thanked for that), but Caraway thought Dallas could use a waterway lined with thematic restaurants and cafes just like San Antonio. “It may sound crazy, but it’s going to go down at some point,” he promised Dallas Observer.

4. When he gave a key to the city to Michael Vick Michael Vick was an amazing football player before and after he served 19 months in prison for his role in a dog-fighting ring. Caraway gave the Philadelphia Eagles’ then-quarterback a key to the city when he was in town for Super Bowl week in 2011. After that, Mayor Tom Leppert tried to restrict the ability of Council members to give out token keys. “We don’t condone it and clearly didn’t approve it,” Leppert told the Dallas Morning News of the Vick award. “It’s unfortunate, and I would rather have not seen the situation.”

3. When he tried to get the youths to pull their pants up In 2007, Caraway got together with some hip-hop artists and businessmen to launch Pull Your Pants Up, a campaign to get Dallas to keep its pants on its hips. He proposed an ordinance against sagging, but it wasn’t constitutionally viable. He didn’t give up, though. Dallas rapper Dooney wrote an anti-sagging song, and Caraway tried to relaunch the campaign in 2012. “You have some folks that don’t even have on underwear, period,” he told NPR.

2. When he tried to fight John Wiley Price at a Christian radio station No arrests were made, but when Caraway was running for Dallas County Commissioner in 2016 between stints on City Council, the two Oak Cliff leaders rumbled during a commercial break of a debate at KHVN, a gospel station. A third candidate began filming when the scuffle broke out, saying that Caraway threatened to kill Price, but Caraway says it was Price who was making death threats and grabbed him by the throat.

1. When he pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges Caraway admitted to accepting $450,000 in bribes and other gifts from two leading figures in the deal between the now-defunct Dallas County Schools and a company that built cameras to capture drivers who didn’t stop for school buses. In a letter addressed to the City Secretary, he wrote, “I have dedicated much of my life to serving others but have never claimed to be without sin. I am truly sorry that I must end my career as an elected official because I betrayed the public’s trust that I worked so very hard to earn.”

Bonus: When Caraway got Dallas to pay for a chicken restaurant. Caraway pushed for an $890,000 grant from the city to pay for a new restaurant for Rudy’s Chicken on Lancaster Avenue. But accepting the grant meant that the restaurant would move locations, something owner Rudolph Edwards didn’t want to happen. “I told [Caraway] I did not want my business on this lot … He did what he wanted to do,” Edwards told the Dallas Morning News.

—WILL MADDOX

By BRENT MCDOUGAL