Media News
Wick Allison, founder of Dallas' monthly D magazine, dies at 72
Wick Allison, founder and chairman of D Magazine, Dallas' city monthly, died on September 1 after a long battle with bladder cancer. He was 72.
According to a post on D's FrontBurner, Allison died at a fishing camp in upstate New York that he visited every summer, surrounded by his wife Christine and four daughters, Gillea, Maisie, Chrissie, and Loddie.
Lodowick Brodie Cobb Allison was born in Dallas in 1948, graduated from UT Austin, and served in the Army. He founded D Magazine in 1974.
In the '80s, he sold the magazine and moved to New York, where he founded another magazine called Art & Antiques, and was editor of the National Review. He returned to Dallas and bought back the magazine in 1995.
He also co-founded Coalition For a New Dallas, a group that initially formed to advocate for the removal of I-345, the freeway that separates downtown from Deep Ellum, but whose greater goal is to remove barriers that reinforce segregation and stifle economic opportunity, and to reduce the primacy of the automobile by encouraging more choices in mobility.
The FrontBurner post says that "if there was a journey to be undertaken, Wick got it started with a kick in the ass and head-back cackle laugh that until recently echoed through the office of D Magazine. He was a mercurial genius. He was a bully. He was loud. He knew the answer before you did. He made things happen through a force of will that generated its own gravity and drew people to him."
The post says that Allison was diagnosed with bladder cancer about a decade ago, but continued to work on issues that were important to him including city and DART projects.
There are no funeral plans, but donations can be made to the St. Vincent de Paul Society at Holy Trinity Church.
