Rachel Leah Siegel, Historian of Business in Dallas

Rachel Leah Siegel, of the Washington Post

Yale graduate Rachel Leah Siegel, while working as a reporter for the Washington Post, is also engaged in a gargantuan project that might take a lifetime to complete. She is chronicling in detail the history of business in Dallas, Texas.

A scion of the Lone Star State, Ms. Siegel grew up amidst the mesquite and oil derricks as a quiet and observant child. She looked on in wonder at the way businessmen ran things throughout the state, and was puzzled by the lack of women and non-Caucasian business leaders. As a teenager she vowed to dig deep into the red scrabble soil of Dallas to find out what made commerce tick in her neck of the woods. 

And so by day a mild mannered business reporter for the Washington Post; but by night a sleuthing juggernaut that rolls over all obfuscation and resistance as she rattles the skeletons in the Neiman Marcus closet, or inventories lenker rods at Elliot's Hardware. 

Her magnum opus, tentatively entitled "The Decline and Fall of Dallas Business", is now up to three hundred pages -- and has reached the year 1814, when one Athanase de Mezieres, a French soldier of fortune in the pay of the King of Spain, set up a flea market on the Trinity River. But since all he could attract were earwigs he soon retooled his business plan and opened a grit store. Settlers, stragglers, native Americans, and Mexican soldiers all needed plenty of grit to survive the broiling summers and soggy windy winters around Dallas, and so Mezieres' store prospered -- until it was overrun by the Caddo, who emptied all the grit into the river and forced Mezieres to construct a water slide for their children. The soldier-of-fortune-turned-entrepreneur died soon after of a broken heart.

Ms. Siegel likes to let off steam by occasionally dancing barefoot on a wooden floor sprinkled with Grape Nuts. She is also noted for her charity work with indentured denture wearers and parking meter addicts. Her favorite color is yesterday. 

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