ONE WAY TICKET TO PARADISE

It strikes us all sooner or later. We may be enchanted by our spouses, delighted by our friends, satisfied with our jobs and our slow-but safe-progress through life. Sure, we feel the ruts where others have walked, but most of the time we’re glad to know that someone else has passed this way before. And still it strikes. Call it wanderlust, the road not taken. One slate-gray February day you’re driving to work, barely conscious of turns you’ve taken hundreds of times. Then comes the thought, too strong this time to push away. What if…? What if you’d taken that job in Boston? Stayed in Germany after the service? Gotten in on that crazy scheme to open a bar in Honolulu? What if…Paris instead of Dallas? Or Oslo, Nairobi, Naples, Natchitoches-almost any there instead of here. Travel quenches the thirst in some of us, but it was’t enough for these six ex-Dallasites. They swapped the familiar for the risky and unknown. And so far, they’re loving every minute of it.

Ten and Karen Dreier

When Ted and Karen Dreier say they cut their ties to corporate Dallas, they’re not speaking figuratively. When they made their getaway, Karen literally hacked her husband’s gray pinstripe suit into pieces and then fashioned the swatches into a patchwork sweater. Ted now wears it to symbolize his transformation from a high-powered executive with a gargantuan house in Irving to a laid-back author living in a modest condo in Breckenridge, Colorado.

Two years ago, almost on the spur of the moment, the Dreiers sold their home in Irving and most of their belongings. “We decided to get out of the rat race,” Ted says. After moving west, he wrote a self-help book, Take Your Life Off Hold, about midlife career changes. Karen, an interior decorator, now specializes in arts and crafts (including patchwork sweaters). “If we had maintained our Dallas lifestyle, we wouldn’t have lasted two weeks,” Ted says. “We had to cut back by 75 percent on our spending. Our quantity of life has gone down, but our quality of life has gone up.”

Dennis Murphy

Dennis Murphy doesn’t look like a “Tex.” He doesn’t sound like a “Tex.” And if he lived in Texas, he wouldn’t be called “Tex.” But seeing as how he lives on the island of St. Thomas and he is from Fort Worth, the nickname sounds plumb perfect. And, hey, it wouldn’t do for St. Thomas’s favorite country-and-western disc jockey to use his real name. “They said I couldn’t be called ’Dennis Murphy’ because it sounded too Irish,” he explains.

Murphy first visited St. Thomas after graduating from TCU in 1979 with a radio-television-film degree. On a lark, he sent out a couple of audition tapes. When he was offered the job, he replied. “Give me a week to go back to Texas and get my stuff and I’ll be back down.” Murphy later introduced modern country music to the islands, and though his C&W show was canceled nearly two years ago when the station went satellite, he still works as production/public service director of WVWI-AM. “Originally, I was only going to stay a year,” he says, “but I love the water and the island life.”

Shel Hershorn

Shel Hershorn says his search for paradise took nearly four years. The nationally known photojournalist, whose work has appeared on the covers of Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Fortune. Time, and Life, says the Sixties really radicalized him, urging him on to seek a safer, more peaceful haven beyond the Dallas city limits. “It was a slow and steady dropping out. All the great magazines like Life and Look were fading. I was spending more time shooting for the advertising side of the business than the journalism side and not liking it. So I packed up my show, bought a van and a pony, and hit the highway, stopping along the way at roadside shopping centers and small-town neighborhoods to snap kids sitting on top of my horse.” He drifted to Taos. New Mexico, and kept going, settling a hundred miles west of there in a small town called Gallina-a spot he says is “fifty years behind and a good place to heal.”

David Wynne

David Wynne left brothers Shannon and Angus to tend to business in big D when he decided slow-paced Santa Fe was the life for him. In the summer of 1981, he went to Santa Fe to visit a high school friend, and within six weeks he was loading up a U-Haul and heading down the road to that Southwestern mecca in the mountains. “I really had no idea what I was doing,” Wynne says. “I had no job, not even a decent lead, but I fell in love with the climate, the natural beauty, the pace of this smalltown artists’ community. I knew I couldn’t forget this place.” Since he’s an artist himself, Wynne and Santa Fe were the perfect match. He now produces food and music festivals, besides serving as a special deputy sheriff for the county, and he’s penning his first screenplay. It’s already got a title, based on the life he knows and loves so well: Santa Fe Days-Lone Wolf Nights.

Gail and Bob West

Former Dallasite Gail West doesn’t bother to lock her car doors unless she’s visiting the big city: Waco, that is. Eight years ago she and her husband. Bob, sold their home in Preston Hollow and moved to the small Central Texas town of Clifton (population 3,063), about forty miles northwest of Waco. “This is a wonderful place to raise kids,” she says. “They can ride their bicycles anywhere and we don’t worry, and that’s just unheard of in Dallas.”

The Wests, both graduates of Hillcrest High School, became small-town Texans shortly after Bob “discovered” Clifton during a hunting trip. “People [from Dallas] used to tease us at first about not having anything to do here,” Gail says. “Well, there’s something to do here every night.” Besides serving on scads of boards and committees. Gail teaches elementary school while Bob runs the Bosque Restaurant and serves as city judge. As for life in Big D, they don’t miss it one bit. As Bob says. “It takes a wedding or a funeral or a reunion to get me back to Dallas.”

Pat Sullivan

So what exactly do you mean when you say you’re a mermaid?” I ask.

“Well, every day I put on my scales and go to work in the sea,’” says Pat Sullivan, full-time resident of St. Thomas. Searching for a little R&R to beat a case of the Dallas doldrums, the former associate creative director of Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt enrolled in a sailing school on the isle last November and decided that this was her ticket. She worked on a charter sailboat as a cook, sold popsicles on Main Street, and took a job for no pay at a diving shop in order to earn her certificate as a rescue diver. All that was before she landed the leading role as head mermaid at the only glass-bottom-boat-turned-restaurant in St. Thomas. (If you go down there to see for yourself, she’s the big silver fish who bellyflops around on the bottom of the ocean floor to the delight of the diners above.)

Sullivan loves her work, but she knows she’s not the only fish in the sea. Her biggest thrill is tracking bottlenose dolphins and spending her afternoons windsurfing, jet skiing, and snorkel ing-all sports she’s taken up since making the switch.