CRITICAL EYE Citizen Holifield

Remember The Music Man? Especially the scene in which the entire population of River City, Iowa, turns out for something called an “ice cream social”?

Now, imagine yourself at that same ice cream social. And instead of the local interpretive-dance ladies performing “One Grecian Urn,” you look up and see the mighty Fort Worth Ballet or Dallas Black Dance Theatre on a professionally designed concert stage. And it’s not a barbershop quartet doing old “Lida Rose” but Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra under maestro Mstislav Rostropovich. With Van Cliburn at the piano. Or it’s the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in a special Fourth of July concert. Or it’s Willie Nelson up there

One morning last summer, Ron Holifield, trie technical director of the open-air Spring Creek Festival, suddenly realized he needed a hard-surface road behind the festival’s amphitheater at Garland’s Winters Park in order to move a show’s equipment in. Holifield had that road built-by sunset.

When it had rained so much before opening night that whole families and their picnics were likely to disappear into the bog, Holifield had the grass dried-by a helicopter. Indeed, Holifield called the entire Spring Creek Festival of arts and entertainment into being. Holy Holifield, he must be some kind of water-walking arts producer, huh?

But his business card says that he is the city manager of Garland.

And this year, as Dallas and Fort Worth engage in another season of mutual artistic mistrust, Garland and Richardson have joined together in a $150,000 partnership as co-presenters of the Spring Creek Festival.

This is not musical comedy, it’s for real. Rostrop-ovich, Van Cli-burn. the National Symphony and Dallas Black Dance will open it all on June 11 this year. The Spring Creek Festival, in its second season, will run through July 4. It’s a $2.5 million operation, including in-kind services, and has an impressive list of corporate sponsors, such as American Airlines, Pepsi, Tom Thumb-Page and The Dallas Morning News. It’s work for artists. It provided family entertainment to more than 39,500 people last summer and the crowd is expected to hit 80,000 this summer. It’s a stupendous attention-getter for the city of Garland.

And it’s all thanks to Ron Holifield.

The suspender-wearing Holifield, 35, laughs with an uninhibited guffaw, and keeps catching himself calling his festival patrons “the citizens.” He really is a civil servant. You and I see an audience on the grass, he sees city hall’s field of dreams: taxpayers. You and 1 see a pop-cultural gold mine, he sees good PR for his town- the “sleeping sister” of Big D that actually is the 10th biggest suburb in Texas, “The really unique thing that we’re doing with this-and I don’t mean to sound too cocky-but we’ve made supporting the arts a good business decision, not just a good community decision.

“I don’t care what arts group you look at, if you go to Dallas Black Dance Theatre, if you go to the Fort Worth Ballet, Dallas Symphony, whatever, the funding they get through EDS, JC Penney, whoever it happens to be, is always budgeted through that corporation’s charitable contributions. It’s viewed by the executives as, ’We’re obligated to do something for the community.’

“Now, 1 don’t mean to take anything away from the validity of that type of decision; it’s very important for businesses to feel that obligation to give back to the community.

“But what we’ve done is redefined the rules. Instead of taking a charitable approach to the businesses, we’re taking a business approach that says, ’Invest in something that’s good business for you.’ “

What, exactly, is the “good business” these corporations are getting? Whatever they want. Tom Thumb-Page wanted traffic in its stores. So, Holifield worked out a deal to make Tom Thumb-Page the exclusive ticket outlet. Last season, 21,000 tickets were sold at Tom Thumb-Page.

Another big sponsor is Pepsi, a company that understands experiential advertising, or making an experience carry a message. Pepsi, like Coke, sells lifestyle-gorgeous people doing gorgeous things in gorgeous places with soft drinks in their hands. So Pepsi bought itself the exclusive soft-drink rights to the festival and now Spring Creek is a festival for the Pepsi Generation.

On one night of last summer’s inaugural festival, the evening’s activities started off with a neighborhood parade of young “citizens” pulled in their toy wagons by their parents. Ask the parents and they’ll tell you they had national-class entertainment in a fresh-air environment so friendly they could let the kids throw Frisbees on the perimeter of the festival without worrying about them, all in the cooling evening of a perfect North Texas day.

“It sounds so Norman Rockwell, so Mayberry,” Holifield laughs, “that I start sounding totally cornball. I mean, it’s not real common to get a flood of letters like we’ve gotten, telling city hall how happy the citizens are with something. We are, I mean, again I don’t want to brag, but we are phenomenally successful.”

And all this almost belonged to Piano. For two years. Holifield, as Piano’s assistant city manager, labored with arts facilitator Peter Wexler to create just this kind of festival. Wexler had been part of the team that produced the original DSO StarFest series. The Dallas Symphony’s Leonard Stone recommended Wexler to Holifield, who then went so far as to bring world-renowned Meyerson Center acoustician Russell Johnson in to look at possible sites. But Piano just wasn’t ready to turn Holifleld’s concept into reality.

On January 8, 1992, Holifield began work as Garland’s city manager. He went to the city council and told them he wanted $600.000 to seed the festival that he and Wexler had dreamed of for years. By March, he had the go-ahead.

“We had exactly 115 days from the night they voted to opening night,” Holifield says, “That included construction of the amphitheater, getting the stage done, getting concessionaires, getting the artists’ contracts. In one afternoon, my parks and recreation guys came back to me with a site, plans, drawings, everything.”

The Spring Creek location had once been tagged for a natural amphitheater site. Garland city employees started wearing buttons declaring themselves workers of “The 115-Day Miracle.” They became so fired up by the idea that they turned up as volunteers after their days’ work. And, when the audiences began arriving, those folks were on-site welcoming them-as proud hosts. They’d done it, under the seemingly happy-go-lucky, hand-pumping direction of this Piano native Holifield, who remembers when Dude’s Drive-In was the cultural site of record.

If this operation were arts-led, headed up by the usual arts-company folks, would Spring Creek have risen from the ground? Maybe. But it’s hard to deny that what appears to have happened here is an astonishing case of a non-arts city-politics man seeing a community-development economic motherlode that others have overlooked. Holifield’s festival lost $183,000 last season, but as far as he’s concerned, he got a bonanza of attention for his town that $183,000 couldn’t buy.

Remember The Music Man? Holifield has used the “think system,” as Professor Harold Hill does in the musical, to make Holifield’s own River City, the town of Garland, think that they could have the National Symphony play for them.

And they’re getting it. Holifield is marching to a city manager’s mantra of unbeatable truths. No arts outfit you’re likely to run into has the resources that Music Man Holifield counts on his fingers:

“We own the electric company.

“We own the water company.

“We own the streets.

“We’ve got engineers on staff…”