Pass It On
Beneath the stadium lights, the story goes, he was an artist, forever changing the way high school football is played in Texas. In a run-dominated 1980s, 17-year-old TODD DODGE passed nearly every down. He called a lot of his own plays. He led his Port Arthur team to the state title game and, in his wake, left college recruiters drooling. He chose UT, but what he wanted even more, even at 18, was to return to high school and coach. Flash forward to 2000, when Dodge became head coach at Southlake-Carroll and changed, once more, the way high school football is played in Texas. He put in a no-huddle offense. The squad would rely, like baseball players, on a series of hand signals, some of which were dummy signs to throw off the opposition. In the last four years, his teams have gone 63-1 and won three state championships and two mythical national championships. This year, Dodge’s son Riley steps under center. “I feel very safe that he can do this,” the coach says. Riley will enjoy many of the freedoms his dad did. Even, on occasion, the chance to call his own plays. And why not? “It’s like we have the same mind,” Riley says. —PAUL KIX
Photo by Dave Schafer
Kicked Out
Montana called AmeriPlan a pyramid scheme. What will Texas call it?
Ameriplan usa was riding a wave this summer. The Plano-based medical-care discount-card provider and multilevel-marketing empire had more than 70,000 independent sales reps operating in all 50 states, and annual revenues approached $100 million. The company crowed about its success in a vanity press magazine. In its slick pages, happy AmeriPlan reps posed with yachts and luxury cars. It showcased AmeriPlan’s founders, 64-year-old twin brothers Dennis and Daniel Bloom. The Bloom brothers are smooth-talking, big-walking, Texas-born businessmen with a professionally polished “aw, shucks” image. They aren’t shy about telling folks they bought Jerry Jones’ Lear jet back in 1999.
Here’s how the Blooms made their fortune: for $12 to $60 a month, AmeriPlan cardholders get discounted services from a network of medical care providers looking to fill their empty chair time (think the Hotels.com business model). Cardholders also get a 30 percent commission for enrolling other members.
How appropriate that AmeriPlan’s business was built with cards. Because in July, Montana’s state auditor toppled it.
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| DOUBLE TROUBLE: Daniel and Dennis Bloom insist their operation is above-board. |
“They are operating a pyramid scheme. They are a multilevel-marketing scheme peddling a product with no value,” says Lynne Egan, Montana’s deputy securities commissioner. “They scammed about 750 Montanans with these cards.” AmeriPlan claimed to have a substantial number of medical care providers under contract, but the State Auditor’s Office could find only one, a dentist, in the entire state.
Dennis Bloom, however, says it’s all a misunderstanding. He disputes the numbers and says the reason Montana investigators couldn’t find any health-care providers is because in that state AmeriPlan contracts through a PPO.
The state auditor and AmeriPlan are in talks. Egan says her office is all too happy to go to the mat, and they’re beyond confident in their allegations. She’s quick to use words like “insurance scam” and “securities fraud.”
Dennis Bloom brushes it off. He says he’s confident everything will be worked out. If not, he isn’t worried. “It’s just not that big a deal in the scheme of things,” he says.
One problem though: Montana officials made some calls, and now the Texas Attorney General’s office is looking into AmeriPlan. In the big scheme of things, Texas is a big deal. —TREY GARRISON
Photo by Elizabeth Lavin
Jump That River!The lowest bid on the first Calatrava bridge was $113 million, or about twice what planners expected. The cost was driven up by federal law, which requires that domestic steel be used in public projects. So in August the city asked for new bids, due this fall. If the cost doesn’t come down—a lot—Santiago Calatrava will have to redesign his bridge. Rumor has it that the architect has been carefully studying the opening sequence of The Dukes of Hazzard for inspiration.
SNAP JUDGMENTS
THUMBS UP: When Farmers Branch CityCouncilmember Tim O’Hare suggested the city adopt ordinances that would make it harder for illegal immigrants to live and work in that fair burg, a group of Hispanics fought back. Calling itself Compre Farmers Branch (Buy Farmers Branch), the consortium of lenders and real estate agents sought to help Hispanics buy all 157 homes for sale in Farmers Branch. So here’s a big thumbs up to the amigo who buys Tim O’Hare’s house. At press time, the 2,423-square-foot “charming English Tudor” (in Farmers Branch?) was listed at $389,000.
THUMBS DOWN: After Frisco art teacher Sydney McGee took her students on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art, a parent called the school to complain that her fifth-grade child had seen a nude sculpture. Fisher Elementary principal Nancy Lawson then reprimanded McGee, a 28-year teaching veteran. Fearing she might be fired, McGee requested a transfer, but Lawson denied it. As for the complaining parent, we’d give him (or her) a thumbs down, too, but in the right light, our thumb looks like a little penis, and we wouldn’t want to offend anyone.
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| Photography courtesy of David Dike Gallery |
A Giant Auction
Wanna buy a shot of James Dean leaning against a fence?
It’s been a big year for david dike. it is the 20th anniversary of his gallery, the 10th anniversary of his auction event, and, on October 21, Dike will sell works from the movie Giant, celebrating its own 50th anniversary. The late Dallas artist and former SMU professor Ed Bearden created storyboards for the film. The drawings were used on the set for makeup and costume reference. But once filming was underway, Bearden kept drawing. Some of these portraits were used to publicize the film in newspapers. On October 21, 10 sketches and photographs will be sold. The coolest part? Bob Hinkle will speak at the event. The poor soul who auditioned for the role of Jordan “Bick” Benedict was told Rock Hudson got the part and he would be teaching Hudson and James Dean how to talk Texan. “He’s got lots of stories to tell,” Dike says. Tall tales surely among them. —Jenny Block
A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Barbs
With its annual Fall Gallery Walk just concluded, the Dallas Art Dealers Association (DADA) has begun to stumble. And it’s not because of all the free Chardonnay. A small group of gallery owners, about eight of DADA’s 35 members, has set in motion plans to break away from DADA and form its own organization, to be called the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD).
“Several of the contemporary dealers breaking off from DADA were disgruntled by the lack of focus caused by an association that houses everything under the sun, including nonprofits, vanity galleries, and antiquities,” says one gallery owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity. There were also complaints that the same handful of gallery owners did all of the heavy lifting, with everyone else reaping the benefits.
CADD will have much stricter entry guidelines. No vanity galleries, for one. Once certain legal issues are cleared up and CADD has formally announced its intentions, other galleries will be invited to join. In the end, though, CADD might only include 16 galleries.
“CADD is a serious group of gallerists that value quality, not quantity, with their primary focus being to promote contemporary art,” the owner says. —J.B.
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| Photography courtesy of SPM Communications |
The $25,000 Scrapbook
When you hire a Pulitzer nominee, it better be worth it.
Alyssa Banta is good. Time “Picture of the Year” good, Pulitzer Prize nominee good. She lives in Fort Worth, but her photographs capture chaotic, unedited moments of our world at war: men begging for their lives, a crazed woman inside a Kashmir mental hospital, a woman howling over her dead husband’s body. Important stuff, right? So why is Banta moonlighting as a maker of family heirlooms, someone essentially crafting fancy scrapbooks? “People do their people thing,” the Newsweek and New York Times contributor says, her four completed heirlooms around her. Families interest her; she doesn’t care if they live in war-torn nations or Hurst. And the money doesn’t hurt. For $25,000, Banta will interview family members for five hours each, shooting them for two hours more—at the grocery store or church choir practice, wherever they’re comfortable. She’ll photograph the extended family, too, at a Sunday brunch or a picnic. The finished book is presented months later, as thick as a dictionary, leather-bound, and priceless. Banta looks up from one of her works. “This woman, she spent a lifetime carrying around her memories, and this book is the one place that makes them official,” she says. As important as if it were in the paper of record. —Paige Phelps
Thanks for Smoking
Two brothers accidentally get into the cigar business.
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| Photography courtesy of Bill Makens |
Michael makens wanted a smoke. Makens was in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, the country’s capital, finding inspiration for his landscape architecture business in North Richland Hills. He decided one night in 2001 that a cigar would go well with the beer he was drinking. But he couldn’t find any good ones in the city’s shops. The next day, he tried visiting cigar factories, but they weren’t set up to take visitors. (He was greeted by machine gun-toting guards.) So a taxi driver took Makens to a shack in a neighboring village where he met Juan Aguilar, an exile from Cuba and a man who knew how to roll the cigars Castro himself passed out to dignitaries. Aguilar’s cigar was the best Makens had ever tasted.
For the next three years, Makens returned again and again to Aguilar’s, hauling back to the States boxes of cigars for his friends. Then, in October 2004, he and his kid brother Bill, a recent college graduate who, like Michael, knew nothing about the cigar business, decided to partner with Aguilar and open a cigar company in Bedford. They called it Flor de Jardin (The Flower of the Garden) Cigar Company. Since then, the company has twice been featured in the Robb Report, and its cigars are sold in 35 states. Locally, you can get them at Javier’s, Sense, and Del Frisco. Aguilar now oversees 25 workers at his own cigar factory in Honduras. And the brothers recently introduced a new cigar, the Smokin’ Toad. “It’s a fun brand,” Bill says. A year’s worth of trial and error went into it, and “there is nothing like it out there.” —P.K.
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| Photography courtesy of Carla Mae |
Q: A vacuum cleaner. A vampire. And Employee of the Month, starring Jessica Simpson.*
A: [long silence] What? A vacuum? [shorter silence] What? [laughs] I didn’t know I was going to be on a quiz show. [laughs] A vacuum cleaner or Employee of the Month? Ughff. I need more coffee. Well, I’m going to say Employee of the Month, just to be on the safe side.
*The answer, as Carnac the Incredible would have known, is “things that suck.”
Breathe Deep
Three things Dallas can do—right now, today—to improve our air quality.
Last month we gave some examples of just how bad our air has gotten. for instance, one doctor at Children’s Medical Center gets up to 70 calls a week from new allergy and asthma patients. This month, what we can do about it:
1. Build stuff at night. Every morning, as much as 40 percent of the bad air from the day before lingers over North Texas. If construction vehicles operate throughout the day, their emissions compound the problem. So make them nocturnal. “It could make a big difference,” says Chris Klaus, a program manager at the North Central Texas Council of Governments. Because it isn’t as hot at night, emissions aren’t trapped as easily in the atmosphere. Similarly, if contractors use cleaner-burning engines, they could be given a bonus by the city after their work is completed, Klaus says. The Texas Department of Transportation already encourages this practice, but local governments don’t. That should change.
2. Nail those bogus inspection stickers. Cars cause nearly 40 percent of the pollution. And half of that is caused by just 10 percent of the cars—vehicles that can’t pass inspections, many with fake stickers. The Council of Governments now has a database called NED that monitors the inspection status of 15 million vehicles in North Texas. A cop on patrol can punch an inspection code sticker into NED and see if the car is in compliance. Lewisville’s law enforcement uses NED. Other cities and counties are considering it. But neither the Dallas Police Department nor the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department has it. They should.
3. Hybrids park free. San Antonio now allows hybrid cars to park free at any metered spot in town. We should follow suit. Admittedly, this will have a small impact, not nearly as much as the two steps above. But every little bit counts. And you have to start somewhere. —P.K.
2,500 butts
That’s how many cigarette butts were disposed of along sidewalks of a six-block area of downtown Dallas on a single day in August. As a result, downtown Dallas, along with Keep America Beautiful, launched a five-week pilot program to curtail butt litter, installing ash receptacles at target areas and handing out free pocket ashtrays.
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| Photography by Elizabeth Lavin |
Two Books To Tackle
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| Photography by Elizabeth Lavin |
Just in time for what used to be called the Red River Shootout (before commerce and political correctness renamed it the SBC Red River Rivalry) come two books about football. Sometime D Magazine contributor Mike Shropshire brings us Runnin’ With the Big Dogs: The True, Unvarnished Story of the Texas-Oklahoma Football Wars (William Morrow). And Fort Worth’s Whit Canning offers Longhorns For Life (Sports
Publishing). Canning’s book is a series of UT fan profiles (the guy who popularized the “hook ’em Horns” sign and so on). If you’re one of the profilees, you’ll probably enjoy the book. But the real juice here is Shropshire’s Big Dogs. It’s a profanity-laced comic history of the fabled football series—a “shootout” all the way—that spends as much time celebrating the off-field achievements of the misbehaving players as it does on the games themselves. Still, Shropshire knows his football. He’s deft enough to compare UT coach Darrell Royal to Steinbeck’s Tom Joad in Grapes of Wrath and sober enough to recall his own time spent with OU running back Joe Don Looney. The whole thing is all the more wonderful when you know that Shropshire, having suffered a recent dog-walking accident, had to type the book with one hand. Odd, but true. Just like this unvarnished story. —TIM ROGERS
Shame, Shame, Shame
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| Photography by Chris Mulder |
The SUV itself is not evil. If your cargo requirements are such, and if you pilot the vehicle with care, then we say, “Keep truckin’, good buddy.” But when you flagrantly, inconsiderately occupy two parking spaces marked “compact car only,” then we get testy. That’s exactly what happened on a recent night at Mockingbird Station, when we spotted a monstrous Chevy registered to Sarah Mahmoodi hogging two spots designed for much smaller cars. So on the driver of Sarah Mahmoodi’s SUV—possibly on Sarah Mahmoodi herself—we dump a steaming load of shame. Shame!
