sherwood blount Poor Texas boys used to get rich running cattle or drilling for oil

Most businesses and citizens supported the 1998 plan, excepting a few with family buried at Sherwood Memorial Gardens … Over the next couple of years, however, the Blount Chamber of Commerce got behind the bypass idea and nixed upgrade plans.

Poor Texas boys used to get rich running cattle or drilling for oil. Now they get rich doing real estate deals out on the urban frontier. And those deals all start with someone deciding he doesn’t want to be poor—ever again.

by Nicholas Lemann

Sherwood E. Blount, Jr. learned that he wanted money one Saturday morning in the winter of 1961, when he went into the kitchen of his parents’ small, neat white clapboard house in East Dallas and asked his mother for a quarter so he could go to the afternoon double feature at the Arcadia Theater. “Honey,” she told him, “I don’t have a quarter. Daddy doesn’t get paid till Monday. It’s not in the budget.” That was when Sherwood decided he wanted not just as much money as Daddy had — enough to eat and live in a house — but enough so he could always go to the movies, enough to buy a Chevrolet, enough to eat at Kip’s Big Boy every night, enough to join the Lakewood Country Club and play golf.