Sherwood Blount’s First Million
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.
(Page 7 of 10)
“Okay, that’s four million four hundred thousand dollars for the single-family, more or less. That means you’ve gotta come up with, let’s see, three million six for the seventy-five acres of multifamily land.” He punched the calculator again, and another number appeared:
48,000
“That’s forty-eight thousand an acre. Cheap for apartment land up there.
“Now, what’s ol’ Sherwood doing with all these numbers? First of all, he’s thinking maybe he can find some old boy that builds apartments who’ll agree to buy the seventy-five acres from Shaddock—that way, Shaddock gets to stay at his thirty-five an acre price. And second of all, he’s trying to make another commission or two out of this deal.”
He picked up the car phone and called Bruce Weale.
That night Sherwood called John McKamy, who asked him to come out to the home place the next day, Wednesday. So late Wednesday afternoon Sherwood went out Preston Road again, turned left again into the magic corridor, and pulled through John McKamy’s gate and up his private drive. Parked next to the house was a new Lincoln Continental Mark V with license plates that said 2 BOBBEE.
“I like that new car, Bobbie,” said Sherwood when he walked in.
Bobbie was sitting behind a desk going through some papers, a petite and demure woman of 55 with a silver-blonde bouffant hairdo. “Well,” she said, “in fact John’s going to get ride of some more of his cars. He just wants enough to be able to say, you know, that he’s ‘got some cars.’”
“You know, it makes me so glad to see the two of you together and happy,” said Sherwood. “Heck, who cares about selling this land? As long as he’s found peace and happiness with you, that’s all I care about.”
“We’ve got plans to build our dream house right down there on the creek.” Bobbie pointed out the window at the spot she had in mind. “But first we’re going to buy a house on Westgate to live in now. ‘Course, we’ll always keep this house. And my house. And our new house. ‘Cause wherever John wants to hang his hat, that’s fine with me.”
“Great.”
“John’s outside. He just wanted to go unplug a battery. He should be just a minute. ‘Course, with John that could mean three hours.” Bobbie sighed resignedly.
But John appeared right away, dressed in brown slacks and a white short-sleeved shirt, a big man with a stand-up iron-gray crewcut, an aquiline nose, and the comfortable potbelly and erect, almost sway-backed posture of a country gentleman. He absently handed Sherwood a copy of a magazine called Big Farmer and sat down. “Sherwood,” he said, “Bobbie wants to buy a house on Westgate and she needs you to put a value on it. She didn’t want to live here because it’s a hundred-year-old house, you know, bad associations, the divorce, all that. She’s an old country girl from Mississippi and as you know she runs a town-house complex that’s worth, well, billions of dollars. Billions. It’s a God-given knack that she has. Only three per cent of the people on earth have it.”
“Let me be one of that three per cent, John,” said Sherwood. “Tell me what you want done, and I’ll try to do it.”
“I want to find out something about this house Bobbie wants to buy. But first let me show you something.” He wandered off into another room.
“We want to know if three hundred and fifty thousand’s a good price for this house,” said Bobbie, “and then if it is we want to sell off however many acres it takes to buy it.”
John returned bearing a huge stack of papers. He was carrying stationary from his church, old farming magazines, pictures of himself riding a horse in 1947, a deed to the cemetery plot where he would one day be buried. “But we don’t want to sell any of this land,” he said. “It’ll be from some other land I own. You know, I’ve been raised to appreciate land. It’s in my system, my body, my soul. It’s been my life.
“Sherwood,” John continued, “this is my home place. I’m never going to sell you this as long as Bobbie and I are living. But I’ll sell you some other land.” He held out a key. “Now, Sherwood, I want you to come over here and unlock my gun case. I’ve got some guns to show you. Don’t worry. I know what you’re thinking. They’re not loaded.”
It took Sherwood a while to ease himself out of there, and when he did he was in a big hurry—Bruce Weale was already waiting for him back at the office, and there was, if you used your imagination, $20 million worth of deals hanging in the balance, all generated by Sherwood out of an isolated maize field in only a little more than a month. All he had to do now was get Weale interested in buying that 75 acres of multifamily land for one of his apartment complexes, and it looked like he would have a deal.
When Sherwood pulled up at his office, Weale and a chubby, bald middle-aged man were waiting outside in the heat, wearing sunglasses, sweating in their flowered shirts. Sherwood parked the Cadillac in front of them, opened the door and waved, and picked up the car phone and called Shaddock. “Peter,” he said, “if you had a deal going with the seventy-five acres of multifamily land already sold, would you be interested in doing the deal? Because you know Bruce Weale? The Apartment Group? They can buy anything they want anytime they want it.” He winked at Weale. “Let me bring him by Friday morning at ten and we’ll see if we can come to a resolution by noon and I’ll go straight back to Stiles.”
“Sherwood,” said Weale, when he had hung up, “this is Harry Lasky. He’s one of my partners. Works out of Fort Lauderdale. Look, we gotta talk in the car. You gotta drive us out to DFW. Harry’s got a plane to Atlanta to make.”
They piled into the car and Sherwood went into his pitch—how Stiles wanted $8 million for the whole 201 acres, how they could promise to buy the 75 acres zoned for apartments from Shaddock, how this would make it possible for Shaddock to afford to buy the whole plot. Harry Lasky was checking his watch every few minutes as Sherwood talked, and chewing on the second knuckle of his thumb. “Assuming this guy Shaddock’s not gonna get cutesy with us,” he said when Sherwood was finished, “then we ought to sit down and work out our numbers together.”
“That’s what we’re gonna do at ten Friday,” said Sherwood.
“Well,” said Harry Lasky, “there’s a hell of a multitude of problems to be solved in a very, very, very short time, but I think we can do it. Bruce, I’ll check with you tomorrow. The phone in my plane’s broken so I’ll have to call you before I leave Atlanta. Then I’ll be in Fort Lauderdale till four, and then I’m flying to Boston.” Weale nodded casually. “Sherwood, it was nice meeting you, and I hope we can do a deal.”
Now everything looked set. Shaddock would buy the maize field from Stiles for $8 million. Weale would buy part of it from Shaddock for $3.6 million. Everyone would get a good price. Sherwood would get two commissions. It seemed to him, driving back from the airport, that the brainstorm of calling in Bruce Weale had worked perfectly and that nothing could possibly go wrong.
Roots
Every once in a long while, Sherwood will drive back to East Dallas after work and look at the places where he grew up. He’ll drive by 4728 Victor Street, the first place he lived, a one-story duplex that the Blounts rented for $35 a month. He’ll look at his elementary school, James B. Bonham, where nowadays all the kids in the playground are black or Mexican. He’ll pass the small white house at 2202 Bennett Street that his father bought for $3000 in 1956, and the old brick Memorial United Methodist Church where the Blounts used to pray on Sundays, and J.L. Long Junior High, and the old fire station, and Woodrow Wilson High. It’s a run-down neighborhood—one that, no doubt, people want to get out of today just as much as they did when Sherwood was growing up there. But there’s something pleasant about it. There are always people around, on porches and in the streets, and there are lots of shade trees, too.
The last time Sherwood went back to East Dallas he stopped for dinner at the place where he had liked to eat when was in high school, a tiny restaurant on Henderson called Here-Tis. Inside everything was white—the linoleum floor, the Formica tables, the painted metal walls. Behind the counter sat two sleepy-looking Indians.
Sherwood ordered a fried chicken dinner and, in the familiar tone of a hometown boy, asked the man who took his order, “Hey, is Mr. Mack still around?”
“No,” the man said blankly. “He’s at home now.”
Sherwood smiled as if remembering a long-ago joke. “He still as crazy as ever, Mr. Mack?”
“I don’t know, man,” said the Indian. “He doesn’t even own the place anymore.”
My Library
