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.
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Now Sherwood lives in Bent Tree Royal, a small part of a large subdivision just south of the Dallas County line developed by Mayor Folsom. The mayor now lives in the next subdivision over, Preston Trails, but he’s building a new house near Sherwood’s. Down the block is the house Shaddock is building for his mother. A stone’s throw away, on one of the fairways of the Bent Tree Country Club golf course, is Stiles’ house. All the houses in Bent Tree are custom built, with light-colored brick and leaded windows and sloping shingled roofs, on lots with expansive lawns and a few scattered, spindly four-foot-high trees, with English antiques and hunting prints and sunken bathtubs inside. The oldest houses there were built five years ago. A lot in Bent Tree now costs in the neighborhood of $75,000, and a house about $300,000.
Most evenings Sherwood leaves work at seven or seven-thirty and has dinner with his fiancée, Phyllis Bisch, a pretty, brown-eyed woman of 30. Phyllis is the daughter of a funeral home director and grew up in Batavia, Illinois, but she left that small, cold town to go to TCU, where she received a degree in fashion merchandising. At the urging of her sorority sisters she entered and won the Miss Fort Worth Pageant in 1969. Through the pageant she picked up some modeling jobs and met her first husband. After the marriage broke up she went to work as a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines, where she is now a supervisor. As soon as she could, she moved to Dallas because it seemed to her to promise everything that her early life hadn’t brought her—it was big and new and clean and warm.
Sherwood and Phyllis met on a Southwest flight a couple of years ago. She saw him sitting in back and whispered to one of the other flight attendants, “There’s a guy back there with the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen, and I’ve got to meet him.” She did, and he asked her for a date, but when they went out, he says, somehow there was no immediate strong rapport and he didn’t ask her out again. Then, last fall, Phyllis saw Sherwood’s picture in the real estate section of the Morning News and sent him a note about it. He called her up and asked her to lunch, and this time the romance worked.
Phyllis lives in one of Bruce Weale’s apartment complexes, a place on the Dallas North Parkway called Windridge, but she and Sherwood spend most of their free time together. Sunday mornings they go to services at Sherwood’s church, Lovers Lane United Methodist, a modern white edifice that houses the world’s third-largest Methodist congregation. In the evenings Phyllis cooks dinner at Sherwood’s house or they go out, a handsome young couple who take great pains with their appearance. One night they were at a seafood restaurant on McKinney when a middle-aged man in a knit shirt with a polo player embroidered on the pocket walked up to their table and said, “You know, whenever I see a really attractive person I just have to come over and tell them so. I’m from San Francisco and they teach us to do things like this there.” Sherwood grinned and gave the man a who-me look, but the man offered his hand to Phyllis instead. “Thank you,” said Sherwood. “I don’t mind your doing this at all. In fact, I’ll be honest with you. It happens all the time.”
In December 1971, in his senior year at SMU, Sherwood married Kay Jones, his high school sweetheart, whom he had met in the ninth grade and dated since his junior year at Woodrow Wilson. Marriage seemed like the thing to do at the time. “We’d been dating seven years,” says Sherwood. “We thought we were in love, and thought we were compatible, and we thought it was the next step in our relationship. But it became clear as I achieved in the real estate business and began to spend more time on it—the Saturdays, the Sundays—that we weren’t compatible. Our goals weren’t the same. See, Kay never really felt that she knew her father until she was sixteen. He was a self-made man. He was always out chasing the dream, building condos and office buildings and apartments, doing deals. And she detested that, that anyone would spend that much time at their work.” In early 1976, just when Sherwood was leaving the Hank Dickerson Company and starting his own business, he and Kay were divorced. “I’ve had some of the greatest successes ever,” he says, “but I’ll tell you, that was my greatest failure.”
On the Brink
On the way to Shaddock’s office Friday morning, June 29, Sherwood took a little time to drive around. He hadn’t slept well the night before and cruising like this helped him calm down. He drove past dozens of apartment complexes: Meadowcreek, Springcrest, Spanish Trail, Shelter Ridge, The Cables, Winchester Ranch. Every few blocks, there was a string of cars leading, somewhere blocks ahead, to a gas station.
Waiting at Shaddock’s office with Bruce Weale was a surprise participant, a young lawyer named Kirk Williams. Williams is a pleasant-looking young man, but to Sherwood he was an ominous sight because he lacked an incentive to make deals. He was being paid by the hour, not by commission.
“The reason Kirk’s here,” said Shaddock, “is that he does a lot of rezoning work. That’s his profession. I wanted him to tell us what the prospects are for getting that seventy-five acres of multifamily zoning from the city. The contract isn’t subject to zoning. Can the zoning be attained?”
“Are y’all aware of what the city’s land plan for Renner is?” said Williams. “The city recommended that that whole area remain single-family. So I think the staff down at city hall isn’t going to recommend the approval of any multifamily.”
Sherwood saw right away that he had a difficult situation on his hands. He was, essentially, asking Shaddock and Weale to take a gamble: the gamble that the city would approve the multifamily zoning. If the city didn’t do that, Shaddock and Weale would be stuck with land worth less than what they had paid for it. Now Kirk Williams was saying the gamble was unlikely to pay off. That prospect would probably scare off Shaddock and Weale. “Okay,” Sherwood said, ticking off the names of some members of the City Plan Commission, “but those guys are very good friends of ours. I mean right down the line.”
“But you gotta remember,” said Williams, “if staff’s against you, you got the women against you. Your women go with your staff. That’s the rule of thumb. And that’s three votes right there. That doesn’t give you much wiggling room.”
“So after talking to Kirk,” said Shaddock, “I think Stiles is going to have a harder time getting his zoning than he thinks. That’s my conclusion.”
Sherwood glared at Williams. “Who you been talking to down there?”
“Eli Martinez, the planner for North Dallas.”
“Well,” Sherwood said triumphantly, “it doesn’t mean a rat’s ass till Gary Seib tells you.”
“Seib isn’t talking,” said Williams. “Eli is the most senior man in that department. They listen to Eli.”
Sherwood was getting nowhere. “Kirk, how can they prevent this man from getting his zoning?” he said in the tone of a kid who’s just been told there’s no Santa Claus. “He paid six million dollars for that land.” He looked plaintively at Shaddock and Weale. “I want to sell this land!”
“Maybe Stiles has it wired,” said Williams. “I don’t know. But the Renner plan says single-family. That’s why staff’s gonna deny multifamily. That’s all there is to it.”
Now the urge to do the deal seemed to have left everyone but Sherwood. He talked for an hour, throwing out combinations of numbers, sometimes making sense, sometimes not, mostly just trying to keep the possibility of a deal alive. As he became more and more animated, everyone else sank further into his chair and looked overcome by lethargy. It was noon. Sherwood was due back at Stiles’ office at one. He was running out of arguments.
Then Bruce Weale, who, looking bored, had been conducting a minute examination of his ball-point pen, asked very softly, “How greedy is Stiles?”
Sherwood stared at him. “Greedy. What’re you thinking?”
“Will he take more money for zoning?” said Weale.
“More than eight million?”
“Not much more, but a little more, subject to zoning.” What Weale was saying was, let Stiles take the gamble. If he got his multifamily zoning, the deal was on; if he didn’t, it was off. And his reward for taking the risk himself would be a higher purchase price.
Sherwood pulled out his calculator and punched a few buttons. “So we bump the price to maybe eight point eight million?”
“How about eight point five?” said Weale.
“Okay. Eight million five subject to zoning or you get your money back.” He pulled out a copy of the contract and started furiously leafing through it, crossing out old clauses and writing in new ones. He showed everyone his changes. He had Shaddock’s secretary make eight copies of the new contract. He called his secretary and had her draw up a check for $25,000, which would be the earnest money payment that would go to Stiles if he signed the contract and was hence the only cash Shaddock and Weale stood to lose if the zoning decision went the wrong way and they backed out. He dispatched Buck, the summer intern, to Stiles’ office with the check. He called Norman and said he was on his way out there. He changed his commission to $85,000. At 12:57, he was in his car and driving.
But Stiles was unimpressed. “Goddam,” he said, looking over the new contract. “I sure am relieved. I was afraid he was gonna sign my counter and I’d have to sell the son of a bitch.” He wiped his brow in an exaggerated way to show what a load had been taken off his mind. “Whew! I am relieved. Now I don’t have to sell it.”
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