October 1979
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.
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. Even as a boy he knew that the main worry in the lives of his parents and his grandparents was not having enough money. He knew the whole point of the hard work they did all day was money, and that even so there was never enough.
Sherwood’s father, Sherwood E. Blount, Sr., grew up in the Depression. His most vivid childhood memory is of his father coming in from the fields to the family’s sharecropper cottage in Kaufman County one cold day and his mother looking up from the stove and saying, “George, we lack three hundred and eighty-five dollars to pay the landlord.” The family, destitute, had to leave the farm and move to the town of Terrell. When Sherwood Blount, Sr., grew up he left Terrell and, after serving in World War II, moved to Dallas and became a fireman. On nights and weekends he moonlighted to make ends meet and dreamed of something better for his only son. The Blounts knew that big things were happening in Dallas, that the city was growing and that fortunes were being made, and they hoped Sherwood, Jr., could be part of that.
When Sherwood E. Blount, Jr., was a senior at Woodrow Wilson High School in East Dallas, he was all-city in football and baseball and the college recruiters were courting him. One of them was a man named Dick Davis, who had gone to SMU and played ball on the great teams of the late forties with Doak Walker and Kyle Rote and then gone on to become a stockbroker. One night Davis took Sherwood and three other football prospects to a Golden Gloves match and then to dinner at the Dallas Petroleum Club. Sherwood had never seen a fancy place like that before, in fact had no idea such places existed. Somehow, it was clear, Dick Davis had made a lot of money, and his friends in this club had, too.
Davis ordered everyone a steak, and when they were finished he asked the boys whether they’d like another steak. At that moment Sherwood was still unsure how he was going to make his fortune, but he knew that the first step was to keep playing ball and go to SMU.
He did well there; he made good grades and was co-captain of the football team in his senior year. He even made some all-Southwest Conference teams as a middle linebacker. He was a clean-cut, direct, polite young man, confident and hard-working and a Christian. After receiving his degree he went to graduate school for business for a semester, but he was restless there and wanted to get out into the world. It was time for him to decide what to do. “I looked at all the opportunities,” he says. “I looked at insurance, finance, marketing, accounting. And I said ‘Okay, in all the areas of business where do you see the greatest opportunity for achievement and the chance to accumulate real wealth?’ I decided to be in selling. I wanted the competitiveness and the self-sacrifice and the hard work of athletics. I wanted to be able to get up half an hour earlier than the next guy. And, I decided, I wanted to be selling a big ticket item, where I’d be really, really, well compensated. So I decided to sell real estate.”
Today Sherwood Blount is 29 years old, president of his own real estate brokerage firm, and the owner of two 1979 Cadillacs and a brand-new house in the fanciest subdivision in Dallas. In the first four months of this year he made more than a quarter of a million dollars. His net worth is $2,194,800. He is a true self-made millionaire.
There are thousands of Texans like Sherwood — people who live in the booming cities but are just a generation removed from tenant farming and the Depression. Somewhere in all of them is the conviction that they are a generation living in a special time and place in which it is possible — through hard work, or faith in God, or somehow running in tune with the engine of urban growth — to erase the worrying about money that dominated their parents’ lives, and to live in a world where everything is new and clean and nothing is impossible.
The Deal
Early one morning in June, Sherwood Blount got in his pearl-gray Cadillac Brougham and drove up Preston Road into North Dallas, to a subdivision called Northwood Hills. He pulled up at a huge brick house with a mansard roof, double wooden doors, and leaded windows. In the driveway was parked an odd assortment of Lincoln Continentals and pickup trucks. This was a Peter Shaddock home — “professionally designed,” as the brochure for Shaddock and Cook, custom homebuilders, puts it, and featuring, “an abundance of handcrafted cabinetry, distinctive wall paneling, high wood-beamed ceilings, elaborate fire places, elegant foyers, lush atriums, and many other fine appointments.” In fact, it was the home of Peter Shaddock himself, with whom Sherwood had some business that morning. Sherwood took his suit coat off a hook in the back of the car, put it on, squared his shoulders, took off his sunglasses, pulled in his waist a little, and rang the doorbell. He looked just the way he wanted to look: like an ex-athlete who, eight years out of school, is still close to his playing weight and doing very well indeed in the business world.
Peter Shaddock, on the other hand, looks like he works outdoors. He is a solidly built, ruddy man of 37 with a mop of blond hair that, along with his air of perpetual unconcern, calls to mind the little Dutch Boy. He grew up in Orange, majored in residential home construction at TCU, and made his first million building expensive homes in North Dallas. His life seems to have unfolded exactly the way he had envisioned. He is reserved, determined, uncomplicated, and a staunch family man. He is building a house in North Dallas for his mother; his sister lives three doors down from him, and her husband, Jerry Cook, is Shaddock’s business partner; his brother, Bill, handles the legal work.
Sherwood and Shaddock chatted a little inside the house, then went out to Sherwood’s car and drove out Preston Road, across the northern border of Dallas County and into Collin County. On their left was the hottest real estate in the Metroplex, the “magic corridor,” as real estate people call it, between Preston Road and the Dallas North Parkway.
Virtually all of the land south of the corridor has been developed already into subdivisions and apartment complexes and shopping centers. On either side, the city was building new roads. To the north ran the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad tracks, right next to which, it had long been rumored, would be built a new “outer loop” that would ring the suburbs outside IH 635, the LBJ Freeway. Dallas was growing very quickly, and the corridor seemed to be the area where it would grow next. The new freeway would make it easier to get downtown, which would encourage people to live that far out. And in 1977 the corridor, which until then had been in the sleepy town of Renner, was annexed into the city of Dallas, shortly after one of Renner’s major land owners, Bob Folsom, was elected Mayor. That meant there would be city water and sewer lines and new roads, but that the people who lived there could still send their children to suburban, rather than Dallas, public schools. The annexation sent land prices in Renner through the roof. Now the fields and farms of Renner were full of bulldozers and concrete pipe, the harbingers of development.
Sherwood drove up to the railroad tracks on Preston and turned left into the magic corridor, down a dirt road, the big Cadillac kicking up plumes of dust in its wake. After fifty yards or so, he stopped beside a field of maize.
This was the site of the greatest triumph of his real estate career — the Ballinger deal, a plot of 201 acres long owned by a wealthy Dallas family and the current residence of a tenant farmer named Buddy Kimball. Sherwood’s job as a broker is to use his sales ability and knowledge to put buyers and sellers of real estate together. Two weeks earlier, on May 18, after several years of trying, he had finally persuaded the Ballinger family to sell the land to a homebuilder named Jerry Don Stiles for $6 million, or $30,000 an acre. As is the case whenever he closes a deal, Sherwood got a commission for his trouble — in this case $195,000, which works out to the broker’s standard 6 percent on the first $500,000 of the sale price, plus a negotiated lesser percentage on the remainder. Deals like this one take place because of the desire of the participants for economic gain, but they are being negotiated all over Texas, all the time, and so have larger effects, too. They are the means by which are worked out the particulars of the single most important change in Texas of the last generation: the growth of our cities. They are also, right now, probably the best way for hungry and ambitious poor boys to leap up the social and economic ladder.
