Church Potlucks

As each dish is unwrapped and uncovered it is placed in line–salads at the front, casseroles and crockpots in the middle followed by desserts. There is an order to things. Amid the shuffle of arriving food fare there is a subtle inspection taking place. As you add your own creation to the lineup you make small talk and glance across the tables to survey the competition.

There will be no scores assigned or ribbons awarded, but make no mistake, there will be judging. From the moment the spoon scoops up the first serving, to the clean up at the end of the affair, eaters and creators are making notes, sharing instant feedback: “Oh my goodness! That is sooo good!” “What IS that spice? Is it cinnamon?” “I must have the recipe!”

Potlucks bring people together. Who doesn’t like an opportunity to graze a table loaded with sumptuous food in endless varieties of flavor, color and texture? And everyone knows about the potluck supper exemption clause that applies to every diet.

As the event comes to a close some serving dishes will be empty and others will return home half-full to reappear as tomorrow night’s supper.

When Verna Blood, Susie Clement, Loretha Riales, and Deb Montgomery bring their potluck favorites to a church social, they always leave with an empty dish. Each has a knack for preparing casseroles, desserts, and salads behind which lines form for a hearty helping. We asked the four ladies to share a favorite potluck recipe with our readers.

Chip Off The Old Block

Phill Haddock taught vocational drafting at Denison High School for twenty years, and while he remembers many of his students, Charles Piazza stands out. “I saw very quickly that he had people expertise, he could grasp information quickly, and he had integrity and he was honest. He talked about ideas, and that impressed me,” Haddock said. “I know his father’s reputation too, so I knew this kid had the personality to be a builder.”

It’s definitely retro with its arched barrel roof and attention to architectural detail. “It has some of the characteristics of traditional old gymnasiums with bowstring trusses and a barrel vault,” said Charles Piazza, who has been “Chip” to one and all since he was a kid. He was talking about the new Parkside Baptist Church Family Life Center in Denison, the most recent project for his company, Piazza Construction Ltd.. “What makes it unusual is an owner willing to invest that kind of money and energy in a facility that pretty much tops anything around here.”

The thirty-thousand square-foot, two-story building features a gym with full size basketball and volleyball courts, locker rooms and showers, a café, and a commercial kitchen on the first floor. “I’d say there’s not a restaurant in town with a better kitchen,” said Piazza.

On the upper level, a running track circles the gym below and is flanked by fellowship and meeting areas, classrooms, aerobics and exercise rooms with fitness equipment, craft rooms, and a youth room with video game stations. Translucent panels set in a barrel acoustical-decked ceiling flood the gym with natural light. “It’s one of the nicer projects we’ve done,” said Piazza. “The owner didn’t spare any expense on quality. It was all top flight.”

Piazza is living his building dreams, taking projects from conception to completion, and having the opportunity to “do it right,” to assert the craftsman’s pride in his work. “Most of the time it’s just about the square feet,” he said. “This time it was more than that.”

Call it sawdust in his veins. Chip Piazza had known he wanted to build things since he was a kid. There was no doubt construction would be his future. “My father, Pete, was a residential contractor, so I was around building all the time. I liked drawing house plans in the drafting program in high school. Building picked me, I didn’t pick it,” he said. “I pretty much knew what I wanted to be, being around construction so much as a kid.”

Piazza credits the influence of Phill Haddock as one of the factors that led him into a building profession. Haddock’s classes were unusual in that he expanded the educational experience beyond the classroom or the drafting lab. “I had many students who held full-time jobs at places like Texas Instruments, Fisher Controls and other businesses around here,” Haddock said. “I managed to get my students the red carpet tour at all of these industries. My kids got to go into places and look at what was going on and how drafting was related to real industry and construction.”

After high school, Piazza went to Texas A&M. In College Station, he majored in construction, and he spent summers with North Texas Construction in Denison. He never particularly wanted to build houses. He was looking for something bigger, so he decided commercial construction was the way to go. On graduation, his summer job turned into a full-time opportunity, and Piazza stayed with North Texas Construction for several years. But working for someone else was not on Piazza’s long term agenda.

“I went through the construction program at A&M and pretty much knew I wanted to have my own company. I was there trying to learn everything I could,” he said. “In 1995, I branched out and went on my own.”

Piazza started out doing industrial construction. “Industrial is mostly plant maintenance, at least that is the part we were into,” he said. “We did some interior renovations and add-ons, but most of it was maintenance work. Most of the time it turned out to be whatever [customers] didn’t want to do themselves or couldn’t motivate their guys to do.”

Fixing things that were broken was not what Piazza wanted to do either. He wanted to start at the bottom and build up, and since residential building didn’t interest him, that meant commercial construction, ground-up construction and major renovations of existing buildings. At the highest of the high end, think Cowboy Stadium or the Empire State Building. But you don’t start there.

“My first commercial job was for Sivells Bend ISD north of Gainesville in 1998. It was an addition to a gymnasium and a complete renovation of the existing gym that cost about $200,000.” Piazza said. “It was a start for us, and it went very well. The district was pleased, we were pleased and we managed to make a little money.”

Sivells Bend was the first job he got, not the first job he tried to get. “I bid on a lot of them. The ratio used to be one to ten, but right now, with the economy, it’s probably one to twenty.”

From that point on, despite the usual tough times most small businesses encounter along the way, buildings and business have been going up for Piazza. From one employee and $200,000 in annual sales, Piazza Construction Ltd. had grown to thirty employees and sales of $25.5 million in 2008.

Construction has been a good fit for Chip Piazza, with his love of building and the sense of accomplishment on seeing a finished product that never fades.

“My favorite part is to see structures come out of the ground. You go from concept on paper to actual tangible structures,” he said. “Being able to orchestrate all that and put it together is pretty challenging and fun at the same time.”

Some projects are routine, others challenging indeed. From banks to churches and schools to parks, each job has its own qualities. The Early Childhood Development Center for the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, a twenty-one thousand-square foot, $5.6 million project, was one of Piazza’s most demanding. “When you stepped into the building, you would have thought you were in Disneyland. The level of detail was over the top,” he said. The company’s biggest job to date was a $6.5 million middle school for the Alvord ISD in Wise County.

The pressure to meet deadlines is a constant challenge, and weather often offers another. “In the spring of 2004, we began a school project in Mansfield, and it didn’t stop raining on us all year long,” he said. “Even though we were contractually compensated for almost ninety inclement weather days during a twelve-month period, it was still extremely hard to be productive. We were constantly demoralized by the rain. Every day seemed to be one step forward and two steps back.”

And those jobs he wouldn’t do again? He has a simple answer: “Jobs that lost money.” And as for dream job, it’s not the next Cowboy Stadium or Empire State. “I’d like to get into multi-structured, mid-rise type stuff.” Mid-rise office buildings are interesting, but not the stuff real dreams are made on, and when pressed, Piazza expanded his sights. “This is pretty much pie in the sky, but I have always marveled at the old gothic cathedrals and have always thought it would be awesome to build a structure that lasts for five hundred-plus years.”

Piazza married his wife Rhonda in 2005. His son and daughter and one of Rhonda’s sons attend Denison High School. He loves the outdoors and makes regular trips to his ranch near Quanah to hunt and chill out. At heart, he’s a hometown boy. Most of his jobs lie within two hours of Denison, and he likes it that way. “I’ve done a job in Abilene, but we’ve been fortunate enough to keep everybody busy at home. At the request of clients, we’ve bid jobs in Round Rock and Austin, but we didn’t get them.”

In August, Piazza Construction moved into new quarters befitting one of the largest construction contractors in Texoma. Despite the economic downturn of the past year, Piazza’s business remains steady in a highly competitive market. “I’ve been blessed, that’s for sure,” he said. “I’m pleased I decided to stay here in Denison and put down roots,” and a few foundations as well.

Animal Sanctuaries: No-Kill Shelters

Martha Hovers has been operating Arfhouse in Sadler for twenty years, ever since she transformed her grandfather’s farm into a “no-kill” animal shelter. “No-kill” means just that. No dogs are ever put down at the shelter. At last count, the facility has 314 dogs that patrol the property and greet newcomers to the gate with an array of barks, howls and wagging tails.

Arfhouse is also an adoption agency for stray and surrendered dogs, pets which are brought in by their owners. Each year more than one hundred Arfhouse residents find new homes with new families.

Some are transfers to Sadler from a sister shelter, Arfhouse Chicago, affectionately referred to as Mutt Hut. These dogs, for various reasons such as their temperament or an illness, are unadoptable, but they too are given a warm bed and food to live out their lives. It’s a two-way swap, with Arfhouse Chicago helping find new homes in the Midwest for some of the Texas dogs.

See more photos from our visit to Arfhouse.

Arfhouse has an annual budget of $175,000, most of which goes to pay vet bills, two full time employees, and several part time workers. The shelter goes through about three hundred pounds of donated food per day, and they would not be able to sustain operations but for the generosity of dog lovers, local and nationwide, who contribute funds. Local vets also help by providing their services at a discount.

Hovers works twelve-hour days caring for her charges, but the rewards for a true animal lover are what keep her going. Seeing that her dogs are heading to happy homes and knowing they will be well cared for is all the thanks she needs.

Red River SPCA

Just a few miles west of Sherman lives Tommie Kirksmith, author of several books on horse riding and care, and the director of the Red River SPCA, another local no-kill shelter. Her shelter houses about twenty larger dogs, some cats, and a couple of horses. She also is proud of her own five-foot-long ball python.

She spends her days fielding calls, sometimes more than two dozen, and sometimes late at night after she has gone to bed, calls that range from allegations of animal cruelty (possibly requiring an on-site visit by her), to questions about animal illnesses or behavior. She is neither a vet nor an attorney, but she will offer advice to the caller as though the animal was her own.

Kirksmith moved here from Corpus Christi, where she spent seventeen years working with the Gulf Coast Humane Society. For a time, she did a show called “Pet Talk” on KXII TV, but while the effort to help viewers with questions about their animals was popular, the program also generated pet surrenders in numbers that threatened to overwhelm the shelter, so for now at least, the TV program is on hold.

The Red River SPCA also provides up-to-date vaccinations for the majority of the cats and kittens and some of the dogs offered for adoption at Pet Smart, in Sherman Town Center. Seventy animals have been placed in the last three months via this special partnership.

Another forty to seventy smaller dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens are sheltered in a Denison foster home run by Audrey Rowbotham. Almost every Saturday she sets up across from the Petsmart, in the Sherman Town Center, with a screened van, to display dogs and cats to potential owners.

Beverly and Scooter, a Success Story

In September of 2008, Beverly Nelson’s terrier, Mix, passed away. Mix had been adopted from a shelter. It wasn’t long before Nelson knew there was a void in her life that needed to be filled. On New Year’s Day, she returned to work to find a stray beagle behind her place of employment.

Nelson had heard of Arfhouse and called Martha Hovers to see if the stray could be taken there for refuge. While talking to Nelson, Hovers mentioned a new arrival, a small terrier named Scooter and suggested that Nelson come in and see the animal.

The next day, on Channel 32, Nelson saw a mug-shot of the newly-groomed Scooter, and it was love at first sight. The next Saturday Nelson and Scooter got together, and they have been hanging ever since. “He’s a great dog. There’s not a mean bone in his body. Oh, he can be stubborn, but he’s big-hearted,” she said.

Where to Find Adoptable Pets

Animal Refuge Foundation (ARF)

Located in Sadler west of Sherman is the nation’s third largest care-for-life, no-kill canine sanctuary and home to more than 300 dogs. ARF plans to open a branch for cats in the near future. Donations of dry and canned dog and cat food are always needed. Pet food donations can be dropped at Neimann Publication at 201 E. Houston in Sherman. All donations are taxdeductible. ARF is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Find out more online at www.arfhouse.org.

Red River SPCA

Red River SPCA is an independent no-kill shelter run entirely by volunteers and coordinated by Tommie Kirksmith-Newman. The group rescues and rehabilitates animals, investigates abuse calls, answers questions, adopts out animals, and helps owners get low-cost spaying and neutering. Red River SPCA rescues dogs and cats, livestock and creatures in the wild. Most of the animals are kept at Kirksmith-Newman’s home at 1215 Cooke County Road 140 in Whitesboro. In lieu of adoption fees, the Red River SPCA asks for tax-deductible donations. Some of Red River SPCA’s animals can be seen online at www. petfinder.com. Foster homes are always needed to provide temporary care. To adopt or to offer foster care, call (903) 668-6309.

Do you have a rescue animal? Tell us about your new friend. Click on Comments below.

Sherman Animal Shelter

Operated by the City of Sherman, the Sherman Animal Shelter is located east of Sherman at 1800 E. Ida Road. Shelter hours are 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Saturdays. Visit the shelter or call the shelter at (903) 892-7255. Animals for adoption can be viewed online at www.petfinder.com.

Denison Animal Shelter – Happy Hearts

Denison’s animal shelter is located inside the Morton Street Animal Hospital at 2500 W. Morton Street, Denison 75020 (903) 465-4714. Hours are Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 8 a.m. until noon and 1 until 5 p.m. Adoption fees are $55 for puppies and adult dogs, and $45 for kittens and adult cats. The fee includes the animal’s rabies vaccination, veterinarian checkup, and spaying or neutering. No website found.

Barn Cats, Inc.

Barn Cats places sterilized feral (nondomesticed) cats into a barn or similar location as an alternative to toxic pest control. Barn Cats is a non-profit organization. A donation is requested. For information call (972) 315-2875 or visit online at www.barncats.org.

Find more area shelters visit www.petfinder.com

Perrin Air Force Base: 1941-1971

The spring of 1941, Europe was eighteen months into a resumption of the hostilities that were little more than act two of the drama begun in 1914. The cast of characters was much the same, but the plot had developed twists that would bring revulsion to even those hardened by the carnage of the first bloodletting.

America, behind her two broad oceans, was at an uneasy peace. Despite the alarmist warnings of the isolationists and heartfelt rallies by groups like America First, few of those whose job it was to plan for the nation’s security felt the United States could much longer remain deaf to the tocsins of war.

The United States had no separate air force. Instead, the army and navy split the responsibility for military aviation. The land-based air arm, the U. S. Army Air Corps, was under manned, poorly equipped and hardly ready to take on the powers that threatened America. But that was changing. The country, the government, and the military had finally awakened to the need to rearm.

In 1939, led by General Henry Arnold, the Air Corps began an expansion that doubled the number of air groups from fifteen to thirty by the end of 1940. New airplanes to replace the aging bombers, transports, and pursuit planes were in various stages of design and testing. Now the growing air service needed fliers.

Congress had passed the first peace time draft in 1940 and extended it for another year in 1941 by one vote in the House of Representatives. Facing the draft and a year in the army, many young men looked to the sky as a better and more adventurous way to serve their country. There was no shortage of would-be aviation cadets. There was a shortage of places to train them.

Community leaders in Grayson County led by County Judge Jake Loy saw opportunity in the wide open skies over North Texas and in the spring of 1941 began talking up plans to bring the Army Air Corps to Grayson County. In March, Loy traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with army and War Department officials and enlist the aid of the county’s representative in congress, Sam Rayburn of Bonham, recently elected Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Loy already had provided the government with a wealth of information about the proposed site and other factors on which the approval of the project would hinge, and he came home with more than just promises. In April, 1941, the Air Corps came to Sherman to meet with local officials and inspect a site for a proposed primary training school.

An Air Corps board met a month later and wrote a report recommending the establishment of the flying school. On June 10, Grayson County voters agreed to a $60,000 bond issue to purchase the land furnish railroad rights of way, highways and utilities to the field. The one dollar a year lease agreement between Grayson County and the United States Government was signed on July 1, 1941, and construction on the air field started that same week. Major Robert J. Warren, project officer and temporary base commander, arrived on August 9, and five enlisted men from Goodfellow Field in San Angelo came to Sherman ten days later.

Throughout the balance of the summer and the fall, work proceeded apace. By the first week in December, most of the buildings were either finished or nearing completion, most of the roads had been paved and the water tower had been finished.

On the first Sunday in December, there were 90 officers and 545 enlisted men on duty at the Grayson Basic Flying School. Half a world away, more than four times that number of American soldiers, sailors and Marines would die in the few terrible hours that introduced America to war.

After Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor moved everything, including the training schedules, up a notch or two. The first class of flight cadets arrived on December 16. The eighty-one would be airmen started training on December 22. On February 20, 1942, the field recorded its first fatalities with a crash that killed Cadet Quinto Perkins and instructor Cyril Van Valkenberg. The first class graduated three days later, moving on to advanced training at another base. That February 23 also saw the dedication of the field and the Grayson Basic Flying School officially became Perrin Field.

Colonel Elmer D. Perrin was a Texan, from San Antonio. He joined the army in 1917 and received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service in July, 1918. Perrin stayed with the Army Air Corps following the Armistice and the end of the Great War in Europe. He became one of the aviators who dedicated their careers to proving the worth of military aviation under the leadership of an iconoclastic brigadier-general named Billy Mitchell.

In 1939 Perrin became the service’s representative at the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company in Baltimore. Perrin got the silver oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel in the spring of 1941 and was involved in testing and developing the B-26 Martin Marauder medium bomber. The Marauder was considered by many fliers a complex and difficult airplane to handle, with a high landing speed and overly sensitive controls. It was a controversial airplane from the time it was accepted by the army. History proved its worth, however, and the B-26 became the most significant medium bomber used in the European war.

On June 21, 1941, Perrin and A. J. Bowman, a civilian inspector, took off from Martin Field in a new B-26. Shortly after takeoff, the plane went into a sudden dive and crashed, killing both men. The Martin Company’s investigation of the crash suggested the plane had been sabotaged. Posthumously, the army promoted Elmer Perrin to colonel.

A year after it received its first class of cadets, Perrin Field had a troop strength of more than 4,000. This number dropped to the more normal 2,800 as more training facilities opened in Texas and other parts of the country. Mid 1943 saw cadet classes of 300 to 400 students, with more than 500 mechanics and technicians working in twenty-four hour shifts to maintain the BT-13s and AT-6s assigned to the field. By the close of the war in 1945, Perrin Field had graduated more than ten thousand student pilots, from the United States and five foreign countries, Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines and Ecuador. The base was also home to another group of foreign visitors, albeit unwilling ones, two hundred German POWs had made Perrin home while they worked on the Denison Dam.

Pilot training ended early in 1946, and even though an instructor school had been set up to maintain flight instructor proficiency, the base was deactivated in November and became a storage facility. When Perrin came to life again, on April 1, 1948, it was part of the newly created United States Air Force. It had a new name, Perrin Air Force Base, new blue uniforms and an old mission, basic single-engine pilot training. For a time, in 1952, the base offered advanced single-engine training and hosted training for the B-26 medium bomber.

Charles L. Brown, left, premed studies at Rice Institute in 1951 and volunteered for the U.S. Army. After training at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, he served in Korea as an infantryman. “I liked the military, but I didn’t like carrying a pack and a rifle, so when I got an early out in 1954, I transferred to the air force,” Brown said. As an air force staff sergeant, he came to Perrin in 1963 to teach small arms marksmanship.

“I was an instructor at Lackland AFB before I came up here. I went through the USAF marksmanship school and worked down there for five years. I transferred up here because my wife was from this area,” Brown said. He spent three more years training shooters before hearing problems prompted him to change jobs. Calling on his premed training at Rice and the continuing education college-level courses he had taken while in the service, Brown became a pharmacy technician.

Brown left Perrin in 1968 and went to Turkey. He retired in 1972, came back to Sherman and went back to school to become a nurse. He worked for fourteen years at Wilson N. Jones Memorial Hospital as a nurse anesthetist. Today he lives in Sherman and is the proud owner of a restored Vietnam-era army ambulance. Brown and his big white truck with the red crosses can be seen regularly at parades and civic events.

1950 and Onward

The roar of jets cracked the skies of North Texas in the early 50s. Larger and longer runways were constructed, and T-33 trainers and F-86D Sabres could be seen on the Perrin flight lines. In 1962, the base became home of the 4780th Air Defense training wing and the largest deployment of F-102 Delta Dagger interceptors in the country. Utilizing nearby Lake Texoma, the Air Force set up a support and ejection training and survival school at the base. During its run, the school graduated more than eleven thousand air crew, including seventeen NASA astronauts. In all, forty-nine future space men passed through Perrin for one purpose or another over the years.

Ever encroaching civilian aircraft traffic from the new Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport that opened in 1974 and changing dynamics in pilot training ended Perrin’s life as a military base. On June 30, 1971, thirty years to the day after the Army Air Corps signed the lease to 1160 acres of Texas prairie for the Grayson Basic Flying School, the military’s involvement at the field ended.

When sixteen-year-old John Elkins left his home in Commerce, Texas, in 1945 to join the air force with his twin brother, he never thought he would end his career almost in his old back yard. “We finished basic training at Shepherd AFB in Wichita Falls and then went to aircraft maintenance school in Mississippi,” he recalled. “Then we went to Wheeler Field in Hawaii, working on P-47s.”

Elkins stayed in aircraft maintenance, rising to crew chief and moving from World War II fighters to the air force’s first jet bomber, the B-47 Stratojet, and then to its first supersonic bomber, the B-58 Hustler, at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth. “When I came back from a tour in Korea, I requested Carswell again and worked on B-52s. Our unit rotated in and out of Guam, and in 1965 launched the strikes against Vietnam.”

After a four-year tour in Oklahoma City as a recruiting supervisor, Elkins came to Perrin. “I worked about a month on the flight line as an aircraft maintenance control supervisor, and then the wing commander called me in and asked me to be the wing sergeant major. It was two years of the finest duty I ever had. About six months before I retired, we learned Perrin was closing, so I just went ahead and put in for my retirement. I retired on January 1, 1971.”Elkins stayed in Grayson County and now lives in Luella. He is one of the founders of the Perrin Field Historical Society and the Perrin Field Museum.

When Perrin Air Force Base closed, the property, by then more than 1,800 acres in size, reverted to the county, becoming the Grayson County Airport. In 2007 it was renamed North Texas Regional Airport – Perrin Field.