Kent Black: Stepping Up, Giving Back

“I like to build things,” said Kent Black. He built a log house in Tanglewood, the first home that he and his wife Karen had at Lake Texoma. On the K Bar K Ranch northwest of Pottsboro, the spot the two of them now call home, he built, or rather supervised, the building of the three-story Georgian home with the roof top cupola that offers a view of the lake. These days, as chairman of the Reba Ranch House building committee for the Texoma Health Foundation, Black is building again. The end of one of the photo shoots for this story found him climbing the steep slope north of the Ranch House site in the bitterly cold December wind to take a picture of the progress for an upcoming committee meeting.

In the past, Black has built radios, top secret communication systems used by the U.S. Navy to communicate with submarines, and other types of high-end electronic wizardry. At least he helped to build and run the companies that made those things. And at the end of a long and productive career in business, he built rocket ships to take men to the stars. Ok, a little poetic license there, but Black was the first CEO of the United Space Alliance, a joint venture between Rockwell International and Lockheed Martin formed in 1996 at the behest of NASA to consolidate Space Shuttle programs under one prime contractor. Not bad for a farm boy from Illinois with a yen for electronics.

Starting Out, Moving Up

Black’s dedication to stepping up and giving back grows out of his roots on a Midwestern farm in an era when civic responsibility was part and parcel of life in a small community. “My dad was a farmer from many generations of farmers before him. When I was born, he was living in a tenant house on my grandfather’s farm about fifty miles north of St. Louis near Taylorville, Illinois,” said Black. “We lived in different places, but always on a farm.”

He came of age in Carrollton, Greene County, Illinois. This was in the 1950s, when for a teenager in small town, American life really was about sox hops, pep rallies, hotrods and drive-ins, at least some of the time. At center, Kent Black anchored the offensive line for the Carrollton Hawks’ split-T and called the defensive signals from linebacker in an Oklahoma 5-4 defense. “We had a couple of pretty good teams, but when I was a senior, and was the co-captain, we were sort of mediocre.”

Being the captain of the football team with a cheerleader for a girlfriend was the stuff dreams were made of in those days, and Kent Black succeeded on both points. He was a junior and Karen Jones was a freshman at Carrollton High when they met and started dating, and three years later, the summer between his junior and senior years at the University of Illinois, they were married.

“I always wanted to build things,” Black said of his decision to be an engineer. “I grew up with Erector sets and building things in the basement shop. As far back as I can remember that’s what I wanted to do.”

He got that chance when he finished school and took a job with Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Black’s first assignment at Collins was working on the radios for NASA’s Gemini project. “I ended up being the project engineer for one of the radios on the Gemini capsule when I was three years out of college. It was a backup radio that they never used, but I was thrilled anyway.”

In 1972, Rockwell International, a mega conglomerate with products and operations as diverse as space craft, commercial electronics, automobile components, printing presses and more, acquired Collins Radio. For Kent Black, becoming part of a bigger company meant more and bigger opportunities.

The job took Black to Dallas in 1976, and his career took a different direction, away from “real engineering” and into management and marketing. “Much to my surprise, I liked it,” he said. “I liked working with the customer. I took over a small division of Collins in Richardson, and for the first time it was like having my own company to run, marketing, finance, engineering, production, all of it.”

The relocation to Big D was an eye opener for Black in more ways than just his career. “In the late 60s I came to Dallas pretty regularly, and I developed some impressions of Texas that were pretty negative. Collins was a very frugal company. They’d put you on a Gulfstream, fly you down to Addison Airport, where the company bus would pick you up and take you to a hotel. If you wanted to eat, you ate there. There was no rental car. The bus took you to the plant in the morning, so you never saw anything. The impression was that there were no trees, just little boxy houses, so I had the impression that Dallas was a pretty barren place.”

That changed when Black became a Texas resident. “We loved it immediately,” he said. “It wasn’t that much different from what we knew in Iowa.” No, Texas wasn’t barren, and it wasn’t all that dry either.

“The very first day I went to work after I moved here, I went to a meeting my predecessor had arranged at Tanglewood. That resolved the tree questions, and then I saw the lake. I had had a pontoon boat on the Cedar River up in Iowa, and I stood in the Tanglewood Tower and looked down at all those boats at Lowe’s Marina and said, ‘This is where I want to be.’”

Kent Black quickly became a living exemplar of the line, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as quick as I could.” The next twenty years included two short sojourns in California, but Black’s heart and home were in Texas, and he always came back.

Giving Back and Growing

The climb up the corporate ladder, taking on ever-increasing responsibilities for ever-increasingly complex and important projects, did not leave much time for community involvement. But this started to change when he came back to Dallas following his first relocation to California. “When I came back, I took over all the commercial electronics and then defense electronics, and it was at that time, ’81 through ’86, that I started getting involved in other things.”

Black started working with the Boy Scouts and the United Way, but his biggest contribution came with Association of Higher Education, an organization of all the colleges and universities in the Metroplex. “What really got me intrigued was the combination of the association and the University of Texas at Dallas. Being with a technical company, I recognized the benefits of having an engineering school nearby. Engineers need to be able to continue their education. The best place for them to go at the time was UT-Arlington, but it was not really convenient to everyone. So I led an effort to get an engineering school at UT-Dallas.”

This involved working with the state coordinating board, which had final approval on curriculum changes and, more importantly, working with the local politics of the thing. Education, particularly higher education, is a very political beast, with schools and communities guarding their turf vigorously, ever wary of someone or some institution seeking to intrude on their domain.

“UT-Arlington didn’t really want UTDallas competing with them. I made a lot of trips to Fort Worth for meetings with the chairman of Tandy [the Fort Worth based hobby and computer company, owner of Radio Shack] trying work out compromises on what we would do at UTD.” As a result of the work of Black and others, UTD got its engineering school in 1985, and “It has been incredibly successful,” Black added.

Black’s career was incredibly successful too. As he did “a pretty good job” with each assignment delegated to him, he moved upward from one position to another. During his thirty-four years with Rockwell, he was the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Space Systems, Rocketdyne, Collins Commercial Avionics, Defense Systems, and Graphic Systems businesses. He was also chairman of Rockwell’s Systems Development Center Board and a member of the company’s Corporate Strategy Committee. The company didn’t have a “president” in those days, so when Black moved up to the top spot, his title was Chairman of the Board, Executive Vice President and CEO.

On retirement from Rockwell in 1996, he accepted the job as top man at United Space Alliance, a joint venture between Rockwell and Lockheed developed to pull all the responsibility for the Space Shuttle under one management team. It was not a job he had sought. It sought him.

“Rockwell and Lockheed had been butting heads over things for fifteen years, and when they finally got together, they couldn’t agree on someone to run it. Since I was a relative newcomer on the Rockwell side, I was acceptable to be the CEO of the new company.”

Black served in that capacity for almost two years before retiring again, spurred by what seems a widely shared desire of grandparents to spend more time with grandchildren, and, “I finally got sick of all the travel.” After a number of years commuting between Lake Texoma and California for Rockwell, Black and his wife put in another stint on the road, or rather in the air, between North Texas and a condo in Houston, where United Space Alliance had its headquarters.

Coming Home and Going Back to Work

Black has had a presence on Lake Texoma since 1982. “I bought a houseboat, but after a few years, Karen got tired of bouncing around in the boat at night, so I agreed to build a log cabin in Tanglewood in ’86. In 1992, the Blacks acquired the property that became the K-Bar-K ranch and built the house they now live in.

Building the log cabin came with a bonus, a son. Well, a son in all but blood, anyway. “I’d just graduated from high school and just started at Paris Junior College, when my girlfriend’s dad asked me if I’d help him erect a log cabin kit he had sold Kent Black,” said Scott Galyon, who was from Roxton in Lamar County. “That was in 1985. I said yes, came over there, and basically never left.”

Galyon came to Tanglewood each weekend to help Black finish out the cabin. At the same time, Black was buying property around Pottsboro for what would eventually be his retirement home and ranch. “In 1987, I got married,” Galyon said, “and moved over here full time to help Kent on the place, and I was also taking engineering classes at UT-Dallas.”

By Gaylon’s reckoning, his junior year at UDT was, “the worst year of my life.” He was unable to get into a number of the classes he needed to take, and he concluded that engineering was not for him. “Looking back, I decided that just wasn’t what the Lord wanted me to be,” he said. “So I stopped doing that and got an agriculture degree from A&M-Commerce.”

He combined his redirected education with on-the-job training and now serves as the ranch manager for the Blacks, working with two full-time and two part-time hands. “I’m a blessed person,” he said. “I have a wonderful family, and I work with people I love.”

But there is more to his relationship with the Blacks than business. “He’s become like a son,” said Kent Black, “and his two daughters are our granddaughters.” The Galyons live on the ranch, as does the Black’s oldest daughter Elizabeth. Daughter Nancy lives in Anna, and has two daughters of her own.

The K Bar K, spread over 1,400 acres, is a “cow-calf” operation, with a base breeding herd of mother cows and bulls. Each year’s calves are sold between the ages of six and twelve months, along with culled cows and bulls, except for some heifers retained for breeding herd replacements. The pride of the spread is Gentleman Jim, a 2,500 pound bull about the size of a Volkswagen.

“I’m busier now than I was when I was working,” said Black, and some of the reasons are the duties he takes on for various groups in the county. “The biggest thing right now is the construction of the Reba’s Ranch House,” he said. “I’m the board member responsible for overseeing the construction.

“Steve Cook, a realtor here in town, and I became friends years ago, and in 2006, he asked me to joined the TMC Foundation board. Because it had been a public hospital, when it was sold, the net proceeds of the sale had to stay public, so they were transferred to the new foundation, which was renamed the Texoma Health Foundation.

“They elected me finance chairman because of my business background, and we started getting the finances in better shape. Then we decided we wanted a really top notch executive to run it, and we started looking. We hired Michelle Lemming in 2007, and that’s the best thing we ever did. She is outstanding. Not only is she a good promoter and organizer, but she can really do the numbers as well. She’s really good on the financial side.”

Black’s experience and recognized skills in many areas make him a goto guy when local groups are looking for help. Before the THF, he served on the Grayson County Airport Board. “Since aviation was in my background, I thought that would fun,” he said. “I was on the board for two three-year terms. I was chairman the last term and then had to step down, but I served again. That time, after about a year, the county decided to merge the board with the Regional Mobility Authority. I was on both boards, so when they merged them, my two jobs became one.”

RMAs had been created by constitutional amendment in 2001. Their status as independent governmental entities gave them authority over all manner of transportation-related operations. And more importantly, they could raise money in much the same way more traditional public organizations such as county governments could. The Grayson Regional Mobility Authority is one of only six in the state.

Typically, the extension of U.S. Highway 289 from Southmayd to Pottsboro and beyond would have been a project for the GRMA, “but we had no money and no staff,” said Black, “so all of us came to the conclusion to just let the county do it, and we’d try to help out on the side. Gene Short, one of the county commissioners, took the lead, and I helped negotiate the contract.”

The Builder

To the community projects they embrace, Kent Black and other former business leaders like him, bring the well developed habit of getting things done. They are all builders in one form or another. Their organizational skills are important as is their ability to understand how the many small segments of a project come together to produce the whole. Even more important are their motivational talents, the ability to share their vision and to help others see the value in the goal and work for it as well.

Kent Black, who once reached for the stars, now brings that vision to improvements that directly affect the lives of his neighbors—a better health care system, improvements in education, enhanced ways of getting from here to there, and something as basic as a new fire truck or ambulance for his rural community.

“I know it sounds a little corny,” he said, “but I’m a great believer in America and the way we do things here. The freedoms we have, the opportunities we have. I come from a small family farm, and look at all the opportunities I’ve had. You can’t do that everywhere in the world.

“I really believe in the freedoms that are built into our system, starting with the constitution. I believe in the capitalistic, free enterprise system we have. There’s no question in my mind that we have the best free enterprise system in the world, which is one of the reasons we lead in so many ways.

“I just believe you should put something back into the system. And of course, some aspects of it are just fun. Building the Ranch House, I love it, even though I get frustrated sometimes. I just like to build things.”

Editor’s Note: Texoma is fortunate in having a wealth of people who have accomplished much before retiring and moving here to live. For people like that, finishing one career is often only the prelude to starting another. They bring the habit of achievement to everything they undertake, and more often than not their skill, talent, and drive are turned to giving back to the community they now call home.

Things That Matter, People Who Care

After more than 500 shows, Dennis McCuistion and Niki Nicastro still do programs about “…things that matter, people who care…”.

About ten minutes into the program a loud, chirping fire alarm went off in the studio at KERA-TV, Channel 13, and everything came to a halt. There was no fire, just noise. After a minute or two, the alarm stopped, only to start again in a few moments. It was ten minutes before things were sorted out.

There was a benefit in the mishap, however. The guest, a man in a gray suit and baggy brown socks, had been hit with an attack of flop sweat when the red light on the camera blinked on. The perspiration had beaded up on his face, and his forehead was glistening. The interruption gave the makeup woman an opportunity to come on the set and dry him off. Taking off his jacket and complaining loudly about the heat from the studio lights, the guest, who had been thirty minutes late for makeup and was grumpy, decided to finish the show sans coat.

The floor director politely pointed out that when the show aired, it would appear that the jacket had suddenly—magically it would seem to the viewers—disappeared, so the coat went back on. Finally, all was put back in order, the imaginary fire extinguished, or at least the alarm thought so, the guest acclimated to the lights, which weren’t all that hot after all, and the taping started again.

The host, Dennis McCuistion, who has been doing this sort of thing for twenty years and is well schooled in the vagaries of television, was not particularly bothered. He watched the rerun of the tape up to the point the alarm sounded, and when the floor director gave the countdown and the action sign, he looked into the camera and restated the question the guest had been answering. The guest, who was prepared to name names in the collapse of the housing market, soldiered on, and in forty-five minutes or so another McCuistion Program was in the can.

The McCuistion Program

The McCuistion Program—twenty-six shows a year for twenty years and counting on the Dallas PBS outlet, KERA—is available to PBS affiliates all over the country. Though the look and the format are familiar enough, the program is not quite typical for the medium or the venue, nor is Dennis McCuistion as recognizable as some other Public Broadcasting faces, such as Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose, or Tavis Smiley.

Part of this lack of wider recognition may be the show’s attitude. McCuistion and The McCuistion Program lean more toward the conservative side of the political and social spectrums (McCuistion says his bent is more libertarian) than the mine run of political-opinion programming on this taxpayer-subsidized network. His shows also are lower keyed—or at least have a lower decibel rating—than many of the shows featuring what passes for discussion on television today. While he strives to present multiple sides of an issue, McCuistion disdains the “in your face” style of ballyhoo favored by some broadcasters and avoids the loud, the magniloquent, and the artificially flamboyant in subjects and in contributors.

More often than not, The McCuistion Program is “of the news” rather than “in the news,” and the theme which rises quickly, blows hard, and disappears like a summer thunderstorm is rarely on the agenda. The program is summed up in its defining phrase, offered at the end of each broadcast: “Talking about things that matter with people who care.”

When he is not traveling and working as banking consultant and motivational speaker, Dennis McCuistion hangs his hat in a house overlooking Lake Texoma. The journey from the small Texas town of Forney to sunsets on the lake has been an interesting one. He came from a family of bankers and followed their path after college, at least for a while. “I’m a recovering banker, a recovering bank CEO,” he says each time he describes his background. It’s a good line and usually brings a smile from the listener, particularly these days when bankers’ images could use a little burnishing.

In 1983, he forsook the bank, but not necessarily the knowledge he had gained in the industry. He was living in Las Colinas and working as a banking consultant—“That’s a banker between jobs, or someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is”—and traveling the country as a speaker on banking and economic topics. And then along came DART.

The Dallas Area Rapid Transit system was one of dozens of metropolitan public transportation developments that rose out of the environmental and energy concerns of the 1970s. Dallas, whose citizens, like those in other cities outside the Northeast corridor, preferred private cars and pickup trucks to aging and happenstance bus service, was being lobbied to build integrated rail lines and invest in new buses and expanded public transportation, with the generous backing of Washington, of course.

“It was a controversial issue,” said McCuistion. “I did some homework on the question and decided it was a bad idea philosophically and economically, and through a series of events, I became the leading voice trying to educate the public as to why this was a bad idea.” He was on the point and suddenly in the public eye. “I was on television a lot, wrote a lot of op-ed pieces for the Dallas Morning News and the Times-Herald, and debated many of the proponents.”

McCuistion’s facility in defense of his ideas came to the attention of John McKay, the general manager of the Dallas CBS Television affiliate, Channel 4. “About a month before the election, McKay did an on-air editorial supporting DART and challenged the audience to call him if they had a different opinion.” McCuistion made the call.

“He [McKay] said write it down, type it up, bring it down to the station. We’ll put it on the teleprompter, and we’ll tape it and run it after the ten-thirty news.” When McCuistion sailed through the taping on the first take, the crew took notice and passed the word to McKay. “Long story short, we became friends.”

McCuistion lost the DART fight, but that didn’t keep him from speaking up on issues he found interesting, important or controversial. A couple of years later, he was having lunch with McKay, who by then had left Channel 4 and bought his own station, KDFI-TV, Channel 27, a low-budget Dallas independent that ran a mixed bag of reruns, public affairs shows, religious programs and leftovers from the three big networks. Before the check arrived, McKay suggested they do a pilot for a local issues talk show.

“The first program we did was on abortion,” recalled McCuistion. “We had a lady who was the number one supporter of abortion rights and a preacher who was absolutely against it, and it was awful. I don’t have a copy of the show, and I hope one never turns up.” Awful, but with promise, was more like it, but it was 1985, Texas was in economic turmoil as the oil and gas business spiraled downward, and promise or not, there wasn’t any money to push beyond the pilot, so the idea all but died aborning.

Enter Niki

Niki Nicastro grew up a “Nu Yawker” in a family of college professors and journalists. Her plan was to follow one of these career paths, too, but that future never quite materialized. Married young, with two children—and now five grandchildren—she sold insurance and commercial real estate, moving south to Atlanta just in time to get in on the boom that made suburban Gwinnett County the fastest-growing spot in the country for a while.

Her next move was west to San Diego, and it coincided with a significant career shift. She had moved from selling tangibles, real estate, to selling intangibles, ideas, and had become very active in the National Speakers Association. Speaking out was the connection that brought Dennis and Niki together for the first time in 1983 at a speaker’s workshop in San Francisco.

“She doesn’t remember the first meeting,” said Dennis, “but then we met again in February ’86, in Santa Fe. I was on crutches and in a cast from a racquetball accident and sitting at a banquet table with her. What kind of person would ask a person in a cast to dance?”

The kind Dennis McCuistion would marry, apparently. “She came through Dallas on her way from Chicago to San Diego in June, and we met again at a convention in July.” The romance was of the whirlwind variety, often at long range, as the pair’s schedules often found them at opposite ends of the country, but they finally got together long enough to get married in June 1987.

Let’s Do a Show

“On one our first dates, we were talking about the future, and the conversation came round to having a television program,” recalled Niki. “That sounded like nothing I wanted to be involved with, but he convinced me that we could make more of an impact on television talking about issues, and reach more people than we ever could writing, consulting or speaking.”

The couple eventually took their ideas back to John McKay, raised some money, and in 1988, with Niki as the producer and Dennis as the front man and host, produced seven shows for KDFITV. The first show was on anxiety and panic attacks and was shot, as were the others, in the studios of KERA-TV, the Dallas PBS affiliate. “We had a lot of people with anxiety problems in the audience,” said Dennis, “and one woman on the front row had an accident during the program. She had an incidence of incontinence all over the chair.” It was a somewhat embarrassing welcome to audience-participation television.

The KDFI shows reached a limited audience, but a few people for whom such things mattered were watching. KERA invited McCuistion to appear on a local discussion show to discuss a slate of proposed amendments to the state constitution, and he agreed. During the production, offhand conversations led to introductions, led to meetings, led to “my sister-in-law knows someone in the station management,” led to “why don’t you talk to…,” led to “well, we like your ideas…,” led to “if we had any money…,” led to “if you can provide a show, we’ll provide the air time.”

It took about a year for all the “led-tos” to be resolved, and in December 1989, the first episodes of The McCuistion Program were taped. Broadcasting began in January 1990. Apparently there was no budget for a really snappy name. That omission was resolved in 1994, when the couple organized The Foundation for Responsible Television, a not-for-profit, 501(c) (3) corporation to facilitate their expanded efforts and ideas.

Two decades later, the beat goes on. Over the years the programs have talked about things that matter—leadership in America, the California energy crisis, who should govern Jerusalem, vouchers in public education, English-only vs. bilingualism, and more, with people who care—Steve Forbes, Sam Donaldson, Jim Lehrer, Robert Reich, and a host of others, some well known, others merely well informed.

The programs are often serious, but not always. “One of the best shows we ever did was on the healing power of humor,” said Dennis. “And there was one on over achievers with an eighty-year-old who was in triathlons. We do serious things, but we also have a lot of fun.”

The Texoma Connection

Some years ago, the McCuistions decided they needed a retreat from stresses of travel, television production, and generally life in the big city. “We had friends up at Lake Texoma. We came up to visit often, and we got to thinking that it would be nice to have a place close to home for some downtime. We’d looked in New Mexico, around Taos, but that was too far, so we started looking for a little cottage on the lake,” recalled Niki.

Not being from around here, Niki didn’t altogether understand that the concept of “cottage” doesn’t quite translate into Texan. Cabin, sure. Shack, definitely, but cottage, not so much. “We were with a realtor going to see a little house on the lake when, as we turned on to the street, I see this ‘For Sale’ sign out of the corner of my eye and said ‘Stop the car! This is it!’”

The “it” was a spacious, multilevel home with decks that looked out over sunsets on the lake. The McCuistions made a deal with the owners that very day and in short order gave up life in the city for life on the lake, full, not part time.

Meanwhile, Back in the Studio

Dennis McCuistion still lives on Texoma, but not Niki. The couple split a few years ago, and Dennis has remarried. But while the McCuistion’s domestic situation changed, their professional situation did not. The McCuistion Program continues, with plans for a year-long celebration of season twenty in the works. After two decades of questions, opinions and investigations, both McCuistions still have lists of shows they very much want to do, as well as shows that were ill advised from the start and shows they would like to forget.

The Good

“I’ve wanted to do a series on homosexuality in American,” said Dennis, after some thought. “There are so many sides to it, the religious questions, the biological and social aspect of it, the parenting question, the military issue, and of course the problems with AIDS. It’s such an important topic, and in my opinion it has never gotten a proper examination. We’ve never had the funding to do it right, because it’s going to take more than just what we can do now.”

At the top of Niki’s to-do list is a subject she battles often in her role as producer and facilitator of an issues and opinion television show. “Political correctness,” she said. “It’s hit me personally so many times. We did a show on it once, but it wasn’t as important as it is now. We are going to do something on this topic, and we are going to make a huge splash.”

The Bad

“There are only two programs we have taped that didn’t air,” said Dennis. “One of them had to do with AIDS. I still think it’s one of the best programs we ever did, although I know Niki disagrees with me on that.

“We had a guy on the panel who was gay and had found the Lord, and the church he was in had convinced him that he was no longer gay. He said it on the air, and that didn’t go well with some people here. The show wasn’t about being gay; it was about AIDS, which affects everybody, but Channel 13 didn’t like this guy’s perspective, and they decided not to air it.”

“The other show was about immigration,” said Niki. “A Hispanic man in the audience asked a question or made a comment, and Dennis asked him if he was here legally and all of a sudden there were boos and hisses, and that program didn’t air.”

The Ugly

“We did one on hospice, which is a very important topic, but we had a guy on I knew was a loose cannon,” said Dennis. “He was a preacher; he had had every conceivable disease himself and had gotten over it, and he ministered in hospice day in and day out. We were there to talk about hospice, so I told him not to talk about all the diseases he’d had, or allegedly had, and the role of the Lord in curing him, and of course, he went straight to that subject.”

“I knew that guy was trouble,” said Niki. “I should have put my foot down about him,” and then, “We did two programs on the Kennedy assassination. We were asked not to do them by the station, which was planning a big retrospective on the subject, but we did them anyway. They weren’t great; I didn’t want to air them, but…”

“I thought they were just wonderful,” said Dennis. “…part one aired, and KERA said, “‘Maybe you shouldn’t air part two.’”

“But we aired it.”

“No we didn’t.”

“I’ll tell you what happened. We had a guy who had written a book…”

“It was biased, it was slanted, it was—”

“It was a great show.”

It was time to agree to disagree.

Most of the time the two McCuistions do agree, of course, but the creative battles in which they engage are part of the reason they work well together and the programs they produce are successfully entertaining, informative, and provocative. But sometimes even that synergism is not enough to overcome outside forces that cannot or will not agree to disagree. The case in point is the most monumental project the team has undertaken as yet. It is primarily Niki’s story.

At War Over Islam

“A few days after 9/11, I got a call from Channel 13, asking if we could put together a program in a few days about what had happened. I said yes. We did a one-hour show called ‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Terrorism’ very quickly and won an award for it.”

The program impressed more than just the members of the awards committee. Hatton W. Sumners was an Arkansas native who moved to Dallas in 1895 and read law in the office of the Dallas County District Attorney. Elected to the state legislature in 1913 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1915, Sumners represented the Fifth Congressional District until 1947, when he retired. Two years later he started the foundation which bears his name. Sumners died in 1962.

In the early 1990s, the Hatton W. Sumners Foundation became a principal supporter of the McCuistions and their Foundation for Responsible Television. Impressed by the program they had put together days after 9/11, Sumners officials asked if Niki and Dennis would be interested in doing an extended-length documentary exploring Islam and the religious conflicts that had so dramatically burst into public awareness with the attacks in New York and Washington.

It was a no brainer. “I told them, ‘In a New York minute, I’d do that,’” Niki said and set things in motion. “We brought in Phil Smith, who shoots and edits for us. I wrote a grant, we got the money, and we started interviews from Baghdad to Lebanon in 2003.”

The McCuistions and Smith spent a month on the ground in the Middle East doing interviews and research and shooting footage for the project. “We did our best to look at both sides of the question, to figure out what were the issues and how we got to 9/11,” said Niki. After the initial investigations, Dennis came home and Niki moved on to Turkey to explore how Islam functioned in the more secular democracy of the Turks. Then it was back to Dallas for more research, interviews and the labor intensive process of turning hours of video and audio into a cogent, enlightening and balanced presentation.

Before the project came together, there were more trips to the Middle East as well as multiple excursions to New York and Washington. All in all, the McCuistions and Smith invested more than a year and a half in the program, which was scheduled to air on KERA in four segments, covering topics from Islam and Democracy to the Role of Women in the Middle East, in January 2006. Then KERA decided they would prefer a single, two-hour format, so it was back to the editing room for Niki and Phil Smith, but they made their deadline, and the program, now titled The Roots of War, was scheduled on Channel 13 for January 29 at 2 p.m.

The Case of the Disappearing Documentary

The Roots of War had its first public showing at the Angelika Theater in Dallas on January 23, 2006 to an invitation-only audience. The response, at least from the buzz in the lobby after the showing, was very positive. Well, not entirely, at least not to one of the invitees.

On Thursday January 26, Mohamed Elibiary, the President and CEO of The Freedom and Justice Foundation, a Dallas-based group described on their Website as “…the first state-wide Muslim organization in Texas,” sent a letter to the McCuistions and KERA expressing disappointment with the documentary.

The letter asked for three things:

1. “A postponement of the airing … of The Roots of War until these and other inaccurate and libelous defamations are corrected. …;

2. A disclaimer … meant to clear up any unintended defamation of the American Muslim community….;

3. A Citizen Town Hall type of meeting to air right after the airing of this documentary to provide the audience with a chance to hear divergent analysis of the subject matter [other] than that provided in this unbalanced documentary.” The letter also offered the documentary makers help and resources to correct the perceived errors.

After receiving the letter, the McCuistions met by telephone and in person that same afternoon with Elibiary and other members of his group. The result of the meeting was a request by Elibiary for a disclaimer, written by him and appended to the end of the program. “Dennis, wanting to be conciliatory, agreed to do so, without knowing that if you agree to a  disclaimer, you are essentially acknowledging that there is a problem,” said Niki. “Dennis also suggested that the program would receive additional editing to update it before it ran nationally on the network.”

The McCuistions were now in a bind. Two days from air, they had tentatively agreed to a disclaimer, which would raise questions about the program’s veracity. They also had opened the door for KERA to say, “If you’re planning more edits anyway, why not just wait?” and the station acted on that opening.

In a later follow-up letter to supporters, Dennis wrote, “They [KERA] indicated they had no time to do the disclaimer properly and that due to the length of the video, any disclaimer would impinge on other programming.” He also said that he had received another call from the station and was told that Elibiary “…had said the disclaimer was mandatory.” On Friday, the 27th, at about 3 p.m., KERA gave in to the Islamic group’s demands, and The Roots of War was uprooted from the Channel 13 lineup. In less than forty-eight hours, two years of work had been undermined.

It was three more years before The Roots of War, gained an audience. The grant funding had been spent, so Niki dug into her own pocket and went back to work. “In the following two years, I went to the Middle East four times on my own dime and conducted interviews to bring things current. Phil and I took our own personal funds to complete new footage, graphics and interviews. It had to be re-vetted, etc., by key experts. It was almost a completely new piece. In June 2009, KERA broadcast the results.

A bit grudgingly, perhaps, Niki admits that the new documentary is better for the extra effort. “It’s much more realistic, much fairer, much more objective, and much more truthful. It is a much better film.”

But sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and the film’s chief critic, Mohamed Elibiary, was no happier with the results the second time around. Invited to a party held to celebrate the film’s second birth, Elibiary got into a noisy altercation with Dennis McCuistion and left in a huff.

2010 marks the twentieth season of The McCuistion Program, and various special events are planned for the year, including periodic retrospectives featuring programs from the archives. Check the TV schedule at KERA’s Website, and make your own decisions about “things that matter” and “people who care.”

Big Band Jazz at Kidd-Key Auditorium

The Grammy® Nominated University of North Texas One O’Clock Lab Band will salute the music of jazz legend Maynard Ferguson during a special Celebration Concert appearance on Saturday, May 8 at Kidd-Key Auditorium in Sherman, Texas. The One O’Clock Lab Band was established in the 1940s by UNT the nation’s preeminent school for jazz musicians and is one of the most recognized big stage bands playing today. Special guest artists Wayne Bergeron and Denis DiBlasio will also appear on the show.

Tickets are on sale only in advance and online only at www.texomaliving.com/jazz. Limited VIP seats are available at $30 each, General Admission $20, and Student $8. Significant discounts are available through all area high school band departments.

William Collins III, a working musician and music education philanthropist, is producing the concert in association with the Texoma Living! Magazine Jazz Series, and the City of Sherman Tourism Dept. to mark the opening of his foundation’s Sherman Jazz Museum this spring. Profits will benefit Collins’s Music Education in Schools program. Collins’s grandfather, William “Billy” Collins was director of the first official Sherman High School Band founded in 1939.

Steve Wiest is director of the UNT One O’Clock Lab Band and only the fifth since 1947. A Grammy®-nominated composer/arranger, Wiest toured with Maynard Ferguson. Maynard Ferguson died in 2006 leaving a broad catalog of recorded works and orchestrations.

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