You grew up in a working Midwest family. How did that shape you into who you are today?<\/p>\n
Well, I think my parents were Depression-era, World War II, Greatest Generation people. And the way you approach things is to figure it out. So I think that has a lot to do with how I approach everything. It\u2019s like, \u2018Well, I\u2019ll just figure it out.\u2019<\/p>\n
You led a long career in the business world. How did that shape your advocacy? <\/p>\n
It\u2019s kind of a take on what I said about my parents. Texas Instruments is a great company, and they give people leeway to stretch themselves. And we used to have a saying, \u2018Make it happen.\u2019 So you didn\u2019t wait for a promotion. You didn\u2019t really wait for someone to tell you what to do. They just wanted your ideas, and they wanted you to be innovative and implement. So that was a good fit for me, and I learned a lot from them. Then I went into business development and started negotiating with other companies, learned how to negotiate, and we had customers around the world. I learned how to negotiate in multicultural environments. Just great people skills that you learn in management.<\/p>\n
So you weren\u2019t involved in volunteering until after retirement?<\/p>\n
Well, we had one son, and I kept up as best I could with his school while (my husband and I) were both flying around the world. It was just home and work, that was it. And so when I retired, I thought, \u2018Well, this is my chance to give back to the community, see what I can do for them,\u2019 because they\u2019ve been so good to me. Lake Highlands is a great place to raise a family and have a career.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the early 2000s at the Skillman-635 intersection. Set the scene.<\/p>\n
The Advocate wrote an article on it, and they called it the Bermuda Triangle. That\u2019s exactly what it was. When the freeway was built, it was in the middle of nowhere, nothing but farmland far as you can see. The 635 path Skillman and Audelia intersected exactly where LBJ freeway had to move across going east to west. So they had so much room with all this farmland, they threaded the two streets together and then threaded them back on the other side. It was an expansive, spaghetti-like structure to move traffic out in the farmland. <\/p>\n
We quickly went from being a first ring suburb to an urban town, and we have so much density around there now that the street infrastructure was never really built to handle, and so it was a mess. People couldn\u2019t figure it out. They couldn\u2019t see buildings were there and couldn\u2019t navigate it. There were accidents. It looked bad, and it couldn\u2019t sustain any economic activity.<\/p>\n
Was it daunting to take the first steps?<\/p>\n
Well, again, my work experience was doing a lot of long-range planning. I remember training my coworkers and saying, \u2018If you\u2019re not sitting at your desk staring at the ball, totally bemused, you\u2019re not doing your job.\u2019 You got to start there and then get the juices going, figure out how to creatively fix the problem. I didn\u2019t really know where I was going, but I had it easy because nobody was paying a lot of attention. The only skin in the game was my sweat equity. I thought, \u2018Well, let\u2019s just try it. If nothing happens, so be it, but I\u2019ll just keep going.\u2019 And Council member Bill Blaydes was a gem. He was amazing, and he started opening doors for me, introducing me to the right people. He was quoted once as saying the smartest thing he did get was me to work on that intersection. When I heard him say that, that meant a lot.<\/p>\n
A major bump came when lawmakers decided to shelve the project in 2018. What was that like?<\/p>\n
That was a major unexpected thing. It was all about defining priorities, getting a good solution, authorizing the money and getting in implementing it. Those are all basic business steps when we got involved with 635 East, and then the governor\u2019s office decided that they were going to put an end to toll roads. That was a political bump in the road that I did not expect, and (I) did not understand that there were special interest groups that had that as their primary objective to cancel all these projects.<\/p>\n
I was amazed that there were people on the 5 o\u2019clock news that were campaigning against toll roads, which I understand in some situations, it is a problem, and those people need help. So sure enough, I found myself on the 5 o\u2019clock news in front of a camera and a reporter explaining why this was different and why it should be treated differently. And it was kind of crazy, like I never thought I\u2019d be on TV standing next to a freeway.<\/p>\n
What was ribbon-cutting day like for you?<\/p>\n
It was hard to talk to me that day. I was just floating. And even my son, they took the book cover and made a plaque for me and presented it to me on my 70th birthday. It\u2019s got a little thing that says something like, \u2018Community champion, beloved mom, grandma.\u2019<\/p>\n
In the book, you talk about a decline in community involvement. How concerning is that to you?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t feel like it is because I live in Lake Highlands, and we have so many great volunteer organizations. But statistically, across the country, and I worry about it, are people really losing interest in getting together with their neighbors and having community and just working on improving their communities. Because that\u2019s where it starts, grassroot efforts in the neighborhoods. What I learned from my neighbors, because we were a small, growing community, and it was new, so you kind of had to pitch in and figure out, \u2018We need a stoplight in the center of town, right?\u2019 And that\u2019s the kind of thing that we need people to have a perspective on and get involved with. So I hope maybe it inspires somebody.<\/p>\n
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You grew up in a working Midwest family. How did that shape you into who you are today?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188108,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160,162,161],"class_list":["post-188107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-plano","tag-plano","tag-plano-headlines","tag-plano-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}