Leslie Gibson
Dear Dad,
Since you can’t hear, I’d like to write you a letter in the newspaper which you so faithfully read every week, and on which I most welcome your comments.
I understand your pleasure in reading “Legally Speaking.” It truly is legalese at its finest.
But Dad, I really appreciate that you, who have never taken an interest in politics at any level, take the time to pour over the articles on Rockwall, Fate, Heath and McLendon-Chisholm.
It is a tribute to these city leaders that you, having spent a lifetime in engineering and mechanics, are now looking at a subject which you have never taken an interest in: politics.
The son of a thresher mechanic in the Wheat Belt of the nation, you’ve taken that innate inherited skill and ability into the Navy, and then into engineering work for cooling and heating systems for buildings and schools throughout Dallas, and fixing everything at home from air conditioning to Volkswagens. Your head, basically, has always been making numbers real in building projects. Now, you look at, throughout the Rockwall County Herald-Banner, the background environment in which construction takes place.
When the council members in the City of Heath plan a town center and what kind of businesses they want to see in their town, when the City of Fate gets its first elementary school in decades, when Rockwall sees the development of a major hotel and retail destination sight for the state and nation, when McLendon-Chisholm finds itself at the edge of massive housing construction, and the City of Royse City sees new brick homes on 33-foot-wide streets laid out for young families, I see a new perspective on the surroundings of our new family starting out in 1957.
Like Royse City and Fate especially, our little neighborhood of new brick houses and sidewalks contained lot after lot of brick homes. We saw the pink buttercups growing profusely in clumps, and heard in the evening the sound of frogs and cicadas, since around us fields still grew wild or in cultivation.
And then I hear again the sounds of your shopsmith in the garage, as well as other sounds of sawing and mowing and projects up and down the street.
Another advantage to a newly laid-out neighborhood surrounded by open space: bicycling. I hear again that unique click of that three-speed bicycle you rode as you led a trio of children on little bicycles all around our neighborhood and the rest of Irving.
Thank you so much for giving me that still wonderful bicycle — that Raleigh — a serene ride still, and from that height I still see mimosa trees and mowed yards and children playing in a 1950s neighborhood, no matter where I ride.
Now, you walk and still ride your bicycle through what has become a tightly developed network of neighborhoods and thoroughfares, full of traffic and grown trees and remodeled houses and convenience stores and strip centers.
And it makes me feel good to know you read now what these folks in these towns out here are doing to plant their cities and towns, a process of which your engineering work was one of the details in the last half of the last century.
It is a privilege to be in the audience at the meetings, and to speak with them before and after.
Rockwall County and western Hunt County are growing so much that we have had one town contemplate disbanding (which they didn’t) because the revenue can’t keep pace with the growth unless the town levies a property tax, and we have had a town contemplate incorporating (which they did), because they felt county growth was threatening their property values, so they chose to protect them by establishing city limits.
Councilmen, and commissioners and city staff, in regular public meetings and workshops, work with developers to establish street widths, water and sewer provision, lighting, open space and a myriad of other details to create an environment which protects the health, safety and welfare of the future citizens.
The concept is broad, so the details of how to do that sometimes create divisions, but I have yet to see a city or county body not maintain civility and not regroup after a tense moment.
I know too, that government at all levels gets a bad rap.
But what I have learned is that what seems like a vast majority of the people involved are just people like those anywhere, who have chosen to become involved in the mechanism which makes society operate. For better or worse, our government at the local level is our way of maintaining an environment for the community in this nation.
It is a privilege to have this bird’s eye view of this process.
I hope, Dad, that you and any other readers of these pages, recognize that all of this work is indeed a ceaseless labor to keep us able to move about and work and attend school and activities safely; that regardless of the success or lack of success in various details, it is still the organism we have and must accommodate and support.
I have Don Lorenz to thank for this privilege. From my childhood he has encouraged me to write and still does. He still expresses his enthusiasm for the reporting, even for a subject which has been foreign to him.
Dad, thank you for making this opportunity possible, by your providing for me and our family throughout my life, and for your optimistic and encouraging nature.
Being your daughter is a privilege, one for which I can never thank you enough.
Thank you.
Leslie Gibson is a reporter for the Herald-Banner.
