Ladies Only:
A look at Main Street's new generation of sole proprietorships

By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher

In Pittsburg, Laura DeWoody says Iris Garcia's la Familia Restaurant is great.

Good food's to be found just up the street from her shop, says Laura Dewoody, who began her business as the girl in a storefront window, working at her jeweler's bench before buying real estate and expanding. A nutrition buff, she's a fan of Iris Garcia's la Familia Restaurant, which features nothing but fresh ingredients in an array of seafood and other non-Tex-Mex traditional Mexican fare. Three kinds of salsa, tortas (sandwiches in freshly-baked bread), fleshly-ground and seasoned chirizo and such are among the recipes she began learning as a child. As the name implies, her enterprise requires help from the family. From left are: Jennifer, Sandra, Iris, Anibal, Cesy and Keren.

"She orders fajitas," said Iris, who works five 14-hour days, one 16-hour day, then takes Sunday off. To go teach at her church.

Iris and her husband, Anibal, created the blue-print and are the driving force of a family plan with a long view. The nest egg for a business grew from years of cleaning houses while Anibal worked to provide basic family support.

"The family works for its children," Iris answered the "why" question after consulting in Spanish with daughters Sandra, a junior at Mt. Pleasant High, and Jennifer, a sophomore anchor on the girls' soccer team. Sandra plays tennis and wants to study business, sights set on an MBA. Jennifer wants to be a vet.

Here at One Journal Place, as we like calling the side-street offices of the only corn-fed periodical in three counties, we've been inspired by the recent publications of special sections dedicated to women in business in our area's main-stream media.

We're here to report the underside of the story. As once-thriving downtown, sole proprietor retail has fallen to the underdog role in a competition determined by cash receipts, women are turning up on Main Street, ignoring the path beaten by the bidness trail blazing new frontiers in franchise and chain, processed and standardized America.

At la Familia, Laura sometimes sits down to eat, but more often orders to go, said Iris, who's been learning her customers since opening last January.

"She has to get back to her store," said Iris.

Just up the street about a dozen years ago, Laura rented "booth space" in a store, set her work bench in the front window and began Laura DeWoody Jewelers. It was a marketing strategy. People could walk by and see a craftsman at work. At night she studied; on class days she drove 120-mile round trip to academia until she became the area's only graduate gemologist.

In neighboring Franklin County we caught Alamo re-creator Jacque Bateman on a day she was working as a volunteer at the local art council's jailhouse gallery.

Julie DeVries' Café Vienna Makes European Pastries common fare in Mt. Vernon.

Fay Hoffman's old church is stuffed with merchandise that ignites the imaginations of her often creative clientele.

In Mt. Vernon Jacque Bateman leapt onto the front page of The Journal the first time we met her. Behind the counter of a one-time interstate convenience store turned into an artisans' retail venture, she and a friend were rolling coins dumped out of jars, gathering up money -- capital outlay -- to put gas in a 150,000-mile Honda for a trip across Texas to a bikers' rally.

"Here's what I want to sell," said Jacque, drawing attention to her display of walking sticks with rattle-snake heads and handles wrapped in rabbit fur, each crafted by hand. One of a kind, whether you were thinking of the woman or the walking cane.

Julie DeVries grew up on a dairy 25-minutes north of Mt. Vernon, out across White Oak Creek. She milked, drove tractors and served time in day-long sentences to the blistering heat of meadows at haying time. Square bales.

"It's good growing up and understanding what you can do, but I wanted to do something else," said Julie, who opened Café Vienna after spending a semester studying in Vienna. Five days a week she arrives around 5 a.m. to begin making the day's fresh European-style pastries. There are no donuts. Her homemade chicken pot pies have inspired evolution of a lunch-hour run. One night a month she swings for the cash-receipt fence, preparing a dinner from a selection of entrees such as crab cakes, cocoanut chicken, chicken parmigiana, veal Marsala.

Before dawn, classical music plays while she bakes.

In Winfield, Fay Hoffman sticks business cards under the dozen spring-loaded clips of a one-time potato chip rack hanging on the front door above the sign that says customers arriving at Antiques Gallore (sic) may call her, then gives some phone numbers. So we called.

"This is who?" she asked for a confirming repetition of identification. Satisfied, she said, "Just let yourself in," then gave instructions concerning the location of the key.

"All my regulars know where the key is," she said when she arrived, finding nine business cards missing from the potato chip clips. "It's like running a trotline," she said, opening the door into an organized explosion of merchandise about the time the phone started ringing. Seeming to pay the phone only half attention, she went through an area of the old church stacked with furnishings, lamps and more - much more - then walked back through, hunting the source of the ring.

"This is the down side of these cordless phones," she said, moving pillows on a couch until she uncovered it. "Hello?"

When all of Fay's things began spilling out the doors of the church, she sorted out what can best tolerate the elements and moved that part of her inventory into sheds lining two sides of the building. Bonafide weather proof stuff is behind a mesh fence across the front.

Fay's store is like walking through wonderland, said Jamie Capel, who within moments of discovering the business made a flat declaration.

"Fay," she said, "you and I are going to be best friends."

Jamie is building an ancient house, new red brick with a definite architectural look, "Federalist Colonial,"she calls it.

The old French doors she found at Fay's are now perfect, richly refinished with just that hint of patina required to reflect authenticity.

Decorators are the core of her business, in this phase.

"That makes it fun," she beamed. "I know all of these wildly creative people."

But the amazing aspect of the business, said Jamie, "is that she actually knows where everything is. When I came looking for a five panel door she directed me straight up the stairs, exactly to the spot she'd screwed it to the wall. However long it had been there, it was only waiting for me."

June Lass's penchant for organization is the backdrop for the Cypress Basin Hospice volunteers recycling Americana in a second-hand shop on Mt. Pleasant's square.

Step back, for the moment, from the tale of sole proprietors, into a Mt. Pleasant shop that reflects the soul of June Lass.

She recycles pop Americana at one of Cypress Basin Hospice's two second-hand shops. The other's in Pittsburg. With a core group of volunteers, she inventories, cleans, categorizes, stocks, stacks and pushes goods across the counter of something like the general mercantiles of long ago must have been.

Time was, a management turn ago, this was a fun place to dicker and bargain, argue and laugh. June has no time for such foolishness. Her job is making the most for hospice care. She is busy because there's always more to inventory and clean, catagorize and stock.

There's an off chance corporate could walk in and discover her one day, snatch her away from here. Trains would be running on time in short order, and the way you're inspired to pull for good people and you'd like to see her hit that payday, but it says here Main Streets need June like never before.

Back in Pittsburg, Laura DeWoody made and repaired jewelry in the window until it caused her to open a store. There are long glass counters of diamonds and gold, the sound of her jeweler working in back.

The inventory is her own blend - the turquoise and silver she likes that fits the earth-artsy feel of Canton trade days. The small shelves of supplements that appeal to her interest in nutrition. The easels of hand-painted oils, the luster of ceramics, the scents of oils and candles, all of it driven by a natural salesman offering the things she likes.

Down the street at la Familia, Anibal's daily routine includes coming in to help run the restaurant. He works a night shift, cleaning industrial equipment, getting off in time to get home to see Iris off to the restaurant and the four children off to school. Then he goes and works in the back during the lunch hour, helps set up for dinner, then goes home around five to sleep until midnight and begin again.

"He does it because that's what's needed," said Sandra, the daughter who wants to study business and learns by common sense example, doing homework in a booth when she's not waiting tables in the evening.

Back in Mt. Vernon, on an oil-top road across I-30 from town, Jacque Bateman has recreated the Alamo. Her retail shop didn't pan out in dollars and cents, and there was the issue of the leaking roof. But step back for a longer view and what Jacque made work in the deal was going through a door that opened into the town's art council, its museums, some blessed ego-centric view that here, a town is being continually built on what it was, and such things are to be revered. She honors that. It makes her valuable here because for no reason other than someone needed to, Jacque borrowed a camera and went to work shooting portraits of community matriarchs, women of interest.

Her show hung in the Old Jail Gallery, and she didn't make any money at it, so she kept painting signs, her bottom-line economic anchor. She made an old barn on her family's farm her shop, and she bought a box car and a cargo container in which to again arrange her things of worth, like a crab trap dug from the sand of a Texas beach with the help of fishermen she didn't know until she recruited them to help her one afternoon. She brought back shells, then put a book of pirate stories in her display in the container, creating a drape with a fishing net. Inside the box car behind the Alamo facade, step left at the saloon-style bar to view the portraits she painted of Alamo defenders. See the weapons. See the ancient water heater. Take a right to the drug store booths, see the autographed portraits of stars who've visited Franklin County, see the mail sack from an old train depot. Out back she sees a theater stage, stretching almost to the hen house by the well house she built around her well bucket, a project about which she laughs at herself. Soon, she's expecting more than a hundred fourth graders to come visiting, so her friend Carol Kober bought everything to make candles, so she fixed up a place to do that. She's invited the local fire department, the county's lawmen.

It takes a mind that knows where the side door is to understand the logical blend of these things. It's Texas, ya'll. Jacque bought a Longhorn bull to wander outside the walls of the Alamo. He lived there peaceably with an old mama cow until a neighbor moved a set of fresh heifers across the road. He promptly went calling and in the ensuing chase, which still irks Jacque, the terrified beast was in moments fleeing as many as three four wheelers.

"They put him through six fences," she said.

Otherwise, she's put together a board to steer development of her Alamo. And, once her bull knew what little real security six not-so-hot fences afforded, her only choice was to load and ship him off to a pasture where she's presently paying to board him. He's for sale, maybe for $1,000, provided the buyer can provide well for him. Play with him some. She's open to surgical reduction of his interest in heifers. Her phrase.

"He likes to roll barrels," she said, smiling at that.

Whether you need a sign painted or would like a longhorn bull, that number's 903-588-2442. That's Jacque, with Custom Advertising and Painting Service, says the answering machine.