A new generation takes a new look at Mt. Pleasant
with Vision 2020
The town needs a good broom factory, said the 1909 Merchants and Planters bank brochure "Some Facts About Mt. Pleasant."
It needs an aquarium, says a school girl a century later.
That old bank, one of two in town with combined deposits "of almost a half million dollars" died in the depression. But at the turn of the 20th century, it envisioned a heady future rising from the promise of fertile land.
"We need 500 farmers to own their own homes," the bankers said back then.
The aquarium idea came at one of 14 autumn town-hall meetings held across the county to provide base-line data for an updated survey of public thought. Brett Boatner's saving the rest of the results for January's chamber banquet in his adopted home town.
"It's a great project and I had the perfect model to work from," said the outgoing chamber pres.
During her 1987 tenure as president, then local insurance agent Vatra Solomon designed a similar study called "Titus 2000."
"We didn't lay out plans," she said. "We just listed goals." A call for a new airport set the sky as the limit. Dream anything and put it on the table. New city hall, new courthouse, interstate service roads, new police and fire stations.
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"What's amazing is the number of ideas in Vatra's study that became realities," said Brett. It's as if rendering notions as goals added subtle direction of force and initiative. That's the mission of Vision 2020, said Brett, a native of Lamar County.
Sports history buffs will remember his father, Johnny, a member of the 1959 State (semi-final) Championship football team, now a physician in Paris.
Cortez and Betty Boatner came to town in 1947. A Louisiana native, he didn't finish high school before going to work for Safeway. He made manager, but there was more to him than that, his grandson says.
"He could sell anything," Brett said.
Betty came from Athens where she was valedictorian of her class.
Driving a flatbed truckload of furniture in from Dallas, Cortez stocked a 1,500-foot rented storefront on Jefferson Street and put a hatch of baby chicks under a light in the window.
Betty kept books and with every sale a customer got a free baby chick during one promotion.
"People then kept backyard hen houses," concludes Jerry Boatner, who joined the family business when he came home from a military hitch in 1971. After completing undergraduate study at Texas Tech, Jerry earned a masters from the University of Missouri's school of journalism. In the army he wrote for Stars and Stripes.
When Brett graduated TCU, his uncle Jerry had just completed his fourth term as Mt. Pleasant's mayor, his eighth elected term counting four terms on the city council.
Brett did the logical thing for a young single man with a new degree in psychology.
"I got a job at a ski resort," he grinned, and spent a season on the slopes living on snow, peanut butter, jelly, macaroni and cheese. But a guy can only have so much fun.
The next year he went to work for a Chicago firm packaging travel and accommodations for NCAA events.
"We rented 12 passenger planes for the biggest job I did," he said, which was making life easy for something over 5,000 Oregon Duck fans, a crowd larger than the population of Mt. Pleasant back when the bank wanted 500 new farmers here.
The town was on a roll in 1909. The bank brochure says 160 new homes had been built in the previous 18 months.
It's on a roll now as the national franchisers move in, expanding retail, swelling the town's growth as a regional trade area.
After three years hopscotching sports fans, Brett was surprised to find himself warming to the idea of the familiar feel of small town life. Periodically, the family had batted about the idea of his joining the business in Mt. Pleasant.
"Jerry and I agreed I could try it for a year and then leave or stay with no love lost either way," he said. Ten years, a wife and two children later he rotated to the chamber's top elected slot. He called Vatra and using Titus 2000's creator as his guide recorded a current look at the town. The study was driven by a 24-member task force, a handful of "at large" reps stirred into members from the county's public entities. Breaking into groups, they held a series of town hall meetings.
"We put two questions on the table," Brett said. "What do we need? What do we need to improve? The agreement was that we'd put every idea down in writing."
They got just under 300. They'll whittle those down to a dozen before the banquet.
"The understanding was that everything in writing was put before the people in positions to shape the public agenda," he said. Down to the appointments including both elected and administrative task force members, he sought balance in his study.
"It's a subtle point, but the perspective of people creating policy isn't necessarily mirrored by the logic of those responsible for carrying it out," he said.
Not long after completing her 1987 study Vatra packed and left town, riding off when Bill Ratliff won his Texas senate seat. She worked as executive assistant for his Texas senate district, then moved with him to the lieutenant governor's office. For 16 years she watched and reached and moved with towns, learning some places weave dreams better than others.
"What you learn," she said, "is that people in some places make things click and people in others argue over who's going to be on the committee. You've got to understand that to appreciate the way Brett's project came together. And it's fun watching another Boatner generation emerge."
There were lots of duplications on the final list. Like the balance sought on the task force, the study considered demographics targeting black, white and Hispanic populations. Similar visions emerged.
Multiple calls for completion of east and west loops flowing south about town make that one a foregone conclusion. Whether or not an aquarium in the foyer at city hall makes the top 12 selections, it made the list. It's been heard.
Providing civic-spirited citizens an alternative route for airing ideas lends new involvement as a spin-off benefit of the study, Brett said as he stood outside the store he now manages.
Like the town, the business has evolved. Since moving into an out-of-business feed store with an angling view up East 1st of the Confederate monument on the courthouse square, it's grown into the largest storefront in the Main Street district.
It's filled in the vacancies of businesses that have evaporated over the years, for whatever reasons. It absorbed a grocery warehouse and an old-style one-island, full service gas station to the south. It stretched east, taking in an old family grocery, The Titus County Food Store. Floyd's Café and a barbershop, last called Zimmerman's, finished up the block-long length along 1st Street. With the purchase of the old cab stand at the corner of Jefferson and 1st, Boatner's covered most of the block along Jefferson and opened a second entrance facing the courthouse square.
The business had several competitors in 1947 including the Miller family's Everybody's Furniture which is, likewise, in its third generation at the other end of the Main Street district. While super-center mentality hasn't swallowed up sole proprietorships in the furniture business, the competition has swelled.
"Just come south from Everybody's," Brett said, ticking off stores - Blake, Hess, and Hazelwood. Just south of town there's Cypress Furniture. In Pittsburg, Parker, Patterson and Smith are all family owned and all competing for the same customers.
"We're fortunate," Brett said. "Our market's grown to support business growth. At a time when a lot of small town business districts are in survival mode, we've got a U.S. highway routing traffic through town and a resourceful group of retailers carving new niches even as we've got franchise development growing out from the town."
Vision 2020 is a mission in search of ways to continue nurturing a town.