FLY GUY

He’s vintage Texan, barnstorming our neighborhood in a plane, tilting at windmills and penning novels. Next up? The movie.

When Steve DeWolf isn’t jogging through his Forest Hills neighborhood, he’s probably flying over it in one of his vintage planes.

The civil lawyer, author and wind energy pioneer owns a PT-17 Stearman that was built in 1943 and a T-6 Texan built in 1942. His father was a colonel in the Air Force, and DeWolf attended the United States Naval Academy, intent on flying carrier-based jets. But his vision wasn’t good enough. After graduation, he went to law school and earned a pilot’s license in 1985. After a girlfriend broke up with him in 1991, he says he thought, “F it, I’m just going to spend $80,000 and go buy an old open cockpit biplane.”

That was the Stearman. “I’ve loved it ever since,” he says.

DeWolf says he tries to fly his planes at least once a week. His home base is the Dallas Executive Airport, formerly Redbird Airport. “My dad said that you have to fly a lot to be safe. I tell my son, Jake, the same thing.”

Why planes from that era? “It goes back to my dad,” DeWolf says. “It’s very pure flying. It’s black or white. You can either fly the numbers or you can’t. Can you fly it in a certain direction, can you keep it stable, can you land well? In law, there’s gray and nuances.”

How does he feel when he’s up there? “Like a million bucks,” he says.

DeWolf has had close calls, including seeing lightning below him while flying over Seguin from the Rio Grande Valley and encountering fog so dense he was forced to fly according to the air traffic controller’s signals. Years ago, in the Stearman, an oil line broke. DeWolf was close to Lancaster and tried to land.

People were saying, “You’re streaming oil.” He landed and had the shakes. “Some tall, thin guy who was in charge of the airport came out and said, ‘Well, I’d let you use the restroom, but I bet you done already used it.’

“Fortunately, I hadn’t.”

DeWolf’s law office on the 14th floor of a North Central Expressway building feels like working in the clouds. He sits at a long, cluttered table in a room surrounded by windows. The office is decorated with framed illustrations of him in court, a photo of him in his plane flying over opening day of the Rangers in 2014, a 1942 Saturday Evening Post cover of his father in uniform and his son’s Lego wind farm project.

Rocks collected from his travels hold down pages of law cases and maps of his wind farm projects. “A rock for everything I have to do,” he says. “I like rocks. Every time I go someplace, I get them.”

In the early 2000s, he was sitting on a beach and penning an editorial for The Dallas Morning News about the need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. He thought about an inlaw in Minnesota who was a progressive farmer researching windmills.

“I thought, ‘Texas… we have a lot of land, we ought to be able to do that.’ I had no idea what I was doing.” He went to TXU Energy and said, “I’d like to build a wind farm.” He asked his wife, Tammy, to give him $25,000 to learn the business. She was OK with it, so he went to West Texas A&M University and studied with the experts. He’s been investing in wind farms ever since.

He also wrote a book. “Dead Stick” is about a Texas civil trial lawyer, “a gritty street-wise” character investigating the death of his brother in Iraq. The main character is Jake, named after DeWolf’s son, and the book’s cover photo is DeWolf in his plane. “Dead Stick” is published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. A producer in Los Angeles has optioned the book to be a movie, and a writer in New York is working on the screenplay.

DeWolf is at work on a sequel. In addition, he writes “The Moderate Minute” column for the Mount Vernon Optic Herald in Franklin County, where he owns a lake house. He’s also on the board of the Cavanaugh Flight Museum.

In the meantime, son Jake is studying at Oklahoma State University, learning to be a commercial airline pilot.

“Flying is not without dangers, and flying these old planes? It’s more dangerous,” DeWolf says. “But crossing the street is dangerous. I do my best to make sure that the planes are well maintained. Like I told Jake, ‘You don’t fly into bad weather. You try and make good judgments.’ At some point, 10 to 15 years from now, I may say, ‘I think I’ve been flying long enough.’ ”

Philanthropy Focus

Our neighborhood loves to give back and support the organizations that make it a special place. We will showcase a local nonprofit each month and explain how it impacts the community.

Story by HANNAH RIDINGS AND WILL MADDOX | Photo by HANNAH RIDINGS

Thrift store volunteer Carl Oatman and CitySquare CEO Larry James might not appear to have much in common, but they are both part of a poverty fighting organization that turns traditional methods on their heads.

Oatman never wanted to be a burden, but he felt like one to his alcoholic parents and older sister, who played mother to the other four siblings in their cramped Seagoville home. They lived in the country, and he enjoyed spending time outside, away from all the social entanglements that made living at home difficult.

He left home at 17, didn’t tell his family and set out for Dallas to find a job. He worked at a factory on HVAC units in Mesquite and was named foreman after a few years. But when the factory closed, he had trouble getting another job and ended up living on the streets.

He didn’t tell his family about his troubles, and eventually he lost touch with them. Their lives were hard too. Oatman learned just how tough while reading the newspaper one day. He was horrified to learn that his brother, who was trying to steal from his mother to fund his drug habit, killed her after stabbing her 13 times.

At that point, Oatman says he gave up. He continued to experience homelessness and was arrested for public intoxication several times. Oatman lived on the street for nearly a decade, bouncing from bridge to bridge, unable to find steady work or housing.

Oatman didn’t like being cooped up in a building with too many people, and he resisted some of the group housing that was available.“I slept outside in the rain, sleet and snow,” he says.

But one night, a friend told him about CitySquare. What would eventually become his home was under construction at the time. He went to check it out. He saw a community of small single-family houses, close to the CitySquare Opportunity Center, which provided concierge medical and other services to reach the people living at The Cottages at Hickory Crossing.

“I was happy. It’s something you can say is yours,” he says. “The decisions are up to you.”

If that is where the story ended, it would be a heart-warming tale of a charity providing a need. But at CitySquare, the relationship between individual and organization is reciprocal. Its model for fighting poverty involves asking what those who receive services can give to the organization. “We are inviting everybody that comes for help to understand that we need help too,” says James, CitySquare CEO and Munger Place neighbor.

City Square began as a food pantry, but over the years it became a poverty-fighting nonprofit with programs that provide housing, job training, food, legal help and arts. Its success is contingent on the community serving the organization and teaching community members how to best address poverty.

James remembers asking a woman who was a customer at the food pantry to help him translate for another group. She did the interview herself, and James asked her to come back the next day. “She came back tomorrow, and almost every tomorrow for nine years,” he says.

Including customers in guiding the nonprofit revolutionized the way he thought about addressing poverty, and the concept became core to CitySquare’s mission. It asks those who are in a posi- tion to help to see the poor as an asset, not a burden. “People closest to a problem know the most about it,” James says.

James is a pastor by trade. He led several Church of Christ congregations before his time at CitySquare. Faith guides him to action on both a personal and systematic level. For James, it is about an attitude change, not just a willingness to give. “To change poverty in America, we are going to have to change our attitude towards people who experience the problem,” he says. “Faith doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t make the world better.”

Oatman gives back by working in CitySquare’s Urban Thrift store in Old East Dallas. He volunteers a few days a week, but he often comes on his off days to offer more help. In return for his service, he gets meal vouchers and bus passes. “If you are willing to help yourself, they are willing to help you,” he says.

He helps inventory donated items, organize the store and work the loading dock. He says he finds meaning and purpose in his responsibilities. “Even if you don’t have anything, you are helping somebody,” Oatman says. “And it feels great.”

It takes 40 volunteers a day to help CitySquare fight poverty in Dallas, and the nonprofit offers a variety of positions. Learn more at citysquare.org.

CITYSQUARE by the numbers (2017):

40,000 neighbors served

391 family law cases, resulting in $1,105,831 in child support for 422 children

135,937 hours of service via AmeriCorps

2,099,739 pounds of food distributed to 13,805 individuals

1,295 neighbors served by the community clinic

615 housed through housing programs

141 jobs obtained