WORTH SAVING

Knowing What To Keep Might Be A Mom Superpower

Those “hoarder” shows on television are something, aren’t they?

The lifestyle is both fascinating and frightening: What people save, and why they save it, sometimes stretches the boundaries of sanity.

I bring this up because I just returned from a trip to my childhood home, a Minnesota farm where my parents lived for 57 years. The time had come to move them to a place that doesn’t require maintenance and snow-shoveling, a place with a single closet as opposed to four huge farm storage buildings. It was time to go through a half-century of “treasures” one final time.

Somewhere along the line, Mom made a conscious but frequently questioned decision: She decided to save everything — gloves and caps we wore at age 10 during our 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. daily cattle-feeding shifts. Ancient snowmobile suits. Dusty rain boots. All hanging on the same hooks we last hung them on 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.

And the closets in our bedrooms — I kid you not when I tell you that I could model my entire 10th grade wardrobe right now. Mom saved everything, “just in case.”

Mom always talked reverentially about “the grainery,” a farm building ostensibly built to hold oats and wheat between harvest and sale. Every time she mentioned the grainery, my sisters and I cringed: The building had become little more than a dusty, rodent-scented black hole, a place where Mom kept her most precious things in boxes and bags.

Trips to visit us in Texas always involved the interstate transfer of goods from the grainery. My first typewriter from college turned up. My report card from second grade. The first Polaroid camera I received for

Christmas, along with the first tiny black-and-white instant photos that popped out of it.

“Why keep all of this stuff?” we asked Mom over the years.

Even Dad joined in the chorus: “Mother, no one wants any of that stuff.”

So it was on my last trip up the grainery’s wood steps, Mom unable to supervise due to back woes. And on a final search-or-forever-destroy mission, I scrounged through her treasures.

There was my original G.I. Joe, lovingly packed in a re-sealable freezer bag and wearing the brightly colored and definitely not Army-issued pajamas my mom sewed for him. There was an old yellow Tonka truck I played with daily as a kid. There were boxes of green plastic soldiers that many times over helped me protect the United States from foreign incursion.

I laughed out loud at what she had saved. I remembered every one of those things — each took me back to when the only thing on my “to do” list was to have fun.

And it was at that point I realized something that eluded me all of these years: I imagine every trip to the grainery reminded Mom of those long-ago days, too, back when her hair was dark, her skin was smooth and the days ahead seemed endless.

It took me until this last trip to our farm, sadly sifting through 57 years of tangible memories, to realize the singular difference between Mom and the TV hoarders.

She saved that stuff not for herself but for us. It was her way of making sure we remembered where we came from and who we are.

Thanks for not listening to us all of those years, Mom.

Rick Wamre

is president of Advocate Media. Let him know how we are doing by emailing rwamre@advocatemag.com.

DISTRIBUTION PH/214.560.4203

ADVERTISING PH/214.560.4203 office administrator: Judy Liles

214.560.4203 / jliles@advocatemag.com display sales manager: Brian Beavers

214.560.4201 / bbeavers@advocatemag.com senior advertising consultant: Amy Durant

214.560.4205 / adurant@advocatemag.com senior advertising consultant: Kristy Gaconnier

214.264.5887 / kgaconnier@advocatemag.com

ADVERTISING CONSULTANTS

Sally Ackerman

214.560.4202 / sackerman@advocatemag.com

Nora Jones

214.292.0962 / njones@advocatemag.com

Frank McClendon

214.560.4215 / fmcclendon@advocatemag.com

Greg Kinney

214.292.0485 / gkinney@advocatemag.com

Michele Paulda

214.292.2053 / mpaulda@advocatemag.com classified manager: Prio Berger

214.560.4211 / pberger@advocatemag.com marketing director: Michelle Meals

214.635.2120 / mmeals@advocatemag.com digital + social media director: Emily Williams

469.916.7864 / ewilliams@advocatemag.com

EDITORIAL publisher: Christina Hughes Babb

214.560.4204 / chughes@advocatemag.com managing editor: Emily Charrier

214.560.4200 / echarrier@advocatemag.com editor-at-large: Keri Mitchell

214.292.0487 / kmitchell@advocatemag.com

EDITORS:

Rachel Stone

214.292.0490 / rstone@advocatemag.com

Steve Dickerson

214.635.2122 / sdickerson@advocatemag.com senior art director: Jynette Neal

214.560.4206 / jneal@advocatemag.com art director: Casey Barker

214.292.0493 / cbarker@advocatemag.com designer: Emily Williams

469.916.7864 / ewilliams@advocatemag.com contributing editors: Sally Wamre contributors: Sam Gillespie, Angela Hunt, Lauren Law, George Mason, Kristen Massad, Brent McDougal photo editor: Danny Fulgencio

214.635.2121 / danny@advocatemag.com contributing photographers: Rasy Ran, Kathy Tran editorial interns: Will Maddox

Advocate, © 2016, is published monthly by East Dallas – Lakewood People Inc. Contents of this magazine may not be reproduced. Advertisers and advertising agencies assume liability for the content of all advertisements printed, and therefore assume responsibility for any and all claims against the Advocate. The publisher reserves the right to accept or reject any editorial or advertising material. Opinions set forth in the Advocate are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the publisher’s viewpoint. More than 200,000 people read Advocate publications each month. Advertising rates and guidelines are available upon request. Advocate publications are available free of charge throughout our neighborhoods, one copy per reader. Advocate was founded in 1991 by Jeff Siegel, Tom Zielinski and Rick Wamre.

• Exercise classes like BODYPUMP, Yoga, Cycle, & more

• Childcare while you work out

• Member pricing on Swim Lessons, Youth Sports, Personal Training, & more!

• Free Wellness assessment to get you started

2016 Sold

ADDRESS Listed for:

6732 Lakeshore Drive | $829,000

6820 Meadow Lake Circle | $819,000

6034 Vanderbilt Avenue | $769,000

6044 Velasco Avenue | $729,999

6111 McCommas Boulevard | $699,000

6534 Mercedes Avenue | $699,000

8438 Forest Hills Blvd | $669,000

1247 Waterside Circle | $600,000

6313 Belmont Avenue | $589,000

5303 Ridgedale Avenue | $585,000

5947 Goodwin Avenue | $549,000

2634 Lakeforest Court | $475,000

6821 Winchester Street | $449,900

517 Clermont Street | $449,000

6487 Annapolis Lane | $429,000

603 Clermont Street | $425,000

7324 Fenton Drive | $399,000

6942 Santa Monica Drive | $339,000

6800 Norman Rockwell Lane | $329,000

*8704 Lacrosse Drive | $2,650

*6873 Burwood Lane | $2,400

*9429 Peninsula | $2,200

Represented Buyer

ADDRESS Listed for:

6272 Mercedes Avenue | $2,195,000

5524 Southwestern Boulevard | $1,199,000

6155 Vickery Boulevard | $885,000

5924 Willow Lane | $683,900

1014 Clermont Street | $649,900

9010 Dunmore Drive | $590,000

6316 Marquita Avenue | $585,000

3216

“WHEN WE DON’T ALLOW FAMILIES TO CHOOSE DISD AT A PRE-K LEVEL, WE’RE MISSING THE POINT IN TIME WHEN THEY’RE MAKING EDUCATIONAL DECISIONS.”

DUSTIN MARSHALL ON OPENING DISD PRE KINDERGARTEN TO PAYING CUSTOMERS

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO DO WITHOUT HIM. I JUST DON’T KNOW.”

LATIFA AMDUR AFTER HER DOG, ROMEO, WAS KILLED BY A LOOSE DOG

Free Birds

RESCUING WINGED CREATURES OF THE URBAN WILD, AND LETTING THEM FLY

There’s an old story that mother birds will ignore baby birds if they are touched by humans. That’s not true.

The best thing to do with a baby bird is to leave it alone if it doesn’t look injured, or you can put it back in the nest.

“The nest is the best,” so says Erich Neupert, who g rew up around the Mecca of ornithology: Cornell University.

These wise words are but a taste of the smorgasbord of knowledge in his head.

His grandmother, he says, is called the First Lady of Birding at the Ivy Leaguer because of the work she did with Peter Paul Kellogg and Doc Allen, founders of the institution’s ornithology school.

When Neupert was a child his grandmother still worked at Cornell.

“I spent lots of time there learning and studying,” Neupert says of his upstate New York upbringing.

“She introduced me to ornithology,” Neupert says. “She put something in me about birds, and now here I am running a raptor center.”

The White Rock area resident now brings that education and spirit to North Texas as the executive director of the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center. It is the only raptor center in North Texas and works with more than 30 raptor species.

Neupert frees raptors all around our city, but White Rock Lake serves as one of the most popular release locations for rehabilitated birds of prey, he says. The lake is a perfect environment for screech owls, great horned owls, Cooper’s hawks and red shouldered hawks. Which is great news for the surrounding area, he adds.

In this market, it sometimes feels like there are five buyers for every home–especially in Dallas’ hot urban neighborhoods. That’s why you need David Griffin & Company. Since the early 1980s, we’ve helped champion Dallas’ move back from the suburbs, and no one gets our city’s close-in neighborhoods quite like we do. Make the next ‘Sold’ sign you see the one in front of your home. Call us at 214.526.5626 or visit davidgriffin.com

“Raptors are the best natural pest control.” Especially screech owls, whose favorite foods include large cockroaches, sometimes called waterbugs, a common sight in North Texas.

“Whenever I tell people that, they’re excited to hear we release screech owls in the area,” he says. But cockroaches aren’t the only pests on the menu.

“Raptors are a top predator on the food web. They eat rats, snakes, mice, rabbits, some squirrel. The smaller ones eat insects. Their job is they kind of help keep some of that in balance.”

And balance is critical. Neupert says the best outcome is to return animals to where they are found, but that doesn’t always work. Blackland Prairie has a computer program that tracks all their releases and notifies them before an area is oversaturated with raptors.

“If we put them all in one area it wouldn’t be good for the area or the birds,” he says.

So far this year the center has seen more than 235 raptors come through and has released 17 screech owls around White Rock Lake. More are coming soon because quite a few of the small owls are still being treated. Birds you might spot at White Rock include two great horned owls, two Cooper’s hawks and two red shouldered hawks, all released by Neupert and Blackland Prairie.

In 2004 Neupert joined Blackland Prairie as a volunteer, along with five others. Two years later he was asked to take over operations.

“I wanted to see how we could grow and expand.”

At the time it wasn’t much more than an outreach effort. Today, they host 200 programs a year, have 14 educational birds to display and this year, they’re open to the public the first Saturday of every month and they’ve added a temporary raptor hospital.

“It’s getting quite busy,” Neupert says of the facility. “Just today we’ve received seven raptors and there’s another one on the way.”

The center also moved to an endangered Blackland Prairie north of Dallas, changing its name to honor the tall grass that used to cover more than 23,500 square miles of Texas from the Red River to San Antonio.

Overall plans for the center include an education facility, interpretive trails through native Blackland Prairie, demonstration gardens with native species and the creation of a raptor rehabilitation center.

The rehabilitation center will be tackled next, Neupert says. It will include a permanent hospital with a surgical center and will be capable of housing up to 900 raptors at once.

“It will make us one of the larger [centers] in the country.”

The permanent rehabilitation center is crucial because injured birds arrive for a variety of reasons. However, the most common reason the center receives calls, especially from our neighborhood, is due to baby birds found on the ground.

“Now, most of the time, those birds are fine. They’re just learning to fly and they don’t need our help,” he says. “We call them orphans, even though they aren’t truly orphans.”

The center also sees raptors that have flown into windows or get hit by cars. Some are sick after eating a rat or mouse that has ingested rat poison. Others, Neupert says, are even shot at, which is illegal. Birds also come in with second-degree burns on their feet because of fertilizer that has been left on lawns. Neupert says it happens when the fertilizer isn’t watered correctly.

“That takes about a month, once we get a bird in with those kind of burns, to get them off.”

If a bird has been injured like that, the center tries to find a new area to release them, keeping them out of harm’s way.

“We do a lot of scouting to find good areas for birds,” he says. “They’re part of a balanced ecosystem. It’s important that they’re out there.”

To learn more or to volunteer, visit bpraptorcenter.org. Or give to Blackland Prairie on North Texas Giving Day — see p. 52.

—STEVE DICKERSON