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Sweet shops

Cheesecake Love

10230 E. Northwest Highway

214.707.0545 cheesecakelove.com

PRICE RANGE: $3.50-$35 cheesecake, and then there’s Cheesecake Love. “People are used to going to the grocery store and buying a manufactured cheesecake,” says JoAnn Sitton, owner of the shop at Easton and Northwest Highway. “People love the product that I sell. Every cake is hand-poured with quality ingredients.” It’s all about the crust, she says, a portion of the cake that is often overlooked. Sitton makes a thicker, crumbly cookie crust instead of the thin, spongy graham cracker typically used in store-bought cakes. She launched her small business four years ago and specializes in 2.5-inch, cupcake-sized cheesecakes as well as 10-inch cakes. Other than her shop, Sitton’s cheesecakes also are available locally at Fuzzy’s Taco Shop in Hillside Village, Sam’s at Park Lane and Atomic Pie at Walnut Hill and Audelia. Standout flavors include caramel pecan, creamy original and chocolate, which features four kinds of chocolate on top of an Oreo crust. “My flavors are not too fancy, so I try to make sure the cake itself is high quality,” Sitton says. She also has special varieties for the holidays, such as pumpkin walnut and Irish cream. —Emily Toman

There’s

AMBIANCE: TAKE OUT

HOURS: 11 A.M.-3 P.M. TUES.-FRI; 11 A.M.-2 P.M. SAT; CLOSED SUNDAY AND MONDAY

Left: creamy original cheesecake

Below: chocolate cheesecake

1 Society Bakery

This small neighborhood shop has received national attention for its decadent desserts — cupcakes, lemon squares, petit fours, brownies you name it. For the holidays, try the pumpkin chocolate chip whoopie pies. 3426 B Greenville · 214.827.1411 societybakery.com

2 The Cake Ball Company

Located in the same storefront as Cheesecake Love, these creative treats are almost too cute to eat. Stop by 3-5 p.m. Fridays for happy hour, when cake balls are $1 each. 10230 E. Northwest Highway 214.559.5788 · cakeballs.com

3 Cheesecake Royale

Still got cheesecake on the brain? This Garland Road shop has ties to the family behind Kostas Café, and uses farm fresh eggs and real whipping cream. 9016 Garland · 214.328.9102 cheesecakeroyale.com

FOOD AND WINE ONLINE Visit lakewood.advocatemag.com/dining

Szechwan Pavilion

Since 1980, we have offered the finest Chinese food in Dallas. Choose from our gourmet menu or convenient buffet. Senior (60+) Discount: Tuesday 4:30 - 9:00 pm

The Corner Market

Try our awarding-winning sandwiches and salads, made fresh with all natural, filler-free deli meats, artisan breads, organic herbs and chef-prepared dressings. Full espresso bar using local coffees & hand-crafted chocolate. Breakfast every day.

La Calle Doce

Enjoy our Weekend Brunch Menu Sats. & Suns. 11am - 3pm. Try our menu specialities like Tortillas and Lox. Also, $2 Bloody Marys, Mimosas and Vampiros. Serving the Dallas Area since 1981.

Hacienda On Henderson

Wanna do the Happy Dance? $2 Tuesdays with $2 Margaritas, Draft Beers & Crispy Tacos all day! Open

don’t sweat the holidays

Bonny Doon Ca’ Del Solo albariño (2008) California >

The holiday wine season causes tremendous panic in people — even those who are familiar with wine — about what to serve. The rest of the year, it’s buy a bottle wine at the grocery store and don’t worry it. During November and December, everyone is afraid that if the wine isn’t right, Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever will be ruined.

This is silly. Wine is there to complement the holiday, not to star in it. Choose wines that you’re comfortable with, and don’t worry especially about food pairings or impressing others with your selections. Do you like the wine? Will it make dinner more enjoyable? Then that’s the wine to buy.

This month’s suggestions follow that approach, and are more guidelines than specific recommendations:

The 2010 vintage is probably the best in the history of the state, and there are quality wines at every price. The McPherson roussanne ($12), a white from west Texas, is fresh and clean with lemon and lime flavors. Messina Hof’s cabernet franc ($22) is a red wine that is deep and rich, perfect for red meat.

Next month’s column will go into more detail about bubbly; it’s enough to know now that there has been tremendous growth in the quality and quantity of cheap sparkling over the last couple of years. It comes from places as odd as Australia (Emeri, $12) or as well known as Italy (the various proseccos and astis, like Lamberti, $14). And sparkling wine is not just for celebrations. Much of it pairs with food — use it at brunch or to spiff up a midweek dinner.

That is, anything but cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay. The world wine glut has lowered prices everywhere, making it easier than ever to try something different. La Clotiere ($9) is a red wine from the Loire region of France that is light and easy to drink; it practically shouts turkey. Bonny Doon’s Ca’ Del Solo albariño ($18) is a California white made with a Spanish grape that is perfect for seafood.

with your wine Thanksgiving leftovers

The world does not need yet another recipe for the holidays, some other way to reinvent something we like the way it is. What we need to do is to figure out a way to use what we didn’t eat at Thanksgiving. So consider these leftover suggestions:

The simple way is to buy two frozen pie shells, add a can of cream of mushroom soup, leftover turkey and whatever other vegetables are in the refrigerator, and bake for 40 minutes in a 400-degree oven. Less simple, but not difficult, is Jacques Pepin’s chicken pot pie (substituting turkey, of course) in “Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.”

You can do a home version of what restaurants charge $10 (or more) for with nothing more than bottled salad dressing, lettuce, cucumbers, bell peppers, carrots and leftover turkey. The adventurous can add a hard-boiled egg. Get a serving platter and arrange the lettuce to cover. Add the turkey and vegetables and arrange in any design you want. Pass the salad dressing.

Why not? Buy a prepared pizza crust and top it with leftover turkey, onions, bell peppers, mushrooms and any cheese in the house. You don’t even need to add sauce.

Ask the wine guy

Are there rules for pairing with turkey?

More or less, and they usually revolve around pinot noir — a lighter red that complements the lighter flavor of turkey and doesn’t get in the way of the rest of Thanksgiving dinner. But any lighter red wine will do the same thing, as will most whites that aren’t too creamy or too citrusy. —Jeff

Siegel

ASK THE WINE GUY taste@advocatemag.com

Story by Rachel Stone and Christina Hughes Babb

Photos By Can Türkyilmaz and Benjamin Hager

Mark Twain once said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did.” A few neighborhood residents embody that truth, even as they reach their golden years. Their life experiences have inspired them to make every moment count toward noble causes and interesting pursuits.

Willetta Stellmacher was the Cook’s champagne girl of 1940, and she doesn’t mind having a glass now.

Willetta Stellmacher

She was a showgirl

Willetta Stellmacher attended one day of high school at Woodrow Wilson in 1931, and she never went back.

“They kept me in the office all day,” she says. “I thought, ‘Well, I can learn more in vaudeville than I can in high school.’ ”

By then, Stellmacher had been working as a dancer in nightclubs for more than a year. She wore makeup and short skirts, and she didn’t look like a 14-yearold high school freshman.

Later, she was denied a job at a Lakewood five-and-dime because she didn’t have a high school diploma. So she joined a vaudeville troupe, sparking an entertainment career that would span decades and take her throughout the country and into the homes of America’s rich and famous.

At 94, Stellmacher is known for her historic home on Gaston at Swiss and her annual White Rock Marathon party. In the ’40s, she says she stood up to the male business establishment in Dallas when it tried to intimidate her after she opened a children’s clothing store in Lakewood.

“They heard I was a chorus girl and didn’t know anything about business,” she says.

And in the ’80s, she was an Old East Dallas landlord whom a newspaper reporter dubbed “pistol packin’ mama” for fiercely protecting her rental properties.

She lived in Hawaii for 12 years. She’s had a few husbands, two children, a granddaughter and lots of friends.

It’s been a heck of a life.

Stellmacher keeps her show biz memorabilia in a hallway near her kitchen. There’s Danny Thomas. There’s the guy who whistled the “Andy Griffith” theme song, and there’s Lawrence Welk and Perry Como. But most striking are the pictures of Stellmacher herself, an intensely beautiful brunette with knockout gams.

She was born in Lewisville, and she and her mother moved to an apartment on Fitzhugh at Gaston when she was 2, after her parents divorced. When she was a student at David Crockett School, a friend was taking dance lessons at Ruth Laird’s Texas Rockets studio. Stellmacher couldn’t afford them.

“So she said, ‘I will teach you everything I know,’ ” Stellmacher says. “She taught me every step and every routine.”

She and the friend, Mita Norman, started working at the El Tivoli nightclub in Oak Cliff, the Baker Hotel Downtown and the Baghdad club in Arlington.

Ruth Laird eventually took the talented young dancer under her wing, offering Stellmacher lessons if she would teach the little kids at the studio.

Through her vaudeville connections, Stellmacher later got a job with Dorothy Durbin at the Edgewater Hotel in Chicago. She worked as a chorus girl there for eight years.

She also danced on Jackie Gleason’s stage show in New York, and she was accepted as an early member of the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, even though she was 2 inches too short. She quit after two performances because “they treated you like dirt, and I had wonderful respect at the Edgewater.”

For 16 years, she dated Joe Piscetti, who was a close friend of Frank Sinatra, a nephew of Al Capone and a guy who was, ahem, well-connected in Chicago.

She remembers sitting in Piscetti’s room at the Waldorf in New York one day. He was having a card party, and she was crocheting a bedspread, “if you can believe that,” she says. And someone mentioned that Walter Winchell had written in his column that Stellmacher was in town, and that she was going to take a Hollywood screen test.

She didn’t want to take the test because she thought movies were “silly.” But Piscetti wanted her to take the test, so she did. It was one of the first screen tests in Technicolor. She tested so well that MGM offered her a seven-year contract, but by then, Piscetti had a change of heart and told her not to sign it, so she didn’t.

“He said, ‘Well, now you can say you turned it down.’ ”

After her dancing career, Stellmacher was a model, which she says paid better than dancing. She was the Cook’s champagne girl of 1940. And her full-page picture appeared in the first four-color process edition of the Chicago Tribune in 1944.

Stellmacher bought her house on Gaston in 1987 and restored it over the following years. She has donated money and volunteer hours to Disciples of Trinity and other philanthropic causes over the decades. She recently overcame a broken foot and pneumonia. And she reminds us to do things while we’re young since they’re not as easy to do at 94.

But she still likes Cook’s champagne, a bottle of which we popped for an 11 a.m. photo shoot.

“Elizabeth Taylor always drank champagne for breakfast,” she says. “So did Onassis.”

Say hello to Mama

Regulars to the Disciples of Trinity thrift store on Gaston know “Mama.” Most of them want to give her a hug when they stop into the store to shop.

Store owner Jim Davis calls her “Mother,” because she’s his mom. Freda Davis, 91, works at the DOT thrift store every day. Some people think her name is Dot and that she’s the owner. But the organization is actually a nonprofit Jim Davis started about 20 years ago to help terminally ill people.

His mom has been deaf since birth, and she’s had an often difficult and almost always interesting life. He couldn’t keep her away from the store if he wanted.

“She loves seeing people,” he says.

Freda Davis has an eye for fashion and often helps customers choose outfits and accessories. Jewelry sales at the store have increased since she started wearing pieces in the store, Jim Davis says.

Because of the language barrier, she takes customers’ physical cues to pick up on what they are looking for without them asking, he says.

Freda Davis was born in a rural community near Sulphur Springs, and doctors told her parents she was mentally dren, and Davis immersed herself in her husband’s family, which was loving and supportive. retarded. Because of that, she was mistreated by her five older sisters and made to work all day in the fields while they went to school.

She finally was diagnosed as deaf at age 7 and sent to the deaf school in Austin. It was lonely at first because she didn’t know how to sign, she says, but once she learned sign language, her life started to blossom. She moved to Dallas at 19 or 20, she says, and met her husband, who was hard of hearing, at First Baptist Church. They had three chil-

She and her husband, George G. Davis, operated an interior decorating business, and she worked with the city’s top designers. After her husband’s death in 1956, she took over the business and ran it for many years. She says she liked making draperies and pillows, and she had the opportunity to meet a lot of people.

Sometimes Jim Davis tries to convince his mother to stay home from the store if she isn’t feeling well. But around midday, she’ll show up anyway.

She likes to dust and do paperwork. When children come into the store, she often befriends them and keeps them busy while their parents shop. She likes to joke and make people laugh.

“She can’t stand having nothing to do,” Jim Davis says. “A lot of people feel like this is mother’s store.

Yay! Mr. Oddo’s here

On a sunny Thursday afternoon, a bunch of Hillcrest High School students made an unusual exclamation, considering they are teenagers: “Yay! Mr. Oddo’s here.”

Anthony Oddo of Lakewood is an 87-yearold substitute teacher at Hillcrest and North Dallas high schools, where students love him.

“His rapport with my students is excellent,” says Hillcrest French teacher Drew Davenport. “His stories are dynamic.”

When Oddo teaches history, he sometimes has the unusual opportunity to speak from first-hand experience. He was an infantryman in World War II, serving in England, France, Luxembourg and Belgium. He lived through the Great Depression, which forced his widowed mother to bring Oddo and his siblings from Tampa to live with relatives in Dallas when he was a kid. He attended North Dallas High School.

“Mama, bless her heart,” Oddo says. “All she could do was barely pay the rent. I never even thought I would go to college.”

But he attended SMU on the G.I. Bill, and he graduated with a business degree. Afterward, he opened a small grocery in South Dallas. It flourished for about 10 years until construction of the R.L. Thornton Freeway led to its ultimate failure. That’s when Oddo joined the postal service, where he served as a mail carrier in the upper Greenville Avenue area for 21 years.

He bought a house on Richmond when he was 29, and he has seen the neighborhood change from mostly homeowners to mostly renters, although, “It’s held up pretty well,” he says.

After retirement from the USPS, he had no intention of stopping work. He started as a DISD substitute 10 years ago. Although Oddo was married four times, he has no children.

“I love to teach,” he says. “Occasionally I have tough students. Sometimes you have to have the wisdom of Solomon. You have to be diplomatic.”

Oddo walks with a cane. He has bright blue eyes, no glasses and good hearing. He says he doesn’t know why other people don’t work in their 80s.

“I’m addicted to work. I’m 87 years old, and I’m still paying taxes,” he says. “Sometimes the kids ask me, ‘When are you going to retire?’ and I say, ‘That’s not in my vocabulary.’ ”

Solving the world’s problems, over lunch

At 79, John Adams could comfortably retire from Adams Paint Center, the store at Northwest Highway and Abrams he (and before him, his father) has owned and operated for decades, but he’s having too much fun. He arrives at the shop about 7:30 each morning. He works for a few hours framing art and photography, which is a significant part of the paint store’s business, but by 10:30 a.m., he usually has prepared lunch/brunch for 4-8 people — maybe sandwiches, soup, meatloaf or chicken. Unfailingly, a small crowd will gather at about noon to break bread in the back room.

“You see — they are not just my customers. They are my friends,” Adams says.

Leah Ekmark, whose artist-husband Fred is Adams’ longtime framing customer, says the lunchtime gatherings are remarkable. “You will find a variety of people gathered around his weathered table — cops, judges and other city officials, a retired horse jockey all the way down to your ordinary contractors. It’s a colorful crew.”

Among the attendees the days we visited was retired letter carrier Dick Barber, pro golfer Rives McBee, and Judge Ken Blackington from Mesquite. Conversation is as varied as the company but, Barber says, “This table has solved many of the world’s problems.”

An interesting, ever-changing and lowstress workload and stimulating friendships give Adams a reason to “get going each morning,” but he didn’t arrive at his golden years without having lived well all along.

Adams left high school to become a Marine, and he trained pilots during WWII. He has owned six Harley Davidson motorcycles. He has two Yamaha motorcycles now and recounts an accident in which he survived sliding along Northwest Highway after a car forced him to lose control of the bike.

“I got a ticket for failure to control my vehicle,” he says, “but I had a buddy on the force who helped take care of that.”

Adams and his wife did a stint on their farm in Nevada, Texas, raising racehorses, and they enjoyed some success, especially with one thoroughbred named Red Sun, a horse that Adams says “nearly paid for the farm.” There was also Ice Cool, Adams Aries, Lord Thomas (named for Adams’ dad), Come Rain or Shine, and Beau Bidder. His greatest contribution to society, in his opinion, is his involvement with Scottish Rite Masonry.

“Masonry takes a good man and makes him better. That’s how it was explained to me,” Adams says.

“When I was a young man living in Vickery — I was pretty mean back then — there were these few men who were very nice and polite and one day I asked them, ‘Why are you so nice?’ and they said, ‘We are Masons,’ and I said, ‘How do I become one?’ and they said, ‘You just did.’ After that, I got nicer.”

The Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, which has treated more than 200,000 children free of charge since its inception in the 1920s, is one of the organization’s “pet projects,” Adams says.

Aside from the time on the ranch, Adams has spent his life in Dallas. He learned to swim in a lake where the Village Apartments are now located. He remembers the WWII POW camp at White Rock Lake and the skeleton recovered during the lake’s 1953 dredging. He’ll tell tales on acquaintances, including district attorneys, judges and mayors (“Henry Wade and Jack Evans were honest men,” Adams says. “I can’t say that for many of them”). He’ll regale his tablemates with stories about well-known friends, including Keller’s burgers’ Jack Keller and Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant’s Joe Campisi — “he was the number one guy,” Adams says of Campisi. Without specificity, and with a raised brow and a wink, Adams notes the well-circulated rumors of Campisi’s mafia ties.

Adams, despite recent heart problems, still plays golf regularly (did we mention he was a good golfer? “Wasn’t anyone who could out-drive me back in the day,” Adams says). In fact, the day after we met Adams, he played in a charity tournament. He says he’s having a little trouble getting around, but that the event benefits impaired and in-need kids — his soft spot.