the devil’s box

Jason Hammond just needed a catfish. Actually, he needed three live catfish for a TV commercial he was working on in Austin. The 1987 Woodrow Wilson High School graduate wound up driving to a fish hatchery in Halletsville, Texas. He bought the fish from bemused hatchery owner Kenneth Henneke, and he wound up getting the idea for his first feature-length documentary, “The Devil’s Box”. “It was killing him why I wanted three catfish, because he usually sells hundreds of pounds of fish at a time, and I almost didn’t tell him what I was doing,” he says. “But I started talking to him, and he said, ‘You need to make a movie about my fiddle contest.’” Henneke and his friends started producing an annual Texas-style fiddling contest in Halletsville in 1970. Hammond had never heard of Texasstyle fiddling before, but he was intrigued. So Hammond and his wife, Beth Jasper, headed to Halletsville. “They fixed us pot roast and introduced us to the world of Texas fiddling,” Hammond says. The couple asked another 1987 Woodrow grad, Erik Hansen, to be their executive producer. The first thing they filmed was the contest. “Neither Beth nor I are very musical, so we really had to attack it from a journalistic point of view,” Hammond says. The threeday festival is every April, and it takes over the entire town. Texas fiddle music is centuries-old music that European settlers brought to Texas, and it evolved over geography and generations. It is almost like jazz in the sense that each fiddler plays the music a different way, adding notes and flourishes to put their own mark on it. “It’s this whole society of people who are these very talented musicians who don’t do it for money,” Hammond says. “They do it for the love of music.” Hammond, Jasper and Hansen are working to have the documentary picked up by a TV network. And they are submitting it to festivals. It screened at SXSW film festival in March. Next, they hope to bring it overseas to Europe and Asia, where they expect it will be well received. “It’s a family film. It’s a happy story. So many documentaries have really sad or serious subject matter,” he says. “This is not one of them. It’s about music. It’s just a lot of fun.” —RACHEL STONE

“I’d never want to consider a life without activity,” says avid runner and biker Gary Derheim. But a hip fracture nearly brought his sport to a screeching halt. At Baylor, Gary was treated with an advanced, new procedure called hip resurfacing. “Before the procedure,” he says, “they spent a lot of time talking to me about options, what was important to me. You need a good hip to ride like I do. The procedure was incredible. I was walking within days. Ultimately, I was able to do a 109-mile bike race, and I didn’t think about my hip once.”

For a physician referral or for more information about orthopaedic services at Baylor Dallas, call 1.800.4BAYLOR or visit us online at BaylorHealth.com/DallasOrtho

3500 Gaston Avenue., Dallas, Texas 75246

LAUNCHgrab-bag

Boulter-Davis

Heart In Steel

You go to Crossroads Diner for the ooey gooey sticky buns , the pillowy pancakes or the creative frittatas, but once you’re in, you can’t help but notice the enormous, center-stage, whisk chandelier. Crossroads owner Tom Fleming imagined it, but stainless steel fabricator Don Kemp of Kemp Steel in East Dallas made it happen. Kemp doesn’t consider himself an artist, but rather an artisan. “An artist creates something original, that only he can create. A good artisan can reproduce anything someone else can do or think up,” he explains. So when Fleming told Kemp his idea, Kemp used his high-tech equipment

MARK DAVIS

to roll long flat bars of stainless steel into the shape of the whimsical-looking kitchen tool. Kemp Steel has been in business in the East Dallas area since 1926. “My grandfather, then my daddy (Don Senior) and now my dad and I work together every day,” Kemp says. “He’s tried to retire, but I won’t let him.” The Kemps work can be seen in homes businesses and churches around Dallas — they built the altar gates and baptistry at St. Bernard of Clairvaux Church in Little Forest Hills, for example. Sidenote: Kemp went to grade school at St. Bernard and attended the first mass there when he was just 6 years old. He went on to Bishop Lynch, followed by Indiana University and later University of Texas at Austin. “I got cold,” he jokes, “and had to come home.”

—CHRISTINA HUGHES BABB