RIPPLE EFFECT

How changing one life, even a little one, can impact many

Four years ago, our family cat died, and our son desperately wanted a replacement. I knew that a neighborhood veterinarian took in injured pets, nursed them back to health gratis, and then adopted them out.

We checked it out, and there in a small cage was a tiny, couple-month-old threelegged kitten, clipped by a car on a big street. How only its tiny left front leg was injured is beyond me, but the vets amputed the leg and sewed it up.

Today, that cat runs circles around its four-legged adopted brother, and out-eats the bigger cat, too. I guess it takes more energy for three-legged life than four?

And when that cat wants some attention, we’ll feel a tiny bit of pressure on the back of our leg or shoulder, and there it will be, on its haunches, its one good front leg elevated as high as it can reach, beckoning us for a little love.

Without being ground up by a vehicle, this street cat never would have come to live with us. Why it didn’t just die out there goes back to the person who ran over it, the person who found it, the vet and staff who took care of it — everyone’s life impacted by a cat and its injury, and the cat’s life impacted by everyone else.

I thought about this cat when we received an invitation to a party celebrating the doctor who, 40 years ago, cured my testicular cancer. I’ve written about my cancer experience before, so I won’t bore you again with most of the details.

But being invited to a dinner honoring Lawrence Einhorn, the guy who solved the disease, seeing his picture on the card with no great detailing of his accomplishments, just a “come celebrate with me” note, made me think back to the two times his life intersected with mine, and how my life (and yours) is different because of him.

Had I been diagnosed a few years earlier, I would have faced months of chemo and radiation and then an incredibly invasive surgery involving a cracked chest and hand inspection of my lymph nodes. Back then, I saw a guy who had this surgery a few years after the fact, and he still looked like death warmed over. He lived, but his life was diminished and changed. Forever.

Einhorn’s cure meant that 80 percent of those diagnosed didn’t need the chemoradiation-surgery routine; we just needed two years of monitoring, and if we were lucky, we were done. So I spent two years convinced I was dying, even though at the end of the day, the medical facts said otherwise.

In the middle of the night, limping along on mental fumes and pretty much convinced I was a goner, I found the doctor’s email address and sent him a plea.

“I think you need to come up here,” he responded.

It wasn’t fun, but thanks to Einhorn (whom I didn’t meet then), the ordeal was mostly mental. I still had my health and my energy, and I decided I wanted to get into magazine publishing with my life.

Ten years later, results of an annual blood test to make sure I was cancer-free came back elevated. Significantly.

Over the course of a couple of months,

I took the test again. The numbers were even higher. And again. Still higher.

Normally, testicular cancer doesn’t show up 10 years later, but the oncologist I was sent to in Dallas said that even though CAT scans and X-rays couldn’t find any cancer, we should assume I probably had brain cancer and get started on chemo immediately.

Even as I reached for the consent form, my wife snatched it away. She said we needed to contact someone else.

I didn’t know Einhorn. Had never talked with him. Neither had my regular doctor.

But in the middle of the night, limping along on mental fumes and pretty much convinced I was a goner, I found Einhorn’s email address and sent him a plea.

The next morning, there was an answer.

“That doesn’t sound like testicular cancer to me,” he said. “Send me your tests.”

I did. He looked at them immediately.

“I think you need to come up here,” he emailed. “Let us test you. Let’s be sure.”

So we flew to Indiana, met Einhorn, and he ran a blood test and took a chest X-ray.

His conclusion?

“Some people just have odd test results from time to time. I think you’re one of them. I wouldn’t do anything if I were you.”

I didn’t. No cancer materialized. Einhorn took a nearly mentally broken guy and saved my life.

As it turns out, I would have been “cured” of brain cancer had I taken that chemo regimen, since I didn’t have it anyway, but imagine what that would have done to my body. This job. My family. My life.

Just like our three-legged cat, who knows how many lives would be different today had Einhorn not responded to my email, or had he been too busy to take a look?

We’ve seen Einhorn once since then. He was in Dallas and wanted to have dinner.

We bought.

Jefferson Tower updates

Jim Lake Jr. knows Jefferson Boulevard will never be the same after his transformation of Jefferson Tower.

He’s banking on the idea that adding new places to shop and eat, plus 17 loft apartments, will draw a different crowd, a new energy, to the boulevard.

While he wants to improve the neighborhood, he doesn’t want to detract from it. It is the people — the taquero, the barber-school student, the fruit seller, the boot repairer — who make Jefferson what it is.

There has to be a balance between old and new.

That’s why Jim Lake Cos. this summer hired Adamson High School standout and Georgetown University scholar Adan Gonzalez as an intern. Part of Gonzalez’s job was to reach out to Jefferson Tower’s Latino neighbors in an effort to find out what they want for the neighborhood.

Gonzalez helped Lake come up with the idea for Jefferson Tower Mercado, which the company plans to launch this fall. The market, in a 7,000-square-foot space next door to Family Dollar, will offer small retail spaces for local artists, crafters and start-ups.

The market will have entrances on Jefferson and at the rear of the building. That is part of Lake’s plan to activate all four sides of the tower. All the tower’s shops and restaurants currently face Jefferson, and the other three sides are unused, which Lake sees as a waste of space.

He is working to buy a portion of the alley from the city, and he plans to create entrances to businesses and apartments at the rear of the building. Also planned are green spaces, a barbecue pit area and parking for food trucks at the rear. The sides of the building facing Madison and Bishop have less sidewalk space, but Lake envisions offering spaces for popup shops on weekends.

Juan Contreras, who co-owns El Padrino restaurant and serves on the board of the Jefferson Business Alliance, says he thinks Lake’s work will have an effect on other property owners.

“There are property owners who haven’t paid much attention to their buildings down there,” Contreras says. “I hope that it triggers other property owners to start investing in their properties.”

Increased consumerism could lead to bigger revenues and business owners who expect more from their landlords, he says.

The first new retail tenant since Lake bought the building last year, Small Brewpub, is expected to open this month. Leasing agent Chris Price also has signed an ice cream shop, which will take a small space near the office building’s entrance. And he signed a coffee roaster for a space adjacent to Small Brewpub.

“We’re being very selective about what’s going in here,” Lake says.

The company has extended leases to longtime tenants Ramon’s Barber Shop, Gonzalez restaurant and a jewelry store.

The tower hosted a movie screening during the Oak Cliff Film Festival in June, and neighbors got to see what it could be like to have more street-level activity at nighttime on Jefferson.

“We’re super excited about increased traffic on the street, people walking back and forth,” says Barak Epstein of the Texas Theatre, about a block from the tower. “It makes Jefferson more of an entertainment district and a place where people are hanging out longer.”

Stone

Advocate editor Rachel Stone, reporting on East Kessler’s costly plan to mitigate erosion from Coombs Creek

She can do it

One woman’s grace in a man’s world

Anna Procaccini drives around the neighborhood in her 1972 Ford Ranger pickup, its door hand-painted with the name of her business: Anna’s Electric.

Procaccini, 58, started her own business in 1995, after 10 years working for the city followed by about nine years at home raising children.

The Oak Cliff native went to work as a trades helper for the City of Dallas in 1976, and she was the only woman in her department. It wasn’t easy.

“I was felt up and down on a daily basis,” she says.

There were guys who refused to work with her. Some literally pushed her around, and sometimes her male coworkers could be cruel.

“They put me up on a roof in summertime then took the ladder down and went to lunch,” she says. “It was hot up there no shade, no water.”

Some guys kept calendars of nude women in their offices and in the locker room. There were no policies or laws against such offenses at the time.

“I couldn’t get a credit card without my husband’s signature, and my mother couldn’t get birth control without my dad’s written consent,” she says.

But she says she never let gender discrimination or sexual harassment get her down. Instead, she used her difference as an advantage.

She laughs recalling the time she found a calendar of half-naked men and hung it on her own locker. A co-worker tore it down and ripped it to shreds.

Procaccini says she never complained, and she never lost her temper.

The advantage women have over men, she says, is a certain grace.

“You have to make yourself strong enough and smart enough to compete,” she says.

Renovating old houses in Oak Cliff was a side business for Procaccini’s parents — her dad also ran a tailor shop out of their Kessler Park home. Helping out in their real estate business is how young Anna found she had a fascination for electricity.

“I absolutely love electrical work,” she says. “It is so damn dangerous.”

Some girls love bad boys; Procaccini says she has always had a thing for potentially deadly currents.

Jimmy Gann, who had served in the military with Procaccini’s dad, hired her at the city to fulfill equal opportunity employment requirements. Eventually, she found a mentor at the city, Johnny Juarez, and became a master electrician.

She quit to care for her first child, and once the youngest was in school, she decided to start her own business, specializing in electrical services to the old homes and buildings in Oak Cliff.

Nowadays, Procaccini is still the only woman on the job, only now she is the boss. She and her husband, Chester, live near Winnetka Heights and have three grown sons. Her whole work crew is composed of men, some of whom she recruited from Oak Cliff high schools and have been with the company for years. The crew also includes her husband and one of her sons. It’s not that she wouldn’t hire a woman, but there still aren’t many female electricians, she says.

Electrical work can be physically demanding. It requires crawling into tight spaces, climbing ladders and carrying heavy equipment. Procaccini says she can’t always do those things, as she has to bid jobs and take care of other administrative duties in the office. But she’s often out there with the guys.

“I can’t be on every job all the time,” she says. “I’m so fortunate to have this crew of men.” —Rachel Stone