At Children’s Health,SM our individualized approach to pediatric health care allows us to treat each child with the attention and care they deserve. See why we’ve been named the #1 children’s hospital in North Texas at childrens.com.
incredible. together.
Being a real estate agent is not the glamorous life portrayed on TV. For these independent self-starters, it most often looks like hard work in the form of back-to-back-to-back showings, managing vendors and repair people, strategizing and negotiating, late-night contract writing, and more. But everyone pictured here knows that’s all in a day’s work. And because they’re driven by a desire to serve others with excellence, it doesn’t feel like work at all.
In this market, you need a hard-working, knowledgeable agent by your side. We recommend one of ours.
Abshiro
Alyssa High DESIGNERS Jynnette Neal | Lauren Allen
MANAGER Alessandra Quintero
Michele Paulda |Frank McClendon
It’s that time of year. Sure, we’ve got fall and football and back-to-school. But it’s also the time of year that we get to celebrate women, and nothing was a better kickoff to that season than Barbie.
Like America Herrera says in her soon-to-be-iconic monologue, “It’s impossible to be a woman. ... It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you!” So we, every year, take the time to appreciate the women in our community and the impact that they have on every single one of us. We’ve got firefighter Barbie, actress Barbie, politician Barbie and many, many makinga-difference Barbies.
I’m proud to live in a community where women support women, and I know that you’ll appreciate these women as much as I do as you meet them in
ROSAesROJO provides a health and fitness community to Hispanic women in the area story Alyssa High photography Victoria Gomez
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In 2012, Aidee Granados headed from Mexico to the United States with her son and husband, whose job relocated the family to Texas. One year later, in an unfamiliar city, Granados was diagnosed with breast cancer.
During her healing journey, Granados learned that cancer was a leading cause of death within America’s Hispanic community. Many sufferers were dealing with language and cultural barriers and a lack of access to preventive care and health insurance. The American Cancer Society says that one in three Hispanic women in the U.S. will get cancer in their lifetime. Granados also read that more than 42% of all cancer cases could be prevented with lifestyle changes.
“I knew that I needed to do something to change what was not working,” Granados says. “Because 42% of the cases are preventable and we are dying faster than other minority groups [from] something that could be prevented if we change the way that we are eating and thinking and feeling and moving.”
While in remission, Granados sought to help her community, creating the nonprofit ROSAesROJO. The organization does this through two programs: SuperVive Comunidad, an app that created a virtual community to empower Hispanic women’s health and wellbeing, and The Rojo Way, a program that provides workshops to Hispanic women on nutrition, positive thinking, healthy emotions and physical activity.
“In Hispanic culture, women are the ones making most of the decisions regarding wellness, so we are working with women as a bridge to the whole family or community,” Granados says. “We are also building skills around the community pillar, because it’s
important for them to take care of themselves, but once they are taking care of themselves it is important to share that knowledge within the community.”
The City of Plano, among other organizations, provides grants to ROSAesROJO to give scholarships to Planoresiding Hispanic women to participate in workshops and mentoring sessions to learn to better their lifestyles.
“We are providing social capital for our community to rely on and feel supported by so that those [lifestyle] changes can be attained,” Granados says.
On the SuperVive Comunidad app, users can share wellness and positive community ideas and inspiration and view live or asynchronous classes.
“They [the community] have accompanied me at every step and I have learned how to better manage my emotions and how to name them. This has had a huge impact on my overall physical and mental health,” Deilhy Melissa Mar Alvarez, a participant in ROSAesROJO programs, says. “Today I understand that I need new habits, I need new tools, and I need a community with the same goals. I am grateful today to have goals and to be part of a community with the same values as me.”
Hispanic women are able to participate in The Rojo Way workshops through recommendations of other women who have attended, before taking on 16 hours of online or face-to-face workshops and four sessions of personalized mentoring.
For those who aren’t able to participate in workshops but want to be involved in the programs, the SuperVive app is free to download in the app store.
Classes are a great way to hone your performing arts skills in a supportive and educational environment with like-minded students. Whether you’re trying out the performing arts for the first time or looking to improve your skills for your next audition, there is a class for you!
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If you took a peak in most of your neighbors’ garages, you could probably guess what you’d find. Cars. Lawn equipment. Workout gear. Old paint cans.
But in Renuka Rajagopalan’s garage, you’ll find a dance studio, fit for collaborating with artists of all kinds.
Rajagopalan is a trained bharatanatyam dancer, a type of classical dance that expresses South Indian religious themes and spiritual ideas. After visiting India for a dance concert in a small suburban town, Rajagopalan found that the intimate, immersive energy of the performance was missing from Dallas’ large stages.
“Just the energy of how pure and intimate the experience was,” Rajagopalan says. “I wanted to bring that to the Dallas area and to my neighborhood that would expose [people] to different art forms in different neighborhoods.”
Her husband got to building, and the Rajagopalans turned their Plano home garage into a dance studio that would host small, immersive events for Dallas-area artists. She called it the Garage Arts Project.
The project started with a yoga workshop, followed by an AfroCuban live music and dance event. Shortly after, Rajagopalan had to shut down the garage for the pandemic.
“I wanted to see how they could jam together, coming from completely different disciplines, and it was so cool,” Rajagopalan says. “We ended up having an impromptu dance workshop, and the kids had a chance to feel the drums and the beads. … The idea was basically to have an experimental space and intimate space. Very carefree, nonjudgemental and safe space for artists to collaborate with somebody who is completely outside their genre.”
After she was able to throw live events again, Rajagopalan hosted a live festival called BRIDGES, which featured 20 artists, dancers or musicians, five music and dance cross-collaborations and around 150 guests. BRIDGES ran again in 2022 at
ArtCentre of Plano, with 20 artists, four collaborations and a second festival location in Houston.
“It fits to do it here in Plano because the Plano/Frisco area is such a multicultural part of different people and different communities that live here in this space,” Rajagopalan says. “It plays along with that idea of bringing, providing a space for bringing different people to come together, and what better way to do that than using arts as a bridge.”
This year, Rajagopalan has hosted online artist collaboration events called Art Salad, a dance production called Four Seasons, an artist showcase at the Cox Theatre in April, and Plano’s second annual Celebrate the Arts! showcase.
While this year’s BRIDGES festival will
be hosted in Frisco to hold more artists, artists from around the metroplex will participate in the two-day event.
It starts Sept. 8 at 6:30 p.m. with a pre-event social at Frisco’s Discovery Centre Black Box Theatre, followed by a gallery viewing of visual artists with drinks and hors d’oeuvres and a pop-up showcase of emerging young talents. At 8 p.m., the main showcase starts with collaborations of visual and performing artists who aren’t commonly paired to create a unique art experience.
“The whole idea is to keep creating pieces that are very unique and refreshing in nature,” Rajagopalan says. “I want to make sure that when Garage Arts presents something, the artist is able to find venues where they can take their collaboration into other spaces and make it into a bigger production.”
At Mighty Chick, each dish is meant to be shared. Each plate has large portions, from fried chicken to traditional Korean plates.
After 10 p.m. on any given day, most Plano streets are dark. Few businesses or restaurants are open, besides a Taco Bell or Whataburger.
In South Korea, however, it could not be more different.
Pochas, street vendors that open late to offer comfort food and a place to hang, line the streets of Seoul. It’s that environment Jenny Ko and Sooyun Lee have attempted to recreate here in Plano.
“Pocha is not really fancy. It’s not like a speakeasy kind of thing,” Ko says. “It’s really straight, easy, where everybody comes and drinks and eats until very late at night. So we needed to capture that concept here.”
Ko and Lee’s restaurant, Mighty Chick, embodies the pocha style, with Korean fried chicken, street food and an always hyped playlist. The place is covered in flags from around the world, disco balls made of shiny foil and walls filled with Sharpie drawings and notes from customers who’ve enjoyed the joint.
When it comes to food, Korean fried chicken is the main event. Double fried with vegetable oil, the chicken has an extra-crispy coating and a sweet-spicy taste. Mighty Chick serves wings or thighs with five flavors: crispy, Seoul hot, BBQ soy garlic, cheesy flake and varying levels of Nashville.
“Chicken is a very simple food, but simple is the hardest one because we need to make a slightly sophisticated [version], with more detail in it,” Ko says. “That’s why we import from Korea, and the sauce and everything is made in house. We’re really proud of using fresh ingredients and never-frozen meat.”
A plate is too much for one person to eat. Each dish is meant to be shared.
The pair didn’t intend to get into the chicken game. Lee started out as a dentist, Ko a fashion designer.
After both eventually moved from New York to
Texas, they discussed getting into the restaurant business, which Lee grew up around.
They started Mighty Chick in Watauga, where there were few Korean places, as a way to introduce the locals to the pocha culture. The restaurant was near Lee’s dental practice, and the duo quickly created regulars at the restaurant.
“There were a couple of chicken places, but none in the Keller/Watauga area,” Lee says. “So we imported chicken powder from Korea and made all the sauce in house in a very typical Korean-style flavor that we wanted to introduce to neighbors.”
They ran the place for two years before the pandemic forced restaurants to tighten restrictions.
When looking to reopen after pandemic restrictions were removed, Lee and Ko thought Plano’s more diverse population would be the perfect setting and opened their Ohio Drive location last year with an expanded menu.
“When we came here originally, the concept was the same as before, but I just realized that Plano is more delicate of a city, more sophisticated, more diverse,” Lee says. “So we got to make it more Korean, with more Korean dishes and flavors.”
Besides chicken, Mighty Chick also serves up street foods like 12-hour sous vide pork ribs, beef brisket, spicy rice cakes and spicy snail salad.
If you’re up late, drinks are definitely on the table. The bar rings up draft and bottled beer, cocktails and many flavors of soju and makgeolli, traditional Korean alcoholic drinks typically akin to wine made of rice.
“They [customers] will see two cute Asian women and say, ‘Oh, you guys are mighty chicks,’” Lee says. “We wanted to have something special, something different, owned by women.”
Wanda McPhail (left) and her daughter Denise Bates (right) have created a legacy of service at Children’s Health.
Denise Bates comes from a long line of medical professionals. Her mother, Wanda McPhail, has held many positions in health care, following in the footsteps of her mother, who was a nurse.
“When I graduated from high school, as we all did in our yearbook, we put what we aspired to be,” Wanda McPhail says. “Mine was aspiring to be a radiologist many, many years ago.”
After attending college at the University of Houston, she went into nursing, just like her mom.
McPhail worked at Texas Children’s in Houston for five years before transferring to Children’s Medical Center in Dallas in 1987. Though she’s been in many different departments and at several campuses, McPhail still works for Children’s Health.
Bates works in the same system at Children’s Health as a manager for clinical program operations at the Plano campus. McPhail works in research administration.
“Whenever you get a group working together with the same goal and the same energy, that’s when amazing things happen,” Bates says. “That’s one of the amazing things about Children’s. We all have the same goal.”
Wanda, you’ve worked in many positions within Children’s Health. What has your journey been like?
McPhail : I started out once I got to Dallas in the radiology department. I was a radiology nurse and worked with some great coworkers and physicians there. I just loved them. We all really did work like a family and helped to make children’s dreams and their ambitions come true. Helping to make lives better for children, and that was the forefront of what we did every day. Helping others allows us to help ourselves. As we make other people better, whether it be an illness or something else that happens in life, helping them through their trials and in issues we were able to help ourselves as well. I love what I did. I love everything that I did, but my journey didn’t stop there after I left radiology. Children’s always has something for whatever you want. It’s there for you. I left there at that department and went to human resources where I was a nurse recruiter for about 10 years. I just loved everything about it and bringing other nurses to our hospital. Of course I didn’t stop there. I left for a while for a health issue, but I could not wait to find my way back to Children’s, and when I did I ended up in research, and that’s where I currently am, in research administration.
Denise, what about growing up with your mom working at Children’s made you want to work there as an adult?
Bates : My mom’s journey with Children’s was extremely professional from the beginning because she was a nurse. We were the kids, and we got to enjoy everything completely
differently, but it was so much fun. We got to come up for the Christmas tree lighting. We’ve seen Santa come in on the DART train. We’ve just seen so many cool things that they do for the kids. They were like a family at the hospital. All of them [my mom’s coworkers] had kids whenever they would get together to hang out. We had drank the Kool-Aid by then. We always wanted to know how we can help and how we can be a part of it all.
needed good tech out here, and I’ve been at the Plano campus ever since.
What has it been like to follow into the same industry and system as your mom?
Bates : I’ve been fighting to become my own person. If anyone has ever worked in a place where their parents were or gone to church or school or anything where people knew your parents first, you don’t actually have an identity. You’re just Wanda’s daughter. So I have fought really hard to be Denise. On the Plano campus, I got to do it a little bit more because my mom didn’t work out here like she did in Dallas. But then as people started figuring out who I was, I started to lose a little bit of that. My mom had the opportunity to make her mark and build her legacy at Children’s Dallas and I’m hoping to do the same for the Plano campus. It’s really cool to be a part of Children’s growth and hopefully in 20 years, I’ll be having the same conversation again, passing the torch on as Children’s grows and as we grow and change over time.
What do you do at Children’s?
Bates : I got a job at Children’s working in psychiatry, actually. And then I went down to radiology because I can’t do anything first here at Children’s because my mom gets to do it all first, so I went down to radiology as a tech aid, and I worked in that department and got very interested in nuclear medicine, which is just one of the modalities of radiology. I went to school for that, but when I graduated from that program, they didn’t have a position available at the hospital at that time. I took a hiatus from Children’s and traveled the country, did some fun stuff. Eventually, they called me and said they
What about you, Wanda? Did you ever imagine your daughters would follow your footsteps?
McPhail : It’s been incredible. It’s a blessing to know that with my children I had something to do with their growth and development and to see that they are giving back to the community. I think that’s one thing as a parent that we always want our children to know. Of course, I’d love for them to be president or Miss Universe or something. But knowing that they’re giving back to the community is something that makes me feel proud to know that they’re my kids.
“Whenever you get a group working together with the same goal and the same energy, that’s when amazing things happen.”
WHEN YOU PUT Chelsea Green and BreAnne Gowen-Tresp side by side, you’d hardly imagine they’re sisters-inlaw, let alone business partners.
Green is all corporate vibes, with a real estate career and the savvy to have owned and operated multiple businesses. Gowen-Tresp, on the other hand, exudes creativity. Her outfits show the care to detail she puts into her own clothes, which spreads into her collection at their store.
Earlier this year, the pair created Plano Shopping Co-Op, a downtown Plano store selling vintage clothing and books galore.
The concept for the store started after years of Green and Gowen-Tresp running their own businesses, selling books and vintage clothes online.
The book side started with a partnership with their other sister, Jessica. Green and Jessica’s book subscription service, called MyBookBox, was run out of a bookstore in Pennsylvania until Green moved to Texas to be closer to her family.
After moving to Texas, Bibliobar, a traveling bookstore that eventually turned into a brick-and-mortar concept within Plano Shopping CoOp, was born.
Bibliobar started a crowdfunding campaign in 2017 to open a location
in North Dallas, with pop-ups at local breweries, festivals and coffee shops. When the pandemic hit, they took a hiatus from the bookstore, returning earlier this year to join together for Plano Shopping Co-Op.
“We fall into the same niche categories of people,” Green says. “People who like to read, like vintage and like a cool place.”
Downtown shoppers can get to the shop by heading to the second floor of A R Shell & Son Agency on the corner of East 15th Street and Alex Schell Place. From there, shelves of books line the walls, with cozy couches and vintage clothing racks. This is not a department store — shoppers are encouraged to stay a while.
“Our goal is to have a space that has a bar or a coffee shop. We want it to be cozy,” Green says. “We plan on having lots of events. We plan on making lots of friends and hopefully getting to know everybody down here a little bit better.”
Gowen-Tresp mends and embellishes vintage clothes, then sells them in the same space as the bookstore.
To Gowen-Tresp, clothes are an art. She cleans up each piece of clothing, fixes any damage or even takes some of the old clothes and
creates something new. In her free time, Gowen-Tresp takes her artistic endeavors to illustrations, jewelry, embroidery or whatever other artistic outlet she fancies at the moment.
“The downtown area has a lot of events, so it’s good to piggyback off that,” Green says. “We’re a good place for people to come and hang out in the evenings.”
On the other side, the store hosts murder mystery nights, craft-andsip workshops, True Crime Story Time, book clubs, book signings and meet-and-greets. The current lineup features storytime on Saturdays at noon and True Crime Storytime every fifth Thursday.
Though they have separate websites now, with Vintage Gnomey selling Gowen-Tresp’s finds and Bibliobar selling books and e-books, the two plan to merge in the future so Planoites can shop the store from home.
Plano Shopping Co-Op is open 2-9 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 12-9 p.m. Saturday and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. However, the pair notes, “all times are an ish,” and they often stay late, especially when there are events downtown.
“Basically, if the door is open or the open sign is on, come on in,” Green says.
Over
Dr.
BREASTS
Dr.
She’s chasing her dreams. Mixing things up. The first one to show up and the last person to leave. She isn’t succeeding DESPITE being a woman, she’s succeeding AND she’s a woman. She’s everything.
Meet these women in our city.
story ALYSSA HIGH | photography YUVIE STYLES
STEPHANIE BOUILLION-MAYER TAKES FIRE-RESCUE TO THE NEXT LEVEL. In 2020, 89,600 firefighters were female, or 9% of all firefighters. Of the career firefighters, only 17,200 or 5% are female. Even fewer are trained for fire-rescue. Fewer than that, in fact only three women in the world, are US&R Rescue Specialist certified.
Stephanie Bouillion-Mayer, a firefighter at Plano Fire-Rescue, is one of them. And the first in Texas.
“I’m proud of her and proud to be able to see the accomplishments coming together,” Anthony DiMarco, a member of Bouillion-Mayer’s Urban Search and Rescue team, says”
Bouillion-Mayer didn’t always want to be a firefighter. She got her degree in biology and shortly after became a teacher.
“I taught high school for a couple of years, and it was definitely not my thing,” Bouillion-Mayer says. “I had been a lifeguard most of my life as a kid and through college. I thought, ‘What’s the big-kid version of lifeguarding?’ And then I found out about EMS.”
Bouillion-Mayer started taking EMT classes at night while teaching during the day.
“I really fell in love with it from there,” Bouillion-Mayer says. “I quit my teaching job and went back to working as a lifeguard until I got an EMT job at the hospital.”
From there, Bouillion-Mayer kept climbing. She went through paramedic school, then fire school, then accepted volunteer opportunities before finding a full-time position at Garland Fire Department.
“I didn’t really plan on leaving Garland, but [my husband] moved from Southlake to Plano Fire,” Bouillion-Mayer says. “Plano has so many opportunities to do all kinds of rescue, and I do the clown program, where we go out and teach at the schools and stuff. I want all the career opportunities to do these things I’m interested in.”
Bouillion-Mayer wasn’t a stranger to Plano. She grew up going through Plano ISD and Prestonwood Christian before returning to work for Plano Fire-Rescue.
She sought out the US&R Rescue Specialist certification to be prepared to join rescue teams and to be able to work with organizations such as FEMA that respond to disasters. The certification provides fire-rescue personnel with the highest level of training, with hundreds of hours of rescue training at the Texas A&M Engineering and Extension Service.
“When we respond to our own incidents in town, I have more skills, more practice and more knowledge from going into these classes and getting the certificates and handson training time,” Bouillion-Mayer says.
Though she is one of three women in the world to complete the program, Bouillion-Mayer attributes that to multiple factors, like the low number of female firefighters in general, the time commitment of the class and the cost of the program to the fire departments.
“Everybody knows, women are stretched out between working and home expectations and everything. [We] get stretched pretty thin,” Bouillion-Mayer says. “I don’t think it’s a lack of ability or desire or anything. There’s just not that many women in the fire service as it is.”
notes that your gymnastics coach gives you,” Amanda says. “I kind of molded into this [acting and performing]. It was easy to pick up on stuff.”
The hardest thing to learn while at NTPA, she says, was acting.
“I would rely so much on my singing voice and I would think that was all I had,” Amanda says. “It wasn’t until I booked my TV show and I had nothing to do with singing that I was like ‘oh, I have other talents too.’ That’s when I finally gained my confidence.”
Amanda booked an Apple TV show, though details at this point are limited, especially with the writer’s strike.
“It was still so hard filming with a bunch of actors who have been doing this for forever,” Amanda says. “But the people were just like a family and made me feel fantastic.”
AMANDA REID IS THE OLDEST OF NINE SIBLINGS IN THE REID FAMILY. All performers: actors, gymnasts or athletes. Reid was a gymnast herself until she turned 13, when her passions turned toward North Texas Performing Arts Academy.
“Switching over to dancing was easy since I was already athletic from gymnastics,” Amanda says. “Acting was a little bit harder for me because I was more insecure there and because I started so late in the game.”
Many students at North Texas Performing Arts Academy start as young as five years old, with many of Reid’s classmates starting classes eight years before she did. Amanda was so nervous, in fact, that she auditioned with her back to the judges, too nervous to sing on a stage for the first time.
“People kept telling her ‘you’re already caught up because
you’re already successful in what you’re doing if you’re just doing what you love,’” Tara Reid, Amanda’s mother, says. “She worked her butt off. We’re a competitive family with nine children, so when she started here, she took every class she could take like she was on a rampage.”
Amanda was on such a rampage, in fact, that she packed in 40 shows over the past five years in NTPA. Not long after beginning the program, Amanda also booked Miss Juneteenth , a movie featuring a former beauty queen and single mom who prepares her daughter for a beauty pageant. In the locally-filmed production that received accolades from several film festivals, Amanda played a teen girl named Tanika.
“I was always super hard working and I feel like that came from gymnastics and that discipline of taking direction and
Looking to the future, Amanda is headed to Shenandoah College this fall. Though she never planned to go to college, she felt called by her grandmother’s mark left as a voice professor and her time there during the audition process.
“There were other colleges that were like ‘You’re not going to audition, you gotta be here and learning,’” Amanda says. “But Shenandoah was all about [letting me audition], so I didn’t even care to look at any other schools.”
In addition to auditioning for more TV shows, Amanda is excited to return to songwriting.
“Songwriting is also a really big thing in my life that I would do all the time,” Amanda says. “I stopped for a while because I was doing a ton of shows. … Once I got my TV show and went down there, my creative juices would wake me up in the middle of the night, and I’d just start writing it down.”
The first woman Democrat elected in Collin County and the first Romanian-American elected in Texas. Among the youngest 15% of the Texas House of Representatives and among 30% of state representatives who are women. Rep. Mihaela Plesa marks a new chapter for the Texas House of Representatives.
“Being the first generation daughter of immigrants, I always heard about the horror of communism and how hard it was for my family to fight not just for their rights and for their voice to be heard for their children and their community in general,” Plesa says. “So, there’s been that political thread that was always in our family.”
Though Plesa was always interested in politics, it’s not where she started her career. She founded a fashion merchandising and design company with a friend and ran it for over 10 years.
The company created inclusive, female-focused products manufactured in Texas. Even then, Plesa understood how her business was connected to local government.
“I saw how hard it was, for instance, for a women-led business to get financial backing and how hard it was for us to become a thriving business in regulated markets,” she says.
After the 2020 presidential election, Plesa was inspired to do more than just protesting and voting.
“I saw more partisanship. I saw more political bickering,” Plesa says. “And I was really called to see how we can heal some of those divides.”
She started climbing the lad -
der as a legislative staffer and legislative director before running for office, becoming the first female Democrat to win Collin County.
“I was kind of seen as an underdog coming into the race,” Plesa says. “I didn’t have an established financial backing. I wasn’t a household name. But I think that we really took the moment and took what people were feeling at the doorsteps and turned it into a movement.”
Plesa beat Jamee Jolly in the race for the District 70 seat in the Texas House of Representatives, winning a tight campaign focused on expanding women’s rights, reducing recapture payments by public schools and improving access to health care.
“Our race in Collin County was considered the most competitive race out of the 150 other seats in the Texas House of Representatives because of the changing dynamics of not only the district but the county,” Plesa says. “We had seen that the
county, even though it’s a Republican-led county, has been growing in diversity. They have really strong public education roots. We were able to meet voters and constituents where they were and really talked to them about the issues.”
Plesa was the first freshman member to pre-file a bill, HB 733, which focused on health literacy in the state’s health plan. Other bills focused on environmental regulation, public health, responsible gun control, reproductive health, community safety and public education.
Moving forward, Plesa is focused on reducing school-related property tax recapture and ensuring that students feel safe in school.
“Once we fix one problem, we’ve got to move on to the next,” Plesa says. “I’m up for the challenge of finding new and unique ways to make sure that Texans are served wholeheartedly with integrity in the State House.”
While their contributions weren’t always publicly recognized, women played a key role in making Plano the city it is today, as my co-authors and I learned in researching our new book, Plano Past & Present, recently released by Arcadia Publishing. The book pairs images from Plano’s early years with modern photos of the same, or similar, locations.
Women couldn’t own land when the first Anglo settlers arrived in the area in the 1840s – but they clearly pulled their own weight. Settlers were lured here by the Republic of Texas’s offer of free land to white men who lived on the land for at least three years. The deal offered 320 acres to a single man, but twice as much, 640 acres, to a married man. Plano’s earliest female residents helped clear and farm the land, prepare the food, care for the children and tend to the home.
Somehow, those residents also found time to help establish and support the earliest community institutions. By 1850, the Plano area had its first school, its first cemetery and its first Methodist class, the beginnings of what is today First United Methodist Church of Plano. Many of the records that help us understand Plano’s history were created by women: the journals of Lizzie Mathews Carpenter, covering 1857 until 1882, and of Lizzie Smoot, who chronicled her life from 1898 until 1914. The minutes, yearbooks and other records of the all-female Thursday Study Club also offer revealing glimpses of life in Plano from 1914 until 2002, the years the club met.
Combing through photos of Plano women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we were struck by the number of women who posed in elaborate hats. Written records suggest that at least four women in Plano worked as milliners at that time – a surprising number for a largely rural community of about 1,300 people.
Female students in Plano’s schools also seemed to enjoy athletic opportunities, long before Title IX. For our book, co-author Cheryl Smith of the Plano Public Library located photos of an early 20th century women’s high school tennis team, posed by a court that appears to be in the middle of a farm, and a portrait of the women’s high school basketball team in 1914, decked out in sailor shirts and bloomers. By the mid-20th century, women began to receive the recognition they deserved. Many of Plano’s institutions still bear the name of female leaders. Harrington Library is named for Gladys Harrington (1901-2004), president of the Plano Federation of
In 1960, Moore’s Variety Store on 15th Street was every child’s dream—toys galore and Archie comic books, which we all collected,” according to longtime resident Rick Saigling. Today, the space at 1024 East 15th Street is occupied by Lyla’s Clothing, Décor & More. Pictured from left to right are Cambrie Wauters (the owner’s daughter), shop owner Meagan Wauters, Lyla’s employee Kennedi Grimes, and shopper Emily Hurd. Vintage photo courtesy of Plano Public Library. Present-day photo by Jennifer Shertzer.
Church Women, which started a free reading service – with 97 books and $60 – in 1953. Wilson Middle School is named for Ammie Wilson (1880-1972), who brought fame to Plano with her prize-winning Hampshire sheep. Her home, the Farrell-Wilson House, is now the centerpiece of Heritage Farmstead Museum.
As Plano celebrates its sesquicentennial – the 150th anniversary of the city’s incorporation in 1873 – it’s a good time to highlight the achievements of women in Plano, past and present. We may not know all their names, but their influence endures.
Authors Mary Jacobs, Cheryl Smith and Jeff Campbell and photographer Jennifer Shertzer will sign copies of Plano Past & Present on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m., at the Interurban Railway Museum, 901 E. 15th St., in downtown Plano. Presentation at 6 p.m. Copies will be available for $25; cash, check and PayPal accepted. All proceeds benefit the Plano Conservancy for Historic Preservation. Plano Past & Present is also available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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