Enduring Gratitude

THE BOOT ST O R I E S F R O M T H E T E X A S H I L L C O U N T RY

H O W A B U S I N E SS W O M A N A N D P H I L A N T H R O P I ST ST R I V E S TO P R ES E R V E H I STO RY

A CO U P L E ’ S H O M E F I L L E D W I T H FA I T H A N D FAV O R I T ES

2022 | ISSUE 3

A FO R M I D A B L E W H I S K E Y T E A M A N D T H E K E YS TO S U CC E SS

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ABOVE: Dian Stai with her constant companion Mia.

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ENDURING GRATITUDE ST O RY BY L O R I M O F FAT T

Entrepreneur, preservationist, and philanthropist Dian Graves Owen Stai shares her passion and prosperity with the Fredericksburg community.

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ost conversations with Texas businesswoman and philanthropist Dian Graves Owen Stai return to a common theme: gratitude. Whether the topic is entrepreneurism and its inherent risk-taking, the cute “thank you” cards she receives from 4-H kids in her local Gillespie County area, or the pillar of faith that supports her generosity, Dian says she’s thankful both for the gifts she’s been given and her ability to share them with her community. But examining the inspiration for her generosity isn’t an intellectual exercise she’s much interested in. “I like to help,” she says, simply. “Why do we do things? They bring us joy.

I feel as though I have been blessed so I can bless others.”

A few miles north of Fredericksburg’s historic district, a fire blazes in the stone hearth of the residence Dian calls Ledgecroft, a low-slung, modern home named for the gently palisaded landscape surrounding it. A gentle winter rain falls outside, droplets forming like chandelier crystals on native grasses and the gnarled boughs of century-old live oaks. Outside, sculptures she has collected with her husband, Harlan, provide a sense of unexpected whimsy to a timeless Texas landscape that hasn’t changed much in centuries. It’s one of Dian’s missions to see that the land and its history endures.

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With cinnamon-colored hair cut in a stylish layers and a trim physique she maintains “by being on the go, constantly,” Dian ushers me in from the rain with an umbrella in hand. Her attentive Bichon Frise, a fluffy cotton ball named Mia, snuggles up beside her on one of four gray loveseats encircling a cocktail table fashioned from a slice of petrified wood. The art surrounding us—a folk-art fox made of antique lace, a fossilized palm leaf that dates back millions of years, a portrait of a whale rendered in cream and cobalt, an abstract canvas painted with dirt from a Utah cave—reflect interests in nature, the earth, and dedication to craft.

I catch a glimpse of my rain-mussed hair, and when I confess sheepishly that I’d normally be wearing a hat, I’m treated to my first taste of Dian’s sense of humor. We share an affinity for hats, it seems, and I’m unsure about contemporary Texas hat etiquette.

“Oh,” she assures me graciously, “wearing a hat inside is okay for ladies, but a gentleman always takes his hat off when he goes into a room. Of course, in my day if you were going to wear a hat after 6, it had better be a cocktail hat.”

I’m rapt as Dian reflects on nearly six decades as one of Texas’ most successful businesswomen, her West Texas work ethic and self-taught business acumen, her long history of charitable giving, and her zeal for historic preservation. The Dian Graves Owen Foundation, which she founded in 1998, has bestowed more than 100 million dollars on organizations in Gillespie County and her adopted hometown of Abilene. These grants (nearly 600 in the Fredericksburg area since 1999) enrich programs across many sectors, including health and social services, education, historic preservation, faith, arts, and animal welfare.

Growing up in Midland and the sparsely populated countryside near Sonora, where the Graves family relocated in response to the country’s polio epidemic, Dian and her two brothers witnessed grassroots philanthropy first-hand. “The integrity and honesty that rules my life now was formed when I was young. Daddy worked on the pipelines, and while Mother always said we were middle class, she was putting on airs,” says Dian with her easy laugh. “But she was always doing things for people; cooking, sewing, helping. If she had made a casserole for dinner and someone down the street was ill, or in need, I knew we were going to have half a casserole that night.”

She attributes her curiosity, observant nature, and affinity for conversation to her father. On family vacations, while her mother and brothers snoozed, Dian kept her father company and developed a love for Texas history and geography. “Cars back then had a hump in the back of the car, where the drive shaft went,” recalls Dian. “The carpet was always worn off because I’d stand there for five hours talking in Daddy’s ear.”

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Dian Stai’s road to success is lined with vision, tragedy, determination, faith, and generosity. As the 1970s unfolded, Dian and her husband Jean Owen, a pharmacist who’d recently lost his job, saw a business opportunity in hospital pharmacy management. Together, the couple founded Owen Healthcare in Abilene. The company was expanding at a brisk clip when Jean died in a plane crash in 1976.

Tasked with running the company herself, Dian resisted corporate sharks who aimed to put her out of business and successfully ushered Owen Healthcare through a difficult transition. The company continued to grow, eventually recording annual revenue of more than $500 million and providing services to hospitals and healthcare providers in 43 states.

In 1984, in what Dian calls one of her proudest moments, she established an Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP), which enabled many of her employees—among them secretaries, clerks, and pharmacists—to become millionaires when she sold Owen Healthcare the following decade. “It was the right thing to do,” says Dian. “These were wonderful young people who were smart, hard-working, and loyal, and they were the ones who built the company.”

In 1998, Dian founded her second company, a private-equity firm called Mansefeldt Investment Corporation. Its diversified interests include one of the largest privately-owned mineral holdings in the Permian Basin. The company’s tremendous success allowed her to establish the Dian Graves Owen Foundation, which today forms the framework of much of her charitable giving.

One would be hard-pressed to find an organization in the Fredericksburg area that hasn’t benefitted from the foundation’s generosity, though longtime Grants Administrator Jane Beard notes Dian rarely seeks recognition. “Dian lives with a spirit of generosity and gratitude,” Beard says. “She is far too modest to want attention for the grants. Instead, she works to make sure that the volunteers—the backbone of these organizations—get the credit they deserve.”

In fact, much of the foundation’s philanthropy remains relatively invisible to the public eye.

There is dental care and addiction treatment for those unable to afford it otherwise; mammography equipment and Covid support for the Hill Country Memorial Hospital; soccer fields, scoreboards, scholarships, and library improvements for local high schools. There’s support for a new shelter for the Hill Country Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, grants to restore the Odeon Theater in nearby Mason, and funds to repair fire damages sustained by the Mason County Courthouse. The foundation supports the Fredericksburg Theater Company, the Fredericksburg Chorale, and the Gillespie County Youth Livestock Show. It’s an exhaustive list of worthy recipients that extends far beyond the

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Here and on the following pages, Dian Stai gives a tour of the Mansefeldt Ranch property she has restored.

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Fredericksburg area. In her adopted hometown of Abilene, for example, the foundation is spearheading the transformation of the city’s 1923 public high school, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, into a library and learning center.

Yet in Fredericksburg, evidence of Dian Stai’s philanthropy reveals itself via improvements to three public-facing entities that help form the community’s identity: The National Museum of the Pacific War; the three-acre campus of the Pioneer Museum, and Marktplatz, the landscaped park surrounding a 1935 replica of the city’s iconic, octagonal Vereins Kirche, site of Fredericksburg’s first church and school.

The foundation bestowed its first grant to the National Museum of the Pacific War and the Admiral Nimitz Foundation in 1999, helping construct the internationally acclaimed George H.W. Bush Gallery of the Pacific War. This 33,000-square-foot expansion not only allowed the museum to present much of its collection for the first time—including maps, correspondence, uniforms, weapons, and personal items ranging from Admiral Nimitz’ cribbage board to his family Bible. It also created climatecontrolled storage for materials that had previously been scattered across storage sites in town.

Other grants digitized the museum’s oral history

“ Dian lives with a spirit of generosity and gratitude,” Beard says. “She is far too modest to want attention for the grants. Instead, she works to make sure that the volunteers—the backbone of these organizations—get the credit they deserve.”

archives (now 5,500-strong), helped renovate the TBM Avenger exhibit at the Pacific Combat Zone, renovate the ballroom of the original Nimitz Hotel (center of 19th-Century social life in Fredericksburg), and create the Olveta Culp Hobby Education Center, which more than 18,000 students visited last year in-person or virtually.

“Dian has made a tremendous impact on our ability to tell the stories of those average young men and women who served the country in extraordinary circumstances,” says General Mike Hagee, president and CEO of the Admiral Nimitz Foundation and the National Museum of the Pacific War. “I’ve seen kids come in who never really knew their grandparents, but their oral histories are here,”

Hagee continues. “They can listen to them talk about their experiences and sometimes recognize their voices. Most importantly, it gives them a personal connection to that time. My own dad’s oral history is here, so I know it really means something.”

Dian’s passion for historic preservation shines across town at the Gillespie County Historical Association’s Pioneer Museum complex. Nine restored historic buildings here, from a blacksmith shop to the “Sunday Houses” once used by farmers when they came to town for business and church services, illustrate early life in Fredericksburg. The Historical Association also manages the Old Jail, the Vereins Kirche, and the Pioneer Schandua House. Together, the sites welcome more than 40,000 visitors annually. “Dian’s support over the past 20 years has allowed us to meet ADA requirements, create interpretive programming, modernize our orientation plaza, digitize and store archives, and underwrite fundraising across a number of projects,” says David Shields, executive director of the association and the Pioneer Museum. “She doesn’t insist on specifics, but rather listens to what we need.”

Former mayor Tim Crenwelge, current chair of the Market Square Redevelopment Commission, notes Dian’s contributions to restoring the city’s historic Marktplatz, including improved bathrooms, playgrounds and meeting spaces. “When I became mayor in 2000, I got a phone call from Dian,” Crenwelge recalls. “She came to City Hall for a meeting, and I asked her, ‘What can I do for you?’ And she said, ‘No, what can I do for you?’” Whether it was by buying land for the Historical Society, moving an endangered historic building block-by-block to a new location, or honoring the late restoration architect ISSUE 3

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John Klein, whose work is on view throughout the city, Dian has established a model for philanthropy in the city.

Klein, who passed away in August 2021, worked with Dian on numerous restoration projects. Those included a cluster of 19th-century structures—a limestone main house, kitchen house, sheep barn, carriage house, and blacksmith shop—at the Stais’ Mansefeldt Ranch property.

“I had wanted to live there since I first saw it as a child,” remembers Dian. “I was seven or eight years old when I first saw the main house. We’d be driving back to West Texas from a vacation in the Hill Country, and I’d beg Daddy to stop, but he always had to get back to work. To me, it looked like a village, with a church and a home that looked like a courthouse.”

She kept an eye on it as an adult, too, but longtime owner Kermit Kothe wasn’t much interested in selling. “I was in Europe when a friend in Texas called to say it was finally for sale,” Dian recalls. “I got right back and shared with him my dream of restoring the buildings, of stabilizing them for the next hundred years.” The sale went through in 1997, and Dian finally had her home in Fredericksburg. “Mr. Kothe told me he was waiting until the right person came along,” she says.

Dian and Harlan had known each other since 1972. “My late husband and I hired him to operate a pharmacy in El Paso,” says Dian. “After I merged my company with Cardinal Healthcare in 1997 and moved to Fredericksburg, we reconnected.” The couple married in 2000 and built what’s now their primary residence, the contemporary Ledgecroft home, across the street from Mansefeldt. “There are a lot of advantages to a modern home—enclosed garage, Dian and Harlan Stai at the circus wagon where they spent their wedding night

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single-level living, the views,” says Dian. “And because we were across the street, we were on the job site every day, working intensely with the architect.”

I’m interested to see the historic property that was Dian’s inspiration all these years. We hop into her car, and with Mia on her lap, we drive across the street, taking a brief detour to pass the cemetery where Fredericksburg founder John O. Meusebach is buried. “We don’t own the cemetery,” says Dian, “but we take care of it.” Beyond a stone gate inscribed “Mansefeldt,” hand-hewn cedar fencing surrounds the gently rolling landscape, punctuated by a pond where her grandchildren fish, outdoor sculptures from around the world, a birdwatching pavilion, and even a purple circus wagon from Castroville, which was originally pulled by elephants.

“That’s where Harlan and I spent our wedding night.

We gave away all the other rooms to family,” Dian says with a laugh.

Just past a pistol-shaped barbecue rig that the Stais received as a gift, we enter the restored barn, which now hosts events and fundraisers for organizations the couple support, such as the Houston Grand Opera (Harlan is on the board). “We have the 4-H appreciation dinner in our barn every year,” Dian says. “The kids wait on tables and do all the clean-up, and they’re so cute in their clean jeans and big belt buckles. You can hear the starch crackle in their shirts.” With a commercial kitchen and walls covered with opera ephemera and artwork both modern and traditional, the old sheep barn has come a long way since it was built in the 1870s.

Restoration of the main house, barn, and other structures on site took more than two years. “Mr. Kothe had done a beautiful job of doing nothing,” Dian says with her signature chuckle. “There was no bad restoration to undo.” She points out the original, hand-chiseled limestone walls, which had been covered with plaster but left intact and undamaged.

“Can you imagine? This was all quarried by hand, brought here by ox-cart, and laid without hydraulics.” Dian called for imagination in the restoration, too, and is especially fond of how they incorporated the old cistern into the kitchen design. “It’s handdug, rock-lined, and 40 feet deep,” says Dian. “And when we wanted to add the kitchen, there it was.

We thought about glassing it over, but we decided to use it as the base for our breakfast table. Isn’t that fun?” She’s kept the hand-cranked operating mechanism outside so that children can see how people once had to bring water to the house.

“What will we be if we lose our history?” Dian asks, reflecting on her role in preservation, education, and philanthropy over the years. “Gratitude, absolutely, drives my desire to share what I have.

There is no reason in the world why I should have been as successful as I’ve been. Yes, I have worked hard, but so do many people. It brings me great joy to give back.”

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