CULTURED BELLWETHERS

BY LEE CULLUM

hose who are happiest are those who do the most for others,” said Booker T. Washington. The celebrated orator could have been speaking to the collective philanthropy that raised up the Dallas Arts District, where the arts magnet high school named after him resides. Decreed the largest arts district in the nation, TACA (The Arts Community Alliance) also resides here on Flora Street, the pathway where the creative and businessminded come together to keep arts and culture thriving and evolving. Two such heroes are this year’s TACA Silver Cup Award honorees: Gene Jones and Joe Hubach.

Maura Sheffler, TACA’s Donna Wilhelm Family President and Executive Director emphasizes, “I’m thrilled to honor two dedicated Dallas arts philanthropists at this year’s 45th TACA Silver Cup on May 3. Joe Hubach and Gene Jones have significantly enriched Dallas’ arts and culture landscape. Their advocacy and support through their time, talents, and treasure make our city a vibrant magnet for audiences, patrons, and artists.”

Gene Jones has been called the “Mother of the Dallas Cowboys.” Indeed, her husband, Jerry Jones, owner of America’s Team, has called her the “backbone” of their family, the matriarch who holds everything together, including three children—all of whom work at the company—nine grandchildren, and, as one observer has noted, team members themselves. The Jones family plus their spouses, partners, and offspring, as well as the extensive staff undergirding this demanding and intricate operation, are joined in a larger setting of loyalty and mutual commitment. Gene Jones is integral to keeping the Good Ship Cowboys afloat and on course.

It all began in Danville, Arkansas, where she grew up, the daughter of a banker and granddaughter of a county judge. She moved into high gear, never to decelerate, at the University of Arkansas, where she met a promising young lineman playing offensive guard for the Razorbacks. His name was Jerry Jones, and the chronicle of a life foretold appears in a photograph of the two of them at homecoming, Jerry in a red jersey, number 61, and Gene beside him, looking elegant and carrying a bouquet of red roses.

Their life then was in Little Rock, with a stint in Springfield, Missouri, where Jerry worked for a while in his father’s life insurance business. Next came oil and gas, with ventures so successful that by 1989 Jerry was in a position to buy the Dallas Cowboys. The couple rolled into town on a wave of controversy. Some fans were teed off that Jerry fired coach Tom Landry and general manager Tex Schramm. The animosity evaporated quickly, however, when the team won three Super Bowls in the 1990s. Nobody ever was mad at Gene, though. She was immediately welcomed everywhere, joining several boards, including that of the Salvation Army, to which she and the Cowboys have been characteristically generous. Currently she serves on the boards of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others.

Indeed, it is in the arts that Gene Jones has made her most lasting impact on Dallas and the world. Her life is lived in stadiums, as she told KERA’s Art & Seek. She is in one every weekend, she said, watching the Cowboys game or some other teams. What she grasped was this: A stadium could mean more than an arena for gladiators of the gridiron to justify the money they make, the discipline they practice, and the punishment they take to excel at a hard and unsparing sport. A stadium could elevate and educate as well as exhilarate. It could bring beauty where there was none before.

Her husband agreed with her, and together they decided to create a work of architecture worthy of the collection of art that would grow there. This stadium one day would be to Dallas and its satellite cities what the Coliseum was to Rome: a repository of the essential culture of the era, since it was “the art of our time,” as Gene said to another interviewer, that she and Jerry and their happy band set out to collect. It was the spirit of their own ineffable moment that they sought to capture. “Every area of our stadium is touched with contemporary art,” she wrote in an email. “As you enter the front door…or any of the main entrances…if you are walking the ramps to the upper deck seats, if you are on escalators at the monumental staircases or if you are in any of the private clubs… you experience the art.”

Of course, there is the Ellsworth Kelly done three years before he died. White Form, shaped like incipient life, seems to signify the beginning of the world in its purest manifestation, just as his world was ending. And Sky Mirror is Anish Kapoor’s radiant invitation to the heavens to reflect the peoples of the Earth to themselves and teach them that they all are one. Here too is Olafur Eliasson’s Moving Stars, like spinning planets in a solar system that is solitary, a universe unto itself, friendly as we once considered it to be.

The Joneses themselves have been changed by the Cowboys Collection. “Since building AT&T Stadium, we have become very interested in contemporary art,” writes Gene. “All our children, grandchildren, and nieces have started collecting contemporary art. … Ironically, the art in our home is football art. … We have collected most of the Saturday Evening Post ‘football’ covers by J.C. Leyendecker and many by Norman Rockwell.” Now she and Jerry make a point of going to Art Basel, the world’s foremost fair in Switzerland, and its sister fair in Miami.

“Art is the style of an age,” said Ada Louise Huxtable, at one time the architecture critic of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. “Art never lies. It tells us exactly what we are.” That’s what Gene Jones, spearheading a remarkable effort, has accomplished at the home of the Dallas Cowboys and now The Star in Frisco as well. That’s one reason why, when Jerry and his family bought a 357-foot yacht, they named it the Bravo Eugenia.

“The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.” Surely the psalmist, in writing this, had in mind someone like Joe Hubach, one-time general counsel of Texas Instruments, devotee of the Dallas Symphony, and winner of this year’s TACA Silver Cup. Or so it seemed when he came out to greet me on a sumptuously sunny afternoon. Long, lean, lanky, moving with disarming ease, he told to me to pull around to the back of the house so no cars in front would block the view of White Rock Lake.

Joe makes a strenuous effort to shape the world around him in a way that both stimulates and soothes his sensibilities. That aesthetic begins with the house, thoughtfully restored by Frank Welch. A raised-seam metal roof lives happily with skylights and dormer windows, touches of whimsy that tell us architecture should be enchanting. That same metal roof appears again, barely visible, down the slightly sloping hill, where a guest house designed by Arch Swank hugs the landscape, endowed with good lines but not wanting to intrude on the main show up above. Joe and his wife, Colleen O’Connor, bought the cottage to protect their world from intruders, developers, and sights they wanted never to see.

Inside, Joe and Colleen have distilled the best of Frank Welch: stick ceilings for which the architect is famous; A-frame ceilings in beautiful wood, proving that texture pleases the eye as well as the touch; a long sightline from the back door—now the front door— that promises those pleasant places, one after another. They now seem less biblical, more attuned to the special delights of daily living.

One of those delights is Joe’s office. It is spacious and full of light, something very important to Joe and Colleen, who moved here from a ranch house in Lake Highlands that eschewed the sun for shade. Clearly this is a room that values creativity along with order.

There are file folders in a holder on the desk, proclaiming that not all of life is digital. A substantial collection of vinyl records (Bob Dylan on the end) makes the same declaration. So do CDs. Joe has two guitars and a cello, which he took up about eight years ago, learning mainly Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and suites by Bach.

A splendid grand piano belonging to Colleen dominates the living room. Do they ever play together? No, says Joe, I’m not good enough to play with her. Colleen is indeed well known as an accomplished pianist. In her office she has a second piano, an old upright from which she cannot bear to be parted. Above it hang Japanese prints, reminiscent of the years they spent in Tokyo, where Joe oversaw legal work for TI in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, as well as Japan.

It was TI that asked Joe to represent the company on the board of the Dallas Symphony, a happy marriage of obligation to a passion for music. He readily ticks off the numbers that consume many working hours at the DSO: Operating costs are covered by ticket sales, endowment income, and annual gifts from donors, but never are these enough. Hence the “structural deficit” for which funds must be found, year after year. It has fallen to $4 million from over $10 million, however, thanks, he says, to the spectacular work of CEO Kim Noltemy. The endowment is $130 million but DSO could use another million. It’s a tough job keeping high culture alive, he observes. “I wouldn’t want to take this challenge on in any city other than Dallas.”

None of this, however, conveys the real love Joe feels for music. Certainly, it was anything but evident when he was growing up in Cleveland, the seventh of eight children. Educated by Jesuits, he went to John Carroll University, a small liberal arts campus named for the first Catholic bishop and archbishop in the United States, who created another university: Georgetown in Washington. Joe majored in political science and minored in history, and much of his reading today centers on the founding era of America as well as the Civil War. Indeed, a book on Reconstruction occupies him at the moment. Joe knew all along he wanted to go to law school, and it was at Case Western Reserve that he met Colleen.

For all his achievement, Joe Hubach is a remarkably modest man. Tall enough to play basketball, you would think but, no, “I was not good enough.” What about practicing law in five East Asian nations? Don’t paint me as an expert in international law, he urges. The contracts were under US law and in English. His cello playing not up to his wife’s skill on the piano; we already know about that. One thing he does concede, however: Joe plays a lot of golf, obviously well, since his handicap is seven. Even so, as I am leaving, he calls out, “Just don’t make me look too good.” P