FARMERS BRANCH HISTORICAL PARK ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION NUMBER 14

INTERVIEW WITH

MR. BILL GLANCY

Place of Interview: Farmers Branch Historical Park, Dodson House

Interviewer: Dara Jones

Date: June 7, 2018

Mayor Bill Glancy DJ: This is Dara Jones and I'm here with Bill Glancy at the Farmers Branch Historical Park on this beautiful day of June the 7th, 2018. And Bill is here to tell us about his time in Farmers Branch but also about his family who has some great historic roots. So welcome, Bill.

BG: Well, thank you. Good to be here.

DJ: Well, it's good to have you. Well, let's just get started. I'd love to hear kind of your beginnings that you were starting to tell us about growing up in Ohio. And please tell us about your family and their historic roots.

BG: OK. Well my mother's ancestry of – her maiden name was Corwin. And Corwin – they came – the original Corwin came to Boston 17 years after the original Mayflower group – Pilgrims landed. And he lived – my understanding and there are some books about this history of the Corwin family but they – he originally settled in the Boston area and then I think he moved into Virginia, Pennsylvania for a while and then went down to Bourbon County in Kentucky and was – lived there for a while and then moved to Warren County in Ohio which is down in the southwestern part of Ohio between Cincinnati and the Dayton area and originally set up – had a lot of large plot of land there and was kind of settled the town of Lebanon, Ohio which is a historic town in the Ohio area. And he was a large landowner. He gave the land originally to build what's now Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. But land was given to build the university there in Lebanon-Warren County area and they never did do that. They built it over in Oxford Ohio. But the land then became – was given to the city and large a large cemetery there, which our family has involvement in that cemetery and in what was Lebanon's High School was – a part of the land was used for that purpose. And that's where I actually graduated from high school was from that. And its claim to fame was it was this – the scene where they form movie Harper Valley's PTA.

DJ: Oh, wow!

BG: And there's been some other movie. It was one of those old classic, big old traditional high schools that sit back, way back, with a very landscaped facility in front of it and it was very typical what he thought about the high schools back in the early 1900s. And really that area has been very historic. And the Corwin family was very prominent in politics in southwestern Ohio. Then when the Tafts were the kind of the driving forces of politics. My great-great grandfather’s brother was involved and started out I think in maybe state legislature – eventually ended up in the U.S. House of Representatives as a senator and a governor in Ohio and he was very prominent at the time of the Civil War. He was one of the original people who – who converted from Whigs to Republicans and they – he was – he was actually clouted as Lincoln's running mate in the presidential election as a vice president. But he – he made a speech on the floor of the Senate against the Mexican American War and it was very unpopular at the time. He said it was a war of acquisition and that we'd had no business doing what we were doing with the Mexican government. And as a result of that his popularity was diminished dramatically. But he did campaign very strongly for Lincoln and is credited with bringing Ohio voters to support Lincoln and then when he was – Lincoln was elected. he was actually appointed ambassador to Mexico and is credited with keeping Mexico out of the fray between the North and the South in…

DJ: That’s pretty amazing.

BG: …the Civil War. And he's actually was one of Lincoln's pallbearers at the funeral. There was like 20 of them. It wasn't like, you know, they brought them in and it was a long progression of things they did. But he had – But it's kind of interesting the change in politics because my great-great grandfather kept a roof over his head. He didn't make enough money in politics to support himself as a senator back in those days.

DJ: Boy, those were the days.

BG: That's right. It's a whole different change in the way things were done. But anyway, my grandfather was prominent in politics in the Warren County area. He was County Commissioner and president of the bank and things like that in the area and had –was a very respected person in the community. And then his family was mostly all daughters which was my mother and her family. And none of them was involved – interested in politics in any way shape or form so they kind of got out of the out of the politic – politics. And I had certainly no intention of being involved in politics either. I was a sales person working for a paper mill and then moved here. First, I went from Ohio and went to St. Louis for a year and worked under another salesman there in St. Louis area and then they transferred me down here to Texas to take over this territory.

Bill with his wife, Frances and their son, Bart And we moved to here from St. Louis. Flew in here on a weekend: like on a Friday. I had no – no real knowledge of the Dallas area other than we knew we were going to move here. My wife, who was a schoolteacher, and I think a very good schoolteacher – A little side note: my mother was an elementary supervisor and a very hard proponent of education and really was very dedicated her whole life to teaching the children and in training teachers to teach children. And she didn't make very many compliments of anybody but one time in St. Louis while we were up there she came and visited the school where Francis was teaching that time – that one year there. And on the way back from – I picked her up at lunchtime and brought her back. And there was something about it. And she told me that Francis is one of the strongest classroom teachers that she ever observed. And for my mother to say – carried a lot of weight because she didn't – I didn’t hear her ever compliment very many people about anything. But anyway, she – she taught there and then she taught in the Parkway system in St. Louis – suburban area of St. Louis out around Creve Coeur-Chesterfield area. And it was – had a reputation a time of being one of the best public-school systems United States. And so, when we came down here she interviewed with Highland Park, Richardson and Carrollton-Farmers Branch school system and they all offered her a job instantly. But for whatever reason she interviewed with Newman Smith himself, who was a superintendent at the time. It was in the summertime. The staff was rather light at this – in administration and for whatever reason she really kind of liked Newman. Smith and his ideas on education. And so, she took the job here. She took a job over here at Janie Stark. And I think she taught the third grade here – second or third grade. And anyway, so based on that we start looking for a house that was close to that school and we ended up buying a house over on Ridgefair and Veronica which was only about three blocks, I guess, from the school. And did all that on a weekend, flew back to St. Louis on Sunday. Put a contract on the house, I think, on Saturday or something and that was our only exposure to Farmers Branch or anything.

Of course, at the time most of the people who knew anything about the Dallas area told us well you – bett- ought to move to Highland Park. That's where you really ought to move to or the University Park. And we went and looked at some houses there and at that time you could buy a house in Highland Park for about the same price you could buy one out here. There were about 25 to 30 thousand dollars.

DJ: Oh, wow. Oh, for those days to come back!

BG: [laughs] That's right. And we often thought, “Well, there's another financial mistake we made.” But they were old houses and, you know, we were a young couple of 27-28 years old and really, we didn't want to buy into an old house with one bathroom and all that stuff. So, we ended up buying a little house over here that was like two years old and – and we thought it was great for us. Had a swimming pool – all those things. And so, we moved in here in August and we moved in a week before she started school. And she taught there one year at Janie Stark and then we started a family and she became pregnant and we ended up – she's just – Once Bart our son was born in November of 1969, she – we decided that it would be better for her to stay home and commit her time to raising him than going back into school system. And I think she loved doing what she's doing. But I think she regretted the fact that she gave up her profession to do that. But I think it helped our son a lot. I mean she…

DJ: Oh, of course.

BG: …she read all the books on education and young early education and was involved in preschool PTAs and all of those things. And she – she really worked on his education. I know one time I came home from work traveling. I traveled a lot one weekend and I noticed when I got in the house they had names – she had a name stuck on everything in the house like “door” and “window” and all this. And I said, “What are you doing?”

She says, “I'm teaching Bart to read.” And he was – she was carrying him around. He wasn't even able to walk yet.

DJ: Hey, the quicker you can start that the better.

BG: So, he did. I mean she gave him a early boost in his education which, you know, paid off in later years. And so, but, we really enjoyed our early life here and really, I got involved in politics in the city or involvement in the city. But we moved – we got involved here as I say she was – our son was about a year or so old. One day a Frances said, “We need a family hobby that we could participate in.”

And I said, “Oh, that’s fine. Sounds like a good idea.” So anyway, I went out and bought a model airplane to build. I don't know how much family it was, but it was something I was interested in and I got started building model airplanes and eventually built radio- controlled airplanes that you fly with a radio signal.

DJ: Now every boy is fascinated by airplanes!

BG: Oh yes. I certainly was that. I built plastic models and I was real young. And anyway, back then this was about 1970, I guess, very few people knew how to fly radio-controlled models. They had proportional radio systems where you had servos and things that moved in conjunction with what control you gave them was invented in 1964 and so very few people were actually doing it. And I went – spent an awful lot of time and tore up a lot of models learning how to do that. And…

DJ: So, you crashed a few?

BG: Crashed a lot of them. We would crash and go home and build and rebuild and go back out. And we’d go back out and it was so dangerous that there's picnic tables out there at the flying field and sometimes my wife would get our son underneath that picnic as I was flying. But anyway, I eventually mastered it enough to be able to do it pretty well. And at the same time, I was buying all these materials from a hobby shop that was down at the corner of Royal and Webb Chapel and the guy talked me into starting a model club to teach people how to do this because his customers – he's having problems. He has – he’s selling them the materials and things. ‘Course they’d go out and crash the airplane and they become discouraged and give up the sport. So, he said, “You know, I really think it'd be neat if you would start a club and teach people how to do this: give them access to someone that can help them with it.” So, the six of us started a original which - now the North Dallas RC Club but…

DJ: Oh. It’s still going?

BG: …it was called something –it's – it’s – Oh yeah, they’ve got a big flying facility in there.

DJ: Oh, that’s awesome.

BG: But anyway, we started that. And so anyway through the friendship of that in 1976 – guys the name was Bill Kavito [PHONETIC] who ran that hobby shop. He called me up one day and said, “I've got somebody I'd like to bring by and for you to talk to.”

And I really – I thought maybe something to do with modeling or something. And anyway, I said, “Oh sure, Bill.”

So, they came out and the gentleman's name was Herb Weidinger and they – they went to Mary Immaculate Church together. And they sat down, and they said, “Herb here wants to run for the Farmers Branch City Council.” He’d come from Chicago and moved here a few years ago.

And I said, “Oh, OK. Fine, do that.”

And Herb s – or Wil – Bill said, “I'd like for you to help him run for office.”

And I said, “Oh. OK. What do you want me to do?”

And he said, “Well, I want you to run his campaign.”

And I said, “Run his campaign?” I said, “I have no idea what it's – how to run a campaign for public office.” I said, “I'm never even been involved in anything like that.”

He said, Ah, well you can you can help him and learn to do that.” So anyway, they talked me into doing it. And so, we started campaigning for Herb. And we went out and walked and knocked on doors and do the things that you do – put out literature and all that. And anyway, Herb won election. He ran against a gentleman by the name of Stan Ball. And at that time in the city of Farmers Branch, I think we've always had good City Councils but there – you know you get a certain group of people that were in office and they kind of become possessive or – or you know they want to direct people to come and run for office that they – they would support or feel like would support what they're doing. And you have always had kind of that going on and there was a group of them that had come in who were doing a good job in the city. They picked it up from a time it was kind of in a crisis area. Actually, at one time the county took over the city government here because of the failure of the City Council. But they came in and were kind of reformers and did a good job, but they had, you know, their opinion about how things were, and it was kind of like you always have, I think, the traditionalists who want to keep things kind of the way they are…

DJ: Oh, of course.

BG: …and very conservative thing. And you have more progressive people who come along who want to change things somewhat. And so that kind of a situation was going on which continually happens.

DJ: Every city has that, right?

BG: Right. And you go through that. And Carol Dingman who you've interviewed was – had – was very progressive at that time wanted to change things and she was trying to get the Council to do a lot of things that they didn't really want to do. She wanted to get – have paramedics and things like that and they didn't have paramedics at that time and you know, various other things and so we kind of supported what she was doing. Herb was supportive of that. Some thought naivety on my part that I really – Herb was a nice guy. He seemed to be interested and early on I was not as probably a critical or selective in who I supported. I thought, “Was a good guy. He wants to do this. Fine. You know, something.”

So anyway, he got elected and, in the following, – trying to think, maybe a year or two years after that, they came to me and a guy by the name of Pat Haggerty, who was on there who was also kind of the group of pa – of Herb Weidinger and Carol Dingman, were trying to get somebody to run in Pat's place because he was going off. And they said, “We'd like for you to do this.”

And I said, “I have no interest in that. I do not want to do that.” I said, “That's not something I'd feel comfortable with”. And, anyway they kept after me and I finally made the mistake of saying, “Well, if you can't find anybody else to do it I will do it.” Well that was the end of the search.

DJ: Oh, of course.

BG: So anyway, got involved and ran a campaign and got elected. And I – there were two- year terms at that time and I served two terms from ’80 –– ’82-’86.

DJ: What are they now? Are they not two?

BG: They’re three-year now.

DJ: OK.

BG: And there wasn't a term limit. I mean you could run however many times as you wanted. And I ran two terms office and didn't run for the third term. And it was a very pr –good time here in the city. Whether we did – were that big of an influence on its development or it was just to happened to be the circumstance or whatever. The city of Dallas was up against us. We were the next expansion area that happened, and I know in the four years that I was on the City Council the ad valorum value of the city doubled. We built a lot of the stuff on the west side, east side. Commercial development happened. Most of our residential by that time was fairly well built out. And the way the city’s situated it's been very beneficial for our citizens. We have a kind of a central core residential area and we have commercial areas on both sides of the city which generated a lot of revenue. They were paying probably 80 to 85 percent…

DJ: Wow.

BG: …of the city’s revenue was derived from the commercial entities. We had all that along the Dallas North Toll what's now the Dallas North Tollway. It wasn’t there then. And then also over on the west side out around the Luna Road, LBJ and all that area was developing, and it was a very interesting time. Almost every Council meeting we had, we had a large development coming in proposing to build this or that or whatever. And I enjoyed the Council at that time and we had active Chamber of Commerce going on at that time and a lot of civic organizations. And back in those areas that was before you got into a lot of the problems with competition within businesses. And people were afraid to go to things and work together because it was perceived as a collusion in development. and a lot of these kind of things going on and a lot of the money was pulled back from banks and stuff who spent a lot of money with people in public promotion of the cities and stuff. And so, utility companies – all these people had public relations people who were out there helping promote the cities. And so, it was kind of a fun time. But then after serving two terms, I kind of went through a change in my career. I'd been with the paper mill for – for 21 years.

DJ: A paper mill hill –here?

BG: No, it was actually out of Ohio.

DJ: Oh, all right.

BG: It was a lightweight tissue mill and I was kind of frustrated in my business. And that kind of probably part of – an undertow of why I got involved in politics because I had worked for it, you know, and after a few years when you kind of figure out the lay of the land – what the business is doing. We were in commodity products, making volume stuff like laminating prof [PHONETIC] for cereal boxes and stuff like that. Couldn't make hardly any money at it. You ran the mill 24 hours a day, seven days a week and you hoped that you made a profit at the end of the year because the business was so competitive. And I got frustrated. As a result of that, they was very reluctant to give you any type of a raise or increase in salaries and stuff. And so, I kind of became frustrated with that and being in the marketplace where the rubber meets the road you kind of get a feel for what's going on. And I was trying to get the mill to move into value added products where we could get more money for them. And I was – we went through a time of finally they lost money. And so, the people who owned the mill decided they'd make some management change and they brought in a new president. And he was a physicist – very bright man. He actually helped build atomic bomb.

DJ: Oh, wow.

BG: But he didn't know anything about business, but he was – knew a lot about people and a lot about how to make business work. And I was frustrated – about ready to quit. And I know he came down and sat down with me down at the Adolphus Hotel and asked me why I was so frustrated and what he thought the company ought to do. And I laid out a plan for the company. And so, he said, “That's interesting.” He said, “Why don’t you write all that up and come in and present it to the board and we'll talk about it.”

So, I – at that point I really didn't care about what my future was with that company. I didn't think it was going anywhere so it didn't bother me a lot. My – my boss was a commodity guy and it’s what he knew and that's what he wanted to sell, and he didn't want to get into an area he didn't know anything about.

DJ: And that was part of the problem?

BG: Problem. And so anyway I went and made that presentation to the board and he was in there. He was the Vice President of Sales and, you know, you could hear a pin drop when I got finished. And I thought, “Well better go home write my resume out and start looking.” [laughs]

And he's – and when we got finished, the president said, “That's very interesting, Bill. So that's a good presentation,” He said. “We'll get back to you.” So –OK. So anyway, he did. About month – six weeks later I got a call and they said they’d come up because there’s something we want to talk to you about – talk to you. And he was – this guy was – was very good at handling people and he didn't take my boss on directly because he'd been there a long time and he was kind of the stalwart of the company. But he went out and hired a consultant. And, course we…

DJ: Pretty shrewd.

BG: …we'd had consultants –that I'd worked in a city, you know, and we had consultants all the time and most of the time they gave you a binding of something that you already knew, and you put it on the shelf and that was the end of it. And so, I didn't go with a lot of enthusiasm, but this guy was so different as a consultant than the one with the mills. I mean when a guy came in and interviewed with the president for the job he came in with a pad of paper and, uh – to write down things and the president said, “Where's your presentation?”

And the guy said, “How am I going to make a presentation? I don't know think about your company.” He said, “Whatever I give you an idea, your people are going to have to do it. I'm not going to do it.” He said, “I've got to work with your people and figure out who you have in your organization that can have some ideas about what this company should do and are committed enough to do it. And if you don't have anybody we're going to go find somebody to do it.” And so, he started interviewing us and he convinced another fellow in the organization that we had good plans. And it got us the leverage to be able to enact what we wanted to do, and we took the little company from 15 million dollars to forty-five million dollars in about two years.

DJ: That's incredible. And that was using your idea?

BG: And the funny thing about it. You ever buy a gift bag now with tissue stuffed in it?

DJ: Sure.

BG: Well that was a product we developed.

DJ: With the – with the color – was that something new putting color on it?

BG: Well we made colors, but we never promoted colors.

DJ: Oh, all right.

BG: They were hard to run. Mill personnel didn't like to run them. All that. But I could put a sheet of tissue – 20 by 30 white sheet of tissue, put in a box to wrap a shirt or something and I could get a penny for it and if I tried to raise the price of that two cents or two per cent I'd lose the order.

DJ: Mhm.

BG: So, at the same time we happened to have – it was kind of sad circumstances. Champion International had a shopping bag mill. It was kind of having the same problem. They made kraft shopping bags. Price was, you know, very competitive. Couldn't make any money. And a guy by the name of John Hildenbiddle [PHONETIC] took over that company and he was trying to develop a more value-added product as well and he started putting higher quality graphics on shopping bags and that. We had a little guy down here in Dallas called the Sample House who was very creative guy and he kind of worked with us and we really developed that gift bag and tissue paper.

[crosstalk]

DJ: So, the two of them together?

BG: And if made that tissue paper and put it in that bag I could get eight cents for it. [laughs]

DJ: There you go. What about the bag?

BG: The bag went, you know, too. I mean it – the price of the bag went up dramatically because it had graphics on it – more high-fi style and was telling, giving them, you know, a nice message and all that. And so anyway we – we kind of rode that item into a lot more value and my reward for success in the company was that the stock went from twenty-one dollars a share to one hundred ninety-eight dollars a share.

DJ: Well there you go.

BG: And the owner sold it – the company. And so, I got a new bunch of managers or owners that came in who were commodity guys.

DJ: Oh no.

BG: And they kept, you know, they would always listen to you, but they’d never do what you said. And after about a year and a half – two years of that I – I decided that I wouldn't go to go through that again. And so, I lef – I wrote out a resignation. Had no idea what I was going to do but wrote a resignation out, handed to them and said, you know, I'm going to go a different direction and really …

DJ: So you didn't know what you were going to next.

BG: No and I had a son graduate from high school, getting ready to go to college. Had a little bit of money in a retirement fund and things like that that I could draw on. But anyway, I started sending out resumes to companies and looking for jobs in that field and I would get interviews with companies and they always end up saying, “Why don't you start a rep firm and rep for us?”

DJ: Now what is a rep firm?

BG: Well you take a bunch of companies that have non-competitive products. Like you have a bag company, you have a tissue company, you have a giftwrap company, ribbon company - things like that and you are their sales person and you have a geographic area that you work in. I had a four-state area down here that I had autonomy and anything that was sold in that four-state area I would get roughly 5 percent sales commission on its sales.

DJ: Now did you have to be directly involved in the sale for that to happen?

BG: No. No. Anything that – you had – you had autonomy. Anything that was sold in there was, you know, and sometimes there's negotiations about things – a piece of business they already have or something they might want to exempt. But generally, most of them were that way. And what – what it facilitated them back in the 80s was it would cost you roughly 150,000 dollars to put a person on the road and traveling and pay for their expenses in the vehicle and benefits and all that. Well if your company's territory sales there did not represent – If it cost you more than 5 percent of that – their sales there to represent 150,000 dollars. It was better to hire somebody else to do it and pay them to do it. And you may pay them 75,000 dollars to represent you there whereas opposed to the 150,000 that cost you to do it.

DJ: Now let me ask you –

BG: We paid our own expenses and all that. They just paid a rough sales commission on what the sales were. Well if you could pick up four or five mills to represent or the suppliers and you get 50,000 a piece for them or 75,000 dollars or whatever it is you try to find a certain area that their sales was. Probably somewhere between a million dollars and 5 million dollars in sales was the area that you kind of look for custom of client that would have sales in that area. And so, I picked up a bunch and I was very fortunate because I was able to get high quality lines because they didn't have any reps down here they liked. And so, they readily got them and they really – I was hired probably as much for my marketing ability as it was as my on-person selling ability to front a customer because I was consulted a lot about how to do things. And at the same time when I left the tissue mill that I worked for in Ohio there was a tissue mill up in Boston who was struggling. They were making carbonizing paper for credit card vouchers.

DJ: I remember that.

BG: Remember the – the little credit card thing they did that?

DJ: Oh, yeah, I do.

BG: And then they had problems with crime and stuff. People would – would take that carbon sheet and get the number off of it and forge things and all that. Well so that business was going away. They went to what was called NCR papers for a while which was a different – had no carbon in it. And then eventually, you know, you didn’t have any vouchers at all. And so, they were doing like 16 million dollars in sales in carbonizing paper and the business going away. And they called me and asked me to come up there when I’d left Crystal. And you know, I said, “Oh, well fine.” They were going to pay my way up. So, I thought, “Yeah, what the hell.” So, I went up and sat down with them.

It was real – they were very antiquated little mill in western Massachusetts. Nothing like the mill I'd left. We were very sophisticated. We were presumed to be the Cadillac of the industry and all that. And so anyway it was a man, elderly man, who was about that time, 75-year-old. He had two Ivy League educated sons in the business and a daughter and a son-in-law. And they sat there and talked to me about what I'd done at Crystal and all this and whether they could duplicate something like that. And I went up there, I think, two or three times. The old gentleman that owned the mill sat in a corner: didn't say a word. I didn’t know what his reaction was to anything. And so finally after about the third time that evening we got ready to break up from that meeting and he said, “Come on. Let's go to dinner.” Fine. So, he and I went to dinner and he asked me a few questions and wasn’t anything really involved but about the business and things like that. The next morning, we went out to the mill and before we sat down to have a conference and he got up and said, “Guys,” he said, “I've sit here and listen to this man talk to you for I don’t know how many days now whatever.” And he said, “Listen to what he said.” And he said, “You know what. I think he knows what he's talking about.” He said, “You boys you got all those pads.” He said, “You write down what this man says and that's what we're going to do.”

And that was that was the end of the debate. You know, I was used to in a corporate world where every time you went in and you debated everything, and I have files that thick on any type of project you wanted to do, and you justified it 90 ways from Sunday and all this. And this man said, “We're going to do this, boys.” And I had no confidence in him. They had a lot worse looking physical facility you could ever see. I was a lot into printed tissue and doing a lot of things like that and I'd silkscreens samples to get the first sales going on and put a lot – I came with an art background. I had a crazy education. I went to Cincinnati Art Academy and studied fine arts for two years and ended up figuring out all I was going to have as a hobby. Couldn’t make a living at that and then I took the other extreme and went to Ohio State and majored in managerial accounting. Now you can't get too far a freight [PHONETIC] of vocations than that. [laughs] And anyway, I did have an art background and did stuff like that. So anyway, I helped them get started. Told them what products to make how much to make, colors to do, designs to –. And they had one little old printing press. It was all tore to pieces in the back of a handicap workshop: for handicapped people. And I looked at that thing and I thought, “My God what – I can tell you all things the world that you can't – if you don't have the physical abilities to do it you're never going to be able make it. Well, I don't know it's a private home corporation, but today it's estimated to be sales of a billion dollars. And I didn't do that. All I did is give them the roadmap to get there. But those boys were very smart, and they own mills in China and all over the place today.

But – and they're really gracious people. I mean they begged me to come up there and visit with him and things like that. And we've done that sometimes. And it was one of those success stories that you really like to see happen with people taking something and really taking initiative and doing it. That printing facility today it's state of the art: great big facility, capsulated [PHONETIC] presses. They do all this printing on films and stuff for everything from cracker wrappers to all kinds of sophisticated food grade packaging and all that. It's state of the art all the way through from – from conception of design through all automated. And so – and they’re people that put money back into their business. They just don't drain it off. And anyway, I represented those folks too. I never took anything for what I did for them, but I represented them down here. My son has the business today. Still represents them.

But I was very lucky in lots of ways of having product lines that were able to do well. And I always had the criteria – always wanted quality. I didn't have anything to come back in a sales presentation if somebody said your quality wasn’t good enough. Now I can fight price all day long – justify why I'm charging you for it. But I never did – did have a comeback if the product didn't meet the standards of what they were expecting. And so – and eventually my son came into the business after he graduated from college and I made him go work for those people for a while because he I told him, “You need to learn the business from their side of the street.” And ‘course they were kind enough to give him a job. He worked up in Boston area in the mill for a while and then came back started to work for me. We worked together for 7, 8 years, I guess. Maybe 10. And then I retired, and he took over the business. They have it today and, uh –

But anyway, that was what was going on at the time when I was a city councilman and I needed to put more time into that. So, I got out of the council business. But what I did was – I would like to help good people get elected to serve. But that's a short-term deal. Worked on a campaign for maybe three or four months and then they all went off and did their job. And you go back to what you were doing. And so, I spent a lot of time helping people get elected. Ran a lot of campaigns here for various people over the years: probably 15, 20 of them over the years. And I think I had developed a good feeling for candidates. You know, and you get people come to you and say, “I want to run for council.”

“OK Why do you want to do that?”

“Well, you know I've got some time and I want to put back into the community.” And those are all you know good goals and good reasons.

But you'd say, “What do you know about the council?”

“Oh, I don't know. I went to a council meeting or two”.

You would say, “You know, that's a difficult job.”

DJ: And it’s not paid, right?

BG: Not paid. And – but you're going to be thrown into a whole different world. In the corporate world, we are bottom line, profit driven. If you make a profit, at something you can get your way. City government’s not – any government’s not that way. It's – it's not reward by success at the bottom line. Governments are spending driven. It's how you spend money, not how you make money. You know, you've got a certain amount of revenue. You can mess around with the tax rate or you can do this but you're going to have a certain amount of money that you bring in and how you spend that money is going to be the results of what happens. And people – you can have the greatest ideas in the world, but if the people don't accept it or do it – it goes nowhere because there's no – they don't see the consequences of that like you do in a business where if you do something, screw up, lose money. Everybody understands that. Or if you make money they can understand that.

DJ: Well the consequences are long term sometimes.

BG: And it is, and you have to be – think all long term and you always have to sit there and think, “What's the long-term consequences?” You know as a councilman you can sit there, and a lot of junk come by and doesn’t have much – much long-term ramifications. But once in a while something comes by that you're going to vote on that may have long term ramifications for the city and you have to be able to discern those things. I used to tell them. I said, “You know, you need to go to Council meetings for a minimum of a year. Sit there, watch the people you're going to serve with. Because what's the chemistry of those people that’s on there? Are you going to be able to work with them or are you going to be able to influence them or you'd be able to agree with them? Or – Because council, good council works together. You're not always fighting each other. It's all right to have a difference of opinion and express the opinion but you've got to leave it on that. Worst thing it can happen is you get mad at somebody because they voted a certain way on that. Next issue comes along you vote against it because the person – you're mad at the person. I mean, you know it's a whole different economy in dealing with a group management of something and trying to do that. But I used to try to find people – and they didn't always have to agree with me. But do they have a good rationale of why they think like they do, and they are – Do they have a good thought process? And do they think about the future? You know, we're always going to have change. But it can be good change and you don't have to tear down what you've had to do that. And I used to tell people, you know, “I want to do things. I understand the things that you like about this community and I don't want to change those things. OK. But we have to do things because today – and it's an accelerated process today. I mean the world is changing so fast…”

DJ: It’s crazy today.

BG: …that we have to be ahead of it. And ‘course in the business world and marketing world. I always had to do that. Always had to think, you know, “What's the next product? How do we evolve our products? How do we do all those things?” So, you're always thinking you know, five years, eight years, ten years down the road about what the consequence is and it's the same in city government. It should be.

And anyway, I did – worked on a lot of campaigns. Kind of got out of it. My wife was involved in a lot of things with the city too. She was on this Historic Board for a number of years and it was during a time when a lot of this stuff was being developed. They – they did a lot of the things with the Victorian cottage and…

DJ: Stuff here?

BG: Here on this premise and she was a very active person in that. Wrote – and then the state passed a law that the public-school systems have to teach a section on local history. I think it's in the fifth grade or something like that. So anyway, she did – her in a bunch of the other gals developed the program which is going on today where kids are brought in here and they would dress up in costume and docents and kind of show the history of the area and this park was developed and we finally got a good consultant who actually put a program together: back – A Walk Back in Time and if you look at this thing it's kind of laid out– the time you start back in the pilgrim’s day or the cabins and things like that and it kind of moved up through the progression of the community up to this building here. And she – she wrote a book – that book on it was a manual that they gave to the teacher. She took them around and gave one to every school

DJ: Now what year was this?

BG: That would have been. Oh, that's when I was off the Council. Because she never could be on a board – wife – a spouse couldn't be on a board when you're on the Council. So that was probably in the mid to late 80s, I guess. She was on here for several years.

DJ: Yeah, we're going to want to get your timeline. When she was on it and when you were on it, you know when you – when you were mayor.

BG: Okay

DJ: Get some dates from you.

BG: Well, we – we – we've kind of dovetailed our time, serving time because at that time I went on the Hospital Board after I went off the Council for a while. We had a Metrocrest Hospital Authority which operated RH – then RHD hospital later, you know, it’s North Dallas now and also, we had Trinity Hospital up in Carrollton. And we were the landlords of the facilities and we would lease them out to providers –

DJ: The city did?

BG: Yeah, the city. The city, you know, it's one of those things where hospital authorities are set up. They’re kind of a quasi-government agency and they – they're set up to help finance facilities because then they become tax exempt bonds that they sell, which, you know, you can sell bonds for less money if they're not – they don't have to pay taxes on them. And so that's the kind of the rationale of – of doing those. And you build the facility, sell bonds and build facilities or buy facilities and add to them or whatever you have to do, what the situation is, and then and then you – you normally – Now some authorities do operate medical facilities, but that's a whole different world providing medical care and we ended up leasing them out to – for medical providers and we had what was became Tenet [PHONETIC]. It was nash – originally Lutheran Medical Systems and, you know, it changed its names two or three times but it was a for profit provider of healthcare and they operated the facilities. We would – we had the land and you'd end up normally people like the doctors would get together and decide they wanted to build their own medical office building. Maybe ten doctors would go in on it or something. They would build a facility, have their office in there, you know, when they, in theory, gained revenue off of the rent of the building to other people.

DJ: Right.

BG: And so most of them end up the point where doctors in reality don't – want to get out of them. They're not as profitable as they think, and you know in the medical profession they spend all their time learning their profession not learning how to run a business. There's a difference

DJ: Yeah. Huge.

BG: And so, they’d end up building, wanting to sublease the land and we would give it to them at a reduced rate to get medical facilities there and doctor's offices there and it all played together. It fed into the acute care facility you had there because the doctors were the doorkeepers of getting patients into the hospital for different things. And so, you wanted them there and we would lease the buildings to them or the land to them. They’d build the building. Generally, there would be a falling out or the point where they’d want to get out of them. And the caveat we had with the leases – ground leases on them is that we had first choice of who bought the building and you know, we didn't want to have something that's negative coming in there and buying the building and setting up a facility. So, we wanted to have some control of it and we would end up usually buying the facility back from them – physical bricks and mortar. And so, we ended up owning most all the buildings that were ended up being around the – the acute care center. And so, we did that. I was on that board for about ten years and during the time and then. Then I kind of got away from the city. I've worked a few campaigns – not too much and then we had a big change come in – in the late 2000s – middle to late 2000s. We got some young guys come in on the council. You know, you again you had a philosophic change of age groups and stuff coming in. A bunch of older guys there and then, you know, they got kind of, the people thought, complacent or to some certain people did and they wanted to replace them. So, you had a new Council come in. Young mayor came in here and changed things dramatically and they came – he came and asked me – he said, “Will you go back on Planning and Zoning to help us? We're having some problems over there with developers.”

And I said, “Oh, fine sure. I do can do that.” And so, I went back on Planning and Zoning.

DJ: Now what year was that?

BG: That would have been about 20007 or 8, I think…

DJ: Alright.

BG: …something like that in that period of time. What you had –you had a lot of young you young guys on Planning and Zoning. And while you don't have to be – just roll over and play dead for developers that come in, you have to work with them. You know, if a developer spends time on a project and comes and presents it to you. He's pretty well – he's got a lot of money in it. And you know he's – he's either got an option on the land to buy or if he gets the zoning changed or he may own the land and come in and try to change the zoning. That's one of the things you always work with in the city and that's what we have back in the 80s we had to be very careful with. Is – you get someone and come in and buys a piece of land under the guise that he's going to get the zoning changed and upgrade the value of the land based on what the new zoning is. Well he may never develop on it. But all he's doing is stair stepping the price of the land because the next guy comes along, and he does the same thing. Well eventually the land gets so expensive that nobody can make it work as far as building anything on it.

DJ: Was that kind of like the thing back in the 80s with Faulkner? Didn’t they do some of that?

BG: Well to some degree, yeah, there was some of that. They're a little more shady than that.

DJ: Well, same principle?

BG: But I mean that's what you had happening. And there wasn't anything illegal…

DJ: Ok.

BG: …about this but you ended up with land that was so expensive per square foot, you know. And then the developer’s the next to last one coming says, “I can't build anything on it unless you let me have something, you know, some dispensation to be in more density on it or more so this – that to it or something like that or – or subsidize it or whatever.” And so that's the thing that you always played around with in these you know commercial markets where, you know, it's kind of a higher – higher dollar commercial markets. And so, any way you would – you would have that kind of stuff going all time.

But when I went on a pla – on Planning and Zoning one of the thing I noticed, you know, is somebody bring in a project like apartment complex or something in some of the co– commissioners would say, “Oh I don't like it.”

Well, when the guy would say, “Well what is it about it you don't like?”

And the worst thing you can tell them is, “I don't know. Change it and bring it back.”

“Well, how am I going to spend a lot of money chasing things that I only know what – what I'm trying to chase?”

DJ: Right. Of course.

BG: And so I'd tell them, I said, “You know, if you – if you if you don't like something that's fine but tell him what it is you don't like about it and what you expect him to do to change it to make it something that they – that you will vote on.” And so, we kind of got that straightened around where stuff would come through and you certainly encourage him to examine the plans and think about it and think about the long-term ramifications. But – but don't turn them down because they won't put a bush somewhere.

DJ: Right.

BG: And believe me, I’ve seen that happen. And so, you know, it's all a compromise to some degree especially in the market we have today.

Now back in the 80s when we had people standing at the door to build anything here we could tell them all kinds of things that we wanted them to do and they would do it based on the economics. They could still make a profit on it. You know, we would have them do traffic studies and all kinds of things about what the impact of that building is going to be and all that. And you know, they’d hire a consultant to do a traffic study and you never had any of them that ever came in and said, “No you don't build this because it's too much traffic.” Well they're hiring the consultant. He's going to come, you know, he may tell you all you need to put a right-hand turn lane here. You may put a signal there – do something, you, know, some minor things but I never had one of them tell me, “Don't let these guys build here because they're going to overcrowd the traffic conditions on the – the street.”

DJ: Now has that happened?

BG: No, I never had one of them ever tell me that.

DJ: I mean, has the traffic ever gotten worse?

Bill Glancy flanked by Dallas Cowboys players “Too-Tall” Jones on the left and Dennis Thurman on the right. BG: Oh, yeah. Sometimes it'll have a big impact from it is, so they don't have enough parking. They don't have enough of this that and the other. And, you know, businesses were all different. It's like we had the Geico building over there on the corner of Spring Valley and Midway.

DJ: Yeah.

BG: Well their big problem was they could – didn't have enough place to park people. They had a building full of people in there, marketing insurance. They had buses. They would rent places in different places and run their own buses around to the parking lot.

DJ: Really.

BG: Yeah. And so – we tried to accommodate that because we wanted to keep them there. But those kind of things happen and you just have to be aware of it. And – but anyway. So anyway, I did that and at that time this young mayor that we had at the time – very progressive young man – smart young man. He got involved in the illegal immigration issue and he really pushed that issue and it had a certain amount of popularity in the community here. You have a older residential community where most of the people here are longtime residents and longtime citizens of our country and they – re – resented a lot of the things they were seeing happen with the residential property and some things like that, which were true. I supported that because before I started getting back involved with the politics: after I retired from my business. Sold to my son. I thought, “Well maybe – maybe I'll go buy some of these little old houses and fix them up a little bit and you know, remodel them make them nice and resell them or rent them or something.

DJ: Right.

BG: And so, it's not so much that I wanted to do it for money, but I just wanted to see the process how it worked. When I was in college I worked for a real estate developer and that's what we did. We bought old country farms back in Ohio and turned them into country estates and so, I'd had a lot of experience doing that kind of thing. And so, I started looking at these houses and it became so depressing you couldn't believe the condition of some of these houses. And one of the things you fight in preserving residential property is absentee ownership. It – and it gets out of hand. Some of these communities...

DJ: So, somebody’s renting it out or something?

BG: Well, yeah, they’d buy a house and lease it and course back then you had that going on because we had the stock market crash and the housing market crashed back in the 80s or early late 2000s. And so, people took money out of the stock market and were buying houses. And you had a government who decided that everybody ought to be able to own a house no matter whether there had the ability to pay for it or not. And they would go out and buy houses with nothing down or very little down. And you, know obviously you've got to get the money back some way and then they would have payments on the house that they couldn’t make. And the laws were such at that time it took about a year to get them out of there after they decided, you know, you tried to foreclose on them. So, they had a year that they get rent out of the thing before they had to abandon it.

And I went into some of these houses and they’d turned them into apartments and you'd have a three-bedroom or four-bedroom house and they'd have maybe three or four couples in there. If you owned a two-room apartment they would take a hammer and knock the dry wall out between the partitions and that's how you got back and forth between one room bedroom and the other. They put locks on the bedroom doors and they had kind of a common kitchen area.

DJ: Now when you say, “knock out the drywall are you talking where it's like professionally done or just –

BG: No. No. You took a hammer and they just knocked it out?

DJ: Just punched a hole in it so you could walk into the next room?

BG: Punched all of them. [laughs]

DJ: Wow okay.

BG: And they were. And it got so depressing. I went up and looked at one on Mark Twain. There was a foreclosure. It looked like it had been used as a daycare center. It had a fence around the back and play area back in there. The house was so dirty, it had a sign on it ‘beware of rodents’ and stuff from the foreclosure people. The house was all gas – stove gas, hot water heaters, gas furnace. None of them had a vent on them. They all vented into the house.

DJ: Oh, that's dangerous.

BG: Yes. And if you had children in there. And so, it kind of got to me thinking, “You know, we've got to do something here. We can't let things just continue to go like it is.” And there's only so much you can do with the code enforcement. I mean they – they hide a lot of this stuff and you know, they would try to go around and – and we even put restrictions. We did that back in the 80s when I was on the council before. How many people can live in a house? Because you would get restaurants that would buy a house and bring employees in. And they put 10 or 15 people in a house. And that was part of their compensation was the place to live where you worked in the restaurants and things like that. And so, you ended up you know, really taking down your neighborhoods and that.

DJ: And that and this is all because of the stock market crash, you’re thinking?

BG: You know that that that's just really been happening economic greed it's going on…

DJ Or had this been happening –

BG: … and it got more accelerated when you had the stock market crash and people wanted to get out of the market and try to get invested in other things and they bought houses.

DJ: All right.

BG: You know, and some of these communities ran up over 50 percent of the houses are – are owned by absentee owners. And you know, that's you buy a house like to rent it, it's a different deal. I mean it's what can get out of it in money, not how once I can make the thing look nicer or present to the neighborhood. I mean it's a business proposition. And so, I supported what they were doing because I felt like it's the way to go. And I always felt even when I was mayor I put a lot of effort into this. Not much success but a lot of effort. I really started studying immigration and what's the problems with immigration. And it became apparent to me that the best thing we could do was get the people who are here legal to become citizens. That issue’s never dealt with

DJ: The people that were here – did you say legal or il –

BG: Legally.

DJ: OK.

BG: The people here on green cards.

DJ: Right. Get them into citizenship. You know, if we had going on Cliff Starnes [PHONETIC] and his wife were running us English classes at the library. We had as many as 400 attendees a month. Now some of them came two or three times a month sometimes or something so it wasn’t 400 people. [crash] Oops, I’m sorry.

DJ: Uh. Oh.

BG: But it was a large number of people came here trying to learn English. Now they have various motives to do that for reasons: some of them for economic reasons. If they learned – if they learned English, they could earn more money than if they didn't. And some of them – I found the ones who came from foreign countries – people coming from off – from particularly Eastern Bloc countries or Europe, those areas, Russia even China, Middle East – a lot of them came over here and they had no intention of going back. They were here permanently. And they understood that they had to assimilate in some degree and that was the thing. I’d go up and talk to them frequently in the classes and tried to encourage them to become citizens. And what we did in the classes or the Starnes [PHONETIC] did was if once they got progressed through, and they had people working at different levels and I tried to encourage people to go up there and help them. Because a lot of people think, “Well, I don't know another lang(guage).” Well you know that's not the point. You don't have to know another language. You have to know English.

DJ: Right.

BG: Because when you sit down at a table with a bunch of people, you had people from maybe five different countries there and they all spoke different languages. If you knew Spanish that didn't necessarily help you with all those people. You had to learn – be able to get them to learn. And basically, it's conversational English that you were teaching them. What you would do is you set them down and say, “All right. Try to tell me what you did this weekend and try to tell me in English and I will try to help you explain that in English.” And you know, they’d just starting off, they'd stumble through it. But soon they became functional enough to be able to tell you in broken English what they did. And as you progressed them – and Cliff usually worked with them in the last stage where he talked about parts of speech and all the more refined parts of teaching a language. And then when we got about 15 or 20 of them to the point where we felt comfortable with them, we tried to get them to take citizenship classes and become citizens and that was the very discouraging because you would get 15 or 18 them signed up together, get publications and books and stuff on citizenship and try to teach them. Very few of them stayed through the whole program become – try to become citizens. You know it's ironic. And this is back – figures back in 2 – early 2013-12-14 when I was really involved [PHONETIC] with this. It cost 695 dollars to become a citizen of the United States.

DJ: Oh, well that’s a barrier right there.

BG: Well to a degree. But it cost you – Like today it cost them something like 450-500 dollars to renew a green card for 10 years.

DJ: Oh. Ok. All right. I didn’t realize that.

BG: So – so. And it's a simple process. If they haven't violated the law and come in here on a green card legally and it's not overstayed and all the other things. All they have to do. They can go online, file the application to become a citizen. They can get the test that they're going to take which is a hundred questions: multiple choice questions. And when they go in for the interview – after the back – part of the fee, the $695 is background checks: checking their country of origin, what kind of information we got back from them. And when you go in for the for the test they select 10 questions from that 100 and you have to be able to orally answer six of those questions collect – collect – correctly. That's the standards for citizenship and I know it because I had the people from CIS come out and sit down and tell them this is how you do it. And I'm running the program, so I know how to do it. It's not – it's not a deception and you know a lot of these people get tied up with attorneys because attorneys – a lot of them make a lot of money trying to process these people through citizenship. And if they have something they've done wrong which could stop that process then he has to get that taken off the records and all that and then you know they'll end up spending five or ten thousand dollars with an attorney.

DJ: That's a lot of money. Yes. And that becomes – and the attorneys like to promote that – that you need an attorney to do it. You don't need an attorney to become a citizen the United States. Anyway, that was my goal. Now I thought things and I sat down with Ted Cruz's people I sit down with John Cornyn’s people, representatives, and talked about this process. The things I see bad about it is you’re required to be here under a green card for five years before you can apply for citizenship. Well once you lived here for that long a period of time without citizenship it's very easy to continue: not follow through the process. Now it's three years if you're a spouse of a U.S. citizen but five if you're not. My thought was, “We can change a lot of the things in this country by just changing the laws minutely. Number one, if they can come in here, learn English, pass the background checks, in a year or two let them apply for citizenship. What's magic about having to sit around here for five years? Number two, quit renewing the green cards. You get one green card for a certain period of time at the end of that time you make a decision whether you want to be a U.S. citizen or not. And if you don't, leave.” You can't – if you don't have skin in the game you're not going to fully involve yourself in the process. If you become a citizen of this country, then you become – you’re part of America and you assimilate into America.

I have had people that were in here that lived here 30 and 40 years on green cards. I mean, give me a break. I would no longer no more think about moving to Italy and not learn Italian or assimilate into the Italian society…

DJ: Mhm.

BG: …than a man in the moon. If you're going to move somewhere here you're going to have to assimilate and become part of that. Now that doesn't mean you give up your heritage and traditions and stuff but you still have to understand how the people here work. You know America, is the most funny country in the world. You ask them for something, they’ll give you the shirt off your back. You demand something they’ll give you a war. And that's the problem going on here and –

DJ: Going on?

BG: With the immigration process. They come in here. They wave American – Mexican flag. They do whatever. I mean, I used to think, “Why would you walk down the street, wave an American flag in front of people who've had a United States flag built – laid over the coffin of their son who gave his life for this country. How do you think that person's going to react to that?”

DJ So – so you talking about people are waving Mexican flags?

BG: Oh yeah. They used to go to a parade downtown and you know we're Mexican. We're going to take America back. You’re not going to do that stuff. Why would you even think that? What mentality would bring you, you know? And I – when I was mayor I would get these illegal immigrant activists that would come in to preach to me about how we were so mean and so this and so that. And I’d say, “Do you really want to help these people? You really want to help people?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Well here's how you do it. Let's go up there and work in the classes, teach these people how to become – assimilate into society here and become a part of it.”

You know, discrimination, all this stuff you have, there’s – there's a rationale of why that comes about. If – if you're a class of people and create most of the crime in the country, you don't think people is going to relate to that? I mean, it's kind of funny when they say, “You profile.” Well, used to teach police how to profile to know who the suspects would look for in certain crime areas – areas or doing crime. It’s just intelligence of thinking of that. And so, you'd say, “Well I was really wanting to help people.”

And I thought you know, “If we could get the ones who are here legally through the citizenship process, let’s then start working for the ones who are illegally here to get them processed to where if – if they're here and good citizens and been good thing at pay {PHONETIC] and all that, then let’s work that group out.

DJ: Mhm. Yeah.

BG: You have to do it in steps. You can’t –

DJ: Now if somebody is illegal and they're here, but they've now been good people and contributed. How –how would they – What's the path for them to become citizens?

BG: Well I think you’d look – Number one – what the – the whole problem to a large degree is economics. They're paid with cash because they don't want to pay taxes. And when you become a citizen, you get a legal social security card and that and somebody hires you they're going to take money out of your check every week to take care of your FICA problem, you know, Social Security, Medicare, income tax withdrawal – all those things that a citizen can…

DJ: Well, it’s a cut in pay to become a citizen.

BG: Yeah. And so, if you get paid with cash or you know, then a lot of the problems today is our employers are greedy employers and greedy citizens who take the services from the employer or the people they hire services aren’t willing to pay for it. You know, they – And that's – that's the sad part of the whole scenario that – that's what creates the problem. That creates the demand or the opportunity for them to come up here because somebody will work… You start out – Somebody starts a business and if they don't do the – the background check and e-verify –And I've owned companies and I know how this works because, you know, if we hired an employee and we got his Social Security number screwed up they sent it back to us right away and said, “This – there's something wrong here.” You know sometimes they'd get the numbers transposed or something. And so, they let you know that there's something wrong.

DJ: Right.

BG: [laughs] And so –

DJ: So, some employers just ignore that?

BG: And pay them cash. You know, I tell people we've recreated 1860.

DJ: So –

BG: We fought a civil war over cheap labor.

DJ: Slave labor. Yes.

BG: Slaves. And that's what they're doing today is they're bringing these people in. They start a business. They hire one or two of them and the business, it grows, and they say, “You got any cousins or anybody else that wants to work?”

Well they call Mexico, or they call Venezuela or wherever they came from and say, “Come on up. I've got you a job.”

DJ: So, it's kind of like a black market –

BG: They don’t just come up here out of the clear blue sky. They have some incentive to go – come up here.

DJ: So, they're meeting a need and, but it's kind of shady in a way. Is that what –

BG: Well you're going to pay for it one way or the other. If you come – if they come up here – The problem the difference between 1860 in 8 – and today, the slave owner, he had to pay for all their things. He paid for their food. He paid for their healthcare and all those things, if he took care of them at all. I mean most of that were – were legitimate people figure you got to take care of them to some degree. Well today day they throw that onto the social mores of the country that we have to take care of them, provide healthcare provide, you know, we – we – we don't just turn anybody away that is sick down at Parkland and places like that. They can go in there and get healthcare. We – we have facilities that provide them food when – when they're starving and all those kind of things which is humanitarian thing to do.

DJ: Of course.

BG: But – but it costs money to do that.

DJ: So, they're coming in and using services that they haven't paid into?

BG: Sure. And you know, the Social Security system is going bankrupt and a large part of it is because enough people aren’t paying into it.

DJ: Mhm.

BG: And so, you know, we need that process and people need to understand that you have to pay for those things that you future want to get back.

DJ: So how do you take somebody that's on the cash system and help them change their paradigm?

BG: It's an education system. You know, Cash in Advance houses’ and this whole immigration thing that becomes a part of the factors. Over at the Metrocrest Social Service Center, which I’m involved with, if you go in there and talk to those people when somebody comes in with a problem they have counselors that sit down with them and say, “OK what's your situation? What's – one of the first questions they ask him is how much do you owe Cash in Advance?

DJ: Oh really?

BG: Cash in Advance charges from 160 to 240 percent interest annually. You borrow 100 dollars from me. Next Friday you owe me 130 dollars or something like that. And then what they get into is they come in here – maybe they're day laborers or whatever, can't get a job. They work in the yards or put roofs on houses. It rained all week. I couldn't work. Family starving, whatever. They go down borrow money. Well once you get into that you can't get out of it.

DJ: So, is it a title loan thing on their car?

BG: It’s like – it's like loansharking and those agencies are unregulated. State does not regulate Cash in Advance houses. You cannot get any state legislator to take that on because they put lots of money – in the money – in the pockets of politicians. And now the banks are buying them because they figure out how lucrative they are.

DJ: Well that's kind of scary to think about having that –

BG: Well is this whole thing that you don't, you know, being – walking down the street every day you don't think about.

DJ: No. I've never thought about that. Pretty amazing.

BG: And so, you know, I feel for the people because they're taken advantage of every step of the way. Now you can't come in here and break one law of the order of entry and stay in this country. Going to have to have a driver's license or something.

DJ: So –

BG: You're going to have to have a Social Security. You're going to have to have something. You're going to create more – break more laws once you're here.

DJ: Getting fake ones?

BG: Get fake IDs. You know, and if they – if they talk him into registering to vote then they're a real problem. It's a misdemeanor to be here as an illegal. It's a felony if you register to vote in this country.

DJ: And maybe people wouldn’t know that?

BG: Well probably they don't. Now there's – a lot of them, you know, the underground, they're pretty smart. They don't – they know a lot of this stuff and I don't understand these people trying to bring them in here and thinking they're going to get a lot of votes out of them because most of them realize, “I don't want to do that.” [laughs]

But anyway, you know that whole thing went on and we spent a lot of money over lawsuits because we had a very greedy opposing law firm who really, the whole premise of the money was spent over the way the ordinance was passed not the ordinance. The City Council, when they brought that ordinance up, they had a big outcry at the City Hall. People came down there and carried signs and call them Nazis and you know all kinds of things.

DJ Now can you refresh since we're putting this down for record? Can you kind of encapsulate what the ordinance was so people that are reading would know?

BG: That had ordinance that they wanted the landlords – commercial land property – you had to submit an applicant to the city and the city verified whether they were a citizen or not. It was the city's responsibility not the applicant, not the landlord or any of that. They submitted it to the city. The city would do all the mechanics of it. So, I understand. I wasn't on the Council when this happened. I wasn’t the mayor. But they did that and then if the city couldn't prove definitely they weren't a citizen they could let them rent anyway. I mean they had to prove they were not a citizen to be able to deny them the ability to rent an apartment. That's what the ordinance. Now the first one was – had some fallacies about it and they actually had – I think that's the one we voted on: the original ordinance. You know, what happened was the citizens came in and said, “You know you're taking that on yourself. That's not what the citizens think. They shouldn't do that. You should put it up for a referendum vote.” So, they did. Well 67 percent of the citizens voted to do it. Well if you're a public official and you go against 67 percent of the people you better figure out you're going to be out of office very quickly.

DJ: Hhm.

BG: Especially when it's a hot issue like that. So, the council kind of put themselves in a box of saying, you know we've got to support it. Now, consequently, the ordinance was changed two more times before it actually – the one we got – we tried to really in react – because then they went back and looked at it and they said, “Well, there's some parts of this that could be overturned in the courts, whatever”. And they finally hired this guy, Kris Kobach, who's a part of the Trump administration right now. He's the – what – attorney general in Kansas. He's probably to prime – prime –premier legal immigration authority – immigration authority in this country. We hired him and – (or they did at the time. It was before I was on there) to write the ordinance and he wrote it and then what was happening – and again some of this is, you know, I wasn't involved in the whole litany of that. I’m only telling you what I was told and how that all came about. I have spent some time sitting down at the City Hall reading depositions about how that all happened because I wanted to be familiar enough with that because I was having to deal with the ramifications and the appeals and all of that part of the legal process. But where the crux of the matter was, as I understand it, the Council, when they took the original ordinance and the people came in and raised cane and carried on and did all these activist groups that were against it. The council went into executive session, discussed it, passed the ordinance in executive session and brought it out and announced it. That's illegal.

DJ: Because it’s supposed to be an open meeting?

BG: Open meetings. The only thing you can deal with in executive session is personnel issues, land acquisition and lawsuits. Those are the three things that you can deal with in executive session, not ordinances passed like this. Now conversely that the only thing that's supposed to happen when you do that is that that action that you took in executive session is null and void. You'd have to bring it out and redo it any in open meeting. That's the problem – the penalty for – for violation of open meeting. Now the lawyers and people –they sued them over that process and back then the Council, as I understand it, again this is what I was told by a Councilman at the time and afterwards and studying. There was a lot of e-mails floated around at that time between Council people dealing with the issues and what was being said about them and all this type of stuff, you know, how back in those days a lot of gossip went on. Well they destroyed all those e-mails. Well then, the court came in and said you can't do that you've got to reconstruct those. Just like you see in Washington now with all the crap that they do.

DJ: So how do you reconstruct a –

BG: You have to hire technical people. We've spent 250 thousand dollars reconstructing the the e-mails that they –

DJ: So actually, trying to find the old ones that got deleted?

BG: Yeah.

DJ: Wow.

BG: Find the ones that are deleted. And then they started through – they wouldn't give up on this lawsuit about open meetings law. So, then they start deposing the council people and the people involved and they multiple-deposed them. You know, you'd have – you had several different people: the ACLU and the different activist groups involved. Well they’d all go in there and each one of them would depose. Well, deposing is expensive and some of these Councilmen –

DJ: That’s depositions…?

BG: Yeah….would spend hours in a deposition asking them questions about “what was your attitude?” and all that stuff. And basically, what happened was that we ran up horrendous legal costs and the city manager told me that the law firm came in and said we're going to buy this decision.

DJ: The city's legal…?

BG: The opposing law firm.

DJ: Oh, the opposing law firm.

BG: “We’ll spend so much money we’ll break you to make this decision.” Well, you know, it's – it's not untypical. People don't unless you get involved in a legal system in this country you don't realize how bad it is. People look at the legislative branch and the executive branch of government and look at them and say there's corruption. It's nothing compared to the judicial branch of government in this country. The courts are a theatrical facility for lawyers. Doesn’t have anything to do with right wrong or indifferent.

DJ: Theatrics. That's an interesting take.

BG: You ever go to trial and watch them?

DJ: Oh yeah. That makes sense. It does make a lot of sense.

BG: The trouble they can – they go down to Austin and get the laws manipulated for their favor. You know in the state of Texas you cannot mention the word insurance in a court?

DJ: Now that's a… Really. Why not?

BG: Because they – they have –they have, through the legislature, convinced them that all people’s in there for is to get money our insurance companies.

DJ: Ah. Ok. And that –

BG: And that you have a car accident and they claim a – it is their fault. You claim it. Who do you deal with? You deal with the insurance company. You don't do with the individual. But yet anything you say between the insurance company and you is not permissible in a court of law.

DJ: Boy, who got that passed?

BG: Well the insurance companies. [laughs]

DJ: Well, of course.

BG: Anyway. That's what you deal with in getting into the legislation – into the legal process. My only really involvement with it was we – the decision came down on the ordinance – the actual ordinance in the local federal court. We appealed the decision. You know, they find an attorney or a judge that that's empathetic to their position, take it to court there. Then you know you're always going to lose at those levels usually. And so, we took it to the Fifth Circuit of Appeals Court - New Orleans. And what they do on those kind of things normally is they – there are 16 members to the appellate court in New Orleans. They take these cases and they will assign them to three of the judges. And then they will make a decision based on their opinion. And we got –in that – that original appeal they voted two to one against us. And again, it's all made up politically. You've got Democratic appointments down there and you've got Republican appointments over a period of years and 16 of them, you know, they’re life appointments, so they process through. And so, we then appealed to the full court. Rare that they ever do that. But the full court took the appeal. So, then you're making the argument in front of 16 of them. Now I went to that appeals. Anyway, in that process I went to that hearing. Had to stand up the whole thing because all the clerks from the judges were – took up all the seating of the appeal. Not – there nothing for the participants.

DJ: Were they like, typing?

BG: Naw. They were just sitting there listening: just interested, I guess, or nosy or whatever. Anyway, Kris Kobach made our argument over the laws and he was excellent. He – he – he quoted every case – past case that supported our position on the ordinance. And they all sit there and shook their head. “Yes, right, right”.

When he got through, they had two other – one from ACLU ones and one of the other Hispanic organizations. They got up and they were very young, inexperienced lawyers and they said all that's true, but it was done mean-spirited. Took about a year for the decision to come down and they came down against us. The ordinance that we passed and took to that court, Fremont, Nebraska called and said they wanted to pass that ordinance up in Nebraska. We sold them the ordinance for five dollars. They enacted the ordinance and the appeals court in St. Louis upheld it. The ordinance is in effect in Fremont, Nebraska.

DJ: I didn't know you could sell an ordinance.

BG: Well I mean, we'd spent money having it formulated, and it was just a common thing. They said – you know, it's kind of a courtesy thing. “You say, “Oh yeah.”

DJ: Just so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel or something? [overtalk]

BG: Just five dollars. They didn't have to reinvent it. He’d written that ordinance for us and he was doing it for them up there. I mean if he wrote the ordinance for one city specifically and was paid by that city to write the ordinance and then he sold it to someone else, he'd have to – you know, somewhere he'd have to get a release for it – to do that. And so that's what happened. But that – that whole thing. But that – that whole thing was not what kind of got me burned out on serving this city as a mayor. I mean I could live with that stuff and that.

DJ: What's your timeline as city council and mayor?

BG: Well I was on – in the city council from 1982 to 1986.

DJ: All right.

Bill Glancy second from right

BG: And then I became mayor in… God, what was it – 2013, 14? Served three years. I went off and Bob Phelps went back on.

DJ: All right.

BG: That time frame after there. I was between Tim O'Hare. I replaced him. He didn't run for re-election. He came to me and asked me to run and do this and supported me and all that. And then, I once served one term. I didn't commit to serve a lot. I said, “I’ll, you know, do it see how it works.”

And so, I –I – I didn't run for a second term. You know, I got frustrated trying to do things and feeling that I was – one thing – one of them was trying to deal with – with immigration: the parts I’d talked about where you try to–

DJ: You got the aftermath after he left, right? You weren’t here…

BG: That was all set. I just came along kind of afterwards and really as a mayor I didn't have a vote anyway. Now I could have a discussion in executive sessions because most things dealing with – with legal matters are done in the executive session and we would have discussions. Now I'm not you can't privilege to tell you the things that happened I could discuss things with it, but I didn't vote on anything. I was just part of it. But I – I supported what we'd done and basically, we had people come and giving us money. I mean big dollars to support that. I had one donor, $600,000 donors to support the illegal immigration issue. So, by the time I got involved that we were getting enough money to pay for what we were doing. I mean it. We weren’t running out –

Bill Glancy and John Dodd in foreground. DJ: Was that helping with the legal bills?

BG: Yeah, the legal parts of it.

DJ: Let me look at some of the questions here. You told me the day you're in office and tell me what brought you to Farmers Branch. And we're definitely talking about the issues of the time and the important votes. You know when you kind of look back over your time on the City Council and the Mayor, maybe treating them separately, what's the high point? What's the low point? What – as you’re thinking about having left a legacy, what – what –

Andy Duncan, Dave Blair, Bill Glancy and John Dodd.

BG: Well you know the things I - I learned in government, it's like gardening. You plant seeds and it make – you hope that they grow. You never get anything really done with direct action. You plant an idea and it may take it forever to get become a plurality [PHONETIC]. It's like – I remember one time we were having problems widening the streets in our main thoroughfares in our community. Whenever you go in and widen street and made it a six lane or whatever, you know, you got pushback from residents along there, that – they didn't want all that traffic. They didn't want all that stuff going on. And I asked the council one time, I said. “Would you want that in your neighborhood? Just an old concrete street?” I said, “You know, if we if we landscaped those streets and made them pleasant and aesthetically pleasant to the neighborhood they probably would be a lot more receptive to doing that.” And that's where we kind of got started doing the landscaping of our main thoroughfares.

DJ: Oh, and some cool – cool looking stuff of just down the way.

BG: And that's one of the things I did as mayor. It was frustrating to me. We hired a consultant to come in and look at our residential neighborhoods and tell us what needs to be done to help improve our residential property. And the one thing – You know they come in and tell you all this – but the one thing they kind of stuck out to me was they said, “You know, we were really surprised when we started going into your neighborhoods.”

“So, why’s that?”

“Well, they’re a lot nicer than we thought they would be.”

“Oh?”

They said, “We drive the main streets of your community, like most people who pass through it. We drive Valley View. We drive Wehb Chapel. We drive Josey, Valwood Parkway and they all look bad. And that's the connotation, we think about residential property is what we see from the main streets when we drive through your city.”

And I just thought about that and it's very true. It's like your own property. If the curb appeal is bad, you're not going to sell the house. And so, I’d start telling – I said, “You know, we really need to improve our main streets.” We started doing that. They redid Valley View, but we are really talking about doing fancier things to Valley View than we – they ended up doing. We were going to take it down to four lanes and put some walkways and paths and things like that on it because once we got LBJ done – while I was in my office we were redoing LBJ out here.

DJ: Was this from the Council years?

BG: No this is during Mayor. It’s just been done.

DJ: OK. Oh, you’re talking about the recent –

BG: But, I didn't want to screw around. I didn't want to encourage people to come down here and drive on our city surface streets while they are redoing that. So, we kind of held back on doing a lot of things. But once I got done, I said, “You know let’s – let’s now continue to do that. Let's cut some of our surface streets to where they don't really designed to hold – handle a lot of volume of traffic.” You got something out there – At Josey lane that thing’s 28 lanes wide. And it should handle the traffic.

DJ: 28? Wow!

BG: Well that's what they say with – with all the entrance ramps, exit ramps, you know, all this stuff. And – and so, we got that done. And you know that handles the main traffic. And you don't want to encourage them to come over here and drive on the surface streets and stuff like that. We were very stringent about restricting truck traffic because trucks will tear down your surface streets in nothing flat: big heavy trucks.

DJ: Mhm.

BG: And so, anyway, I always just trying to get the aesthetics of the neighborhood. My basic philosophy as a Council person was, “You take care of city services: things people want you to do with fire protection, police protection, safety, things like that. The other thing you do is you protect their investment in their home. And hopefully have the value in your city be more than the surrounding cities around you, so that they're having a better situation. If they don't like what's going on here, at least they get their money out of their house and go somewhere else and move –

DJ: Right.

BG: Now they don't. Most people – once they move to Farmers Branch, they never leave because…

DJ: Well, it’s a great city.

BG: …the services here are unbelievable. And so, but that in my mind, I'm protecting that person's value of their property because most of them, that’s the biggest single investment they have is in that property. And so, I would even still now today I– went to Council about a year ago and told them, I said, “Let's put some money aside for neighborhood improvements: walls around their neighborhoods, things that make appeal come when you drive down these main streets and look into these neighborhoods that it looks nice from the street, so that they will go into the neighborhoods and look for property to buy or [unintelligible].

And you've got – another thing, I guess, was the frustrating part of being a mayor was where – we're at a time of transition. We have a lot of senior people in our neighborhoods. Our age – our average age here is really high and a lot of them are getting to the point where they need alternative living. Single family houses are a big challenge for a lot of these people to maintain. You have single member households now where one is passed away or they're both to the point where they can't go out and take care of the yard, keep the maintenance on the house properly like that. You have to hire it done or they neglect it and don't do it. And so, they need alternative living. You know the medical profession today is keeping us alive a lot longer. I'm seventy-seven years old. And you know, that's way past average mean age even 20/30 years ago. And, you know, I have friends today that are in their 90s, so we're living longer. But you know, we’re either going to wear out our minds or our bodies.

DJ: Hopefully at the same time.

BG: Yeah. [laughs] And so we need alternative living and you can't throw them out of the house. But you create – always try to create win-win situations. If you've created something they like better than the house they're in, they will go to that. So, I – I pushed for – for alternative senior housing and what most people that own a house here, they want to retain the things they like about the house and transport it to the living senior living thing. Most of them want it on one level. They would like a garage attached to it that they can drive into and close the door before they get out of the car. And I've designed some housing projects that d – around – around that philosophy. And I tried to get some of the developers to do that. You know, they’re – they are always talking about transitioning to a younger generation of people here. Well, if people don't sell their house, you're not going to have transition. They can't – can't move in here until somebody sells them a house. And if you create something that the senior likes better than what he's in he'll vacate the house here and he will move into the senior housing. And we tried to do it up there behind the Four Corners. Are you familiar with Farmers Branch here at all?

DJ: Four Corners. I've heard that.

BG: Well it's the main intersection up here at Josey Lane and Valley View. The – there's a big backside of that thing that was developed years ago as a commercial and it never did because it has no street exposure and ne – retail never did well back there. It’s hidden. And there's an old bank back there that's been closed. There’s a bunch of land back. I tried to get them to take that land and make that a senior housing project where they could – could move into that and they would be real close to Wal-Mart and drugstores and all the things they do and even let them ride golf carts around. You know drive a golf cart long after they can't drive a car and be – get around in there and maintain their independence. Don’t have to have somebody take care of them. They don't like that. As long as you can. There's a certain point where you can't do that. You have to have it.

DJ: But you want it as long as –

BG: Let’s just give them their dignity as long as they can get it. And so, I tried to get them to build those and we never have gotten anything done like that. But – to transition you need to transition – needs to be something that people like and agree with and not force them to do something they don't want to do. And once you got – you know if you build a senior community that a 100 people move into there's 100 houses – 75 whatever it is that comes on the market that you can – somebody can buy fix up and rent.

You know we're building apartments in Dallas just like crazy. We built a lot when I was Mayor and are still doing a lot of them on the west side, east side and places. And I've interviewed those people that own those things and manage them and ask them about how things work with them. They'll tell you that about – most of the people live in those things about 18 months on the average. At the end 18 months about half of them’ll buy a house and about half of them move somewhere else whether they'd change jobs, or they go into a new complex or whatever. But you're put – there's a lot of demand built up out of those things for single family or housing.

Now I think demographically, you're seeing less people demand housing today than you had years ago. You know, a lot of the housing market in this country was affected by World War II.

DJ: Mhm.

BG: You know, you put guys in the military that lived 18 to 24 inches apart for three or four years and they came home, and they wanted isolation. They wanted a house that had windows the front windows the back and not many on the sides. And that's the way housing was dictated around here for years and years and years. You know, they all built these little subdivisions with little boxes and, you know. And – and you know, that became this – the kind of the direction that we all thought of in housing. We finally stretched them out and made them ranch houses and did everything but the same principle’s involved.

Well today young people are – they don't – they don't run that way particularly. They don't bother them to live in a apartment or something like that as opposed – and they – they don't have as – such a value on ownership as our generation did. We thought we owned it. And that's what you fight with seniors today trying to get them out of senior housing. They don't want to give up ownership and rent. Now you sit down piece of paper and show them how it costs them less to do that, but it still doesn't necessarily register with them or it takes a long time to convince them that they want to do that. But I think that's the kind of thing you need evolution to be able to evolve your community where you need new people coming in. But you can't throw the old ones in a ditch.

DJ: Oh no.

BG: So, you've got to do something that they like better. And I tell you when most of them move into these senior housing project place. “I wish I had done this years ago.” [laughs] But getting them that transition and giving up all the stuff that they have collected over the years – to do that and condense down into smaller living quarters it's a big trauma for them.

DJ: Oh that's – Yeah. That's not easy.

BG: And so, you know, some people can afford to live in a big house and hire people to take care of it and do all that and you know. And you know we're probably past moving out of our home, you know and my wife and I, at this point will probably live it out there. But it's something that, you know, you can develop things and that was my and my – my goals. And I got frustrated cause I couldn't get any of that kind of stuff done.

DJ: So, do you think anybody will carry on that vision now that you're gone?

BG: As I say, I've all – I've learned that you plant a seed and if the seed’s strong it will survive and come to p-reality [PHONETIC]. And I think they will. They’re starting to build some senior housing. They’re starting to do that. You know and the people – I get people come to me and tell me they want senior housing and I’d say, “You know we got all kinds of stuff in Carrollton and we got a bunch of it down there along Forest in Dallas.”

“Bill, you don't understand it's not in the City of Farmers Branch and I am not going to leave this city.

“OK.”

DJ: Well that says a lot about your legacy right there that people enjoy living here and want to stay.

BG: I think it is and I – we've been blessed really with good government here for a long time. Now there have been opposing opinions and arguments and all that but I think the basic I – I don't remember really, very few people I felt like, ever run for City Council or Mayor or anything who wanted to do it for personal gain. I think they did it in the general idea that they were trying to help the city and do that and if you get good city managers – staff that are on board you know you can do very well. Now, you know, people don't understand that staff may have a different motive. I mean this is a this is a job for them. They're looking out for their own livelihood and things like that. But generally, you get people that are trying to move – and we have good staff here and they're very accommodating to most citizens. And you know, they feel good about it. They feel good about our police department and our fire department and, you know, and they're very good at it taking care of needs. And, you know, I had several people that were brought back to life while I was on Council, you know, that basically died, and the Fire Department revived them. And if we can get on them in, you know, a minute or two we can save a lot of them. And the response times – we worked on that very diligently to keep that response time down and get people there and protect them and – and keep them safe. And – and I think that's what most people like and they felt good about this community. They feel good about what's here as far as services. You know, sometimes you get to thinking, you know, I’m spending a lot of money on something not many people are using. But – but I mean you're always playing that as a as a government official. How do you spend the money to the most people get the benefit from?

DJ: Mhm.

BG: There’s very few things that you can do to spend more money on than a lane of freeway. More people use that lane of freeway than almost anything else you can spend money on but that doesn't mean you don't build parks and you don't build recreation facilities and other things that a certain amount of people will – now the ratio of people to get benefit for that compared to a lane of the freeway is very little, but you – you just have to balance all those things. You can't just have them lanes the freeway and nothing else. And so, I think you – those are all things that you try to balance in the process of governing.

DJ: Now there’s a couple of questions. I'm looking at our time.

BG: Yeah, I don't know what your time frame. I don’t want to ramble all about a bunch of stuff that –.

DJ: Oh, well, I'm good but I usually try to stick around two-ish hours.

BG: OK.

DJ: So, we're getting close to that but there's a couple of parting questions. One of them would be what made you decide to run for mayor? I don't think we've –

BG: Well again it was kind of one of those things. I liked what the direction we were going basically. You know you never 100 percent sold on everything that's going on, but I felt – and I wanted to see that continue to move the city forward and try to be progressive. I think we went into a period of kind of recessionary thought for a long, long time of just kind of being – taking care of the basics and not trying to bring in economic development, not kind of change things and I’d seen the new Council trying to do that. And then when Tim O'Hare decided not to run and came to me to run and – I looked around and I didn't see anybody really wanting to do that job or the ones who wanted to do it wanted to kind of – were people from the past to kind of – I felt like probably want to move backwards a little bit or get – draw back from some of that stuff that was going on. And I didn't want to see that. And so, I reluctantly decided to do it and spent most all my own money. Spent over 30-35 thousand dollars campaigning of my own money to do it. I didn't take a lot of money. It took a little from people but not a lot. And – and I didn't want to be influenced about my decisions based on financial contributions and things like that. But it was a good experience overall. It's not a highlight of my life. [laughs] But I enjoyed the…

DJ: It’s hard work isn't it?

BG: It is. And you’re thinking all the time about you know, “What should I be doing? Where should I be putting my effort? What kind of things you're trying to do. And you're trying to move the city forward and think five and ten years down the road. What’s the consequence of these things? What's going to – I mean, what do we need to do?” And I put a lot of push pressure on our economic development department. I'd ask them almost every time I see them, “What are you working on? What do you got going on? Who are you talking to?” And – and we're in a such a fast-changing time, it is hard to really get a grip around what's long term sustainability in economic development. No. Everybody’s running around trying to drag in big boxes. Well I don't think big boxes are going to be around in another few years. You know, the mail order business and all this stuff of the Amazons and the mail order, that's – that's cutting into their business substantially.

DJ: It’s really changed, hasn’t it? Best Buy and Whole Foods. {overtalk]

BG: Well that was one of my pet project: that interchange out there of 635 and 35 is one of the premier crossroads in United States. And right over there in that corner we owned – we had a whole bunch of vacant land. And I was pushing to try to get the Amazon-type businesses over there because their key is going to be accessibility: “get product in there and get product out of there.” We're going to a time when you can order something on some kind of a mail order business and you can either run over there and pick it up or they'll probably bring it to you in a matter of a few hours and you're going to have to have access – good access to do that. And that sits in a way – there's freeways all around it. And the good thing about somebody like an Amazon: that’s sales and sales taxes is the key to financial security of its community, not ad valorum tax. You get sales tax off of those. That's – that's a lot of revenue.

DJ: Now, ad valorum is property taxes?

BG: Mhm.

DJ: OK.

BG: Well you get, you know, roughly here where we were about a third – a third –a third of our income – third of it come from franchise fees and things like that, a third of come from ad valorum tax and about a third comes from sales tax.

DJ: All right.

BG: And if you could increase sales tax – if you have something on like that kind of a business, it doesn't require much of any kind of a service and everything they sell you get a portion of it. Now a portion of the money goes to the state – big portion of it goes to the state. The city gets a portion of that sales tax money. And – and that's where you can really raise you if you get something has big retail to it. You know, we – we romanced, while I was mayor, Nebraska Furniture Company: Huskers's to move out there in that west side rather than move up there to The Colony. And it's tough today because people have gotten into the position of giving them so much and they demand so much. They gave them 30 years of 100 percent tax abatement to move out there.

DJ: Wow!

BG: Well now there's nothing left for me. I'm putting them out there for nothing. Because I get no sales tax from them and it stays with the property. If they go bankrupt that doesn’t make any difference. The next one comes, and he gets it too.

DJ: Well, then do the actual home owners do they bear that burden that the – ?

BG: Well they get, you know and things that they buy and the city they pay sales tax on it. It all comes back to the citizen in one way, shape or form eventually, filtered through the businesses of the things they buy or whatever.

DJ: But I just thinking when a business isn't pulling it's like tax revenue weight, then the other people are picking up the –

BG: And there are certain kinds of businesses you focus on. You know, we had – God what was that they told me? Was it 20 or 40 internet car businesses in the city.

DJ: Really? Internet car businesses.

BG: Internet car businesses that sell cars over the Internet.

DJ: Guess I blinked and something new happened.

BG: Oh, Lord, I mean it's a big market today. You go on the line you – all kinds of cars. A lot them come off of leases, you know, one owner used cars, very young, new stuff, not junk. But – but we don't get any of the sales tax off of an automobile sale. That all goes to state. So, there's no incentive to have a car dealership in your city.

DJ: Ok. That makes sense. Ok. My last question is – just think about the city. Well, they said, when you were in office, but you could even talk about when you got here. Kind of like what was a microcosm of the city and the culture and who was here and then think about now and what's happening. What's changed?

BG: Well when we moved here in ‘68 it was a very different situation. Most of the housing was fair – relatively new. Most the residential housing in this city was built between mid and early 60s and the beginning of the 70s. It was all built and all this practically [makes whooshing sound] and –

DJ: Was there a lot of land when you got here?

BG: Yeah there was quite a bit of open land, and you know.

DJ: What was North Dallas then?

BG: LBJ. The first section of LBJ was opened about the time we moved here, and it went from – from Webb Chapel to Preston Road and we called it the “Highway to Nowhere” because there wasn't anything at either end of it. North Town Mall was the big shopping center. It was over there where the Burlington Fact – Coat Factory is. There was a Woolco, a Montgomery Wards and a little strip center and it had a Reynolds Penland men's shop and Michael's had their first craft store in that little area there and that was where we shopped. And up there at the end of Valley View or end of Preston Road where LBJ stopped, the only thing it was there was a self-sustaining Sears store. The Valley View Mall wasn’t there are any that kind of stuff and it was all road [PHONETIC] and it really was a very, you know, we didn't think we were put upon because of retail. But they didn't have shopping centers and all that kind of stuff around here. We had strip malls that we shopped in. And – but all that's changed and, you know, and you’ve seen – you have to be real careful. This was a middle-class neighborhood – community, not neighborhood but community. Most of the people here were working class people that bought houses –relatively new houses which were in a medium range – price range. Well the thing that happens as time goes on that usually has a tendency to go down. And you get lower costs, you know, people don't fix them up. Price of housing, you know, it doesn't erode but it doesn't escalate like it does, you know in higher end neighborhoods.

And so, you started seeing a lot of that happen. And I think now we're seeing this change back. A lot of houses are being torn down now and new houses being put in. People – some people resent the cost of the houses. They call them Mc-Mansions and all that. But they don't understand economics. If you pay $125,000 for a lot that can only be about 20 to 25 percent of the selling price of the house, so you're going to have a $500,000 house on it. It’s just economics. And so, but – but that's what happened and a lot of us – the things we see with older people is they don't stay up fine with finances or the economy. You know, they think a loaf of bread still at a cost this amount of money because that's what I bought it for all my life. Well it doesn’t. And you know that you can understand they buy bread all the time, but don't buy houses all the time.

DJ: Right.

BG: And things like that. And so, you know, the thing gets away from him about how what the cost of some of this kind of stuff is today, you know. They’re living an era where they say, “A medium sized house can’t cost $500,000. That's a high-end house in my – my vernacular.” But that's the way things are today.

DJ: Mhm.

BG: You know, we laugh when we watch that home TV, you know, where the – these people are relocating and, you know, and they – here you got a young couple that's living in a basement of their family's house, you know, and now they're going to buy their first house and under their budget’s 1.2 million dollars. How in the world they do with that?

DJ: [overtalk] Wow, wish my budget was that!

BG: But so, you know economy and economics changes, how they do things changes. But I think Farmers Branch in general is in good shape. The community’s in good shape. And we got a new Council that has new ideas and some new things. But, you know a lot of them make sense. Sometimes from a practical knowledge you always as a past Council pound became Mayor or whatever, you see things that you tried that didn't work and you say, “Why were we trying to reinvent the wheel? You know, we've tried that, and the results were not good. And so, why go back and do it again?” But you know, sometimes there can be a timing on something. It didn't work then. It worked now. But that a lot of things don't work no matter when you try it. [laughs] And so that –But I feel good about the city. It's been a good place to live. We have burial plots over there the cemetery. I guess we'll be here the rest of our existence.

DJ: Well it's a great place.

BG: It is, and it is. People love it. You know it's kind of a small-town community in a large sense. There's a core of people that are involved in the city that you see very frequently at different things. Too many of them anymore, we see them at funerals rather than –

DJ: Yeah.

BG: But that's just life. And – but I think it is and people feel good about the city. I mean people can – can rant and rave to you and everything about – It was always funny, you know. They would rant and rave about something and you’d say something, and they’d say, “Oh, I just love this city.” [laughs]

So, I guess you put it in perspective and there's always the comical things that happen to you as a politician, you know.

DJ: So, what was a comical thing you remember?

BG: Well one thing I remember one day this lady called me up and she just ran up and down me about – she was parked in handicap parking spot. She had taken a friend to a – somewhere and her friend was handicapped, and they use a handicapped sticker and they went on their way. Well the friend got out of the car and forgot to take her handicapped sticker. So, she went so went out and parked the car. Someone determined that she was not handicapped. It was not her sticker and they gave her a citation and she explained this. And I said – one thing I never did. I never handed out favors. And I made, you, know say be personal friends who wanted you to do something. “No, that’s not my way of doing it.”

And so, anyway so she went through this and I said, “Well it sounds like the way it's supposed to work.” I said. And so, she kept on. So finally, I said, “Tell you what.” I said, “You give me the information and I will call the Chief – Police Chief and make sure to ask him to follow up and make sure that we handled the proper procedures and didn't do something we shouldn't have done or some impropriety about it. But I say, “It sounds to me like, you know, nowhere to go with that.”

So anyway, I said, “OK now. Now where did this happen?

And she says, “Over in Plano.” [laughs]

I said, “Plano? What do want me to do about it?”

DJ: That’s hilarious.

BG: She said, “You know that Mayor over there,” I said – She said, “You can call him up and get this taken care of.”

And I said you're right, “I do know the mayor of Plano. I know him fairly well.” But, I said, “I’d no more call him up and ask him to ch – intervene in a traffic cit – or a citation than the man in the moon.” I said, “I would really be offended if he did that to me.” So – [laughs]

DJ: That’s hilarious.

BG: Anyway, so, I mean she left upset. But you know, later I see that mayor over there and I was laughing, and I said, maybe I've got a complaint about the way you're running your city over here.”

He said, “What's that?”

I said, “You know, you got a citation.’

And he said, “Yeah.” He said, “You know, we've got so many people complaining about people parking in handicapped parking spots that we appointed a citizens committee to go around and – and enforce that and –” He said, “Boy, they are zealous!” [laughs]

I just thought, “You know, things like what in the world?” Poor lady. I don't know who she was. I don't remember her telling me her name at the time. But she was really upset.

DJ: That’s hilarious.

BG: Yeah. So, you know that's just kind of typical of some of the stuff they call you up, you know, and rant rave about. Some – “There’s a dead varmint out in the middle of street and nobody's been by to pick it up.” But anyway. But you know city government’s good. It's – I think it's – it's the closer people are to the government the better off the government is.

DJ: Mhm.

BG: You know I've been a big advocate for a long time of taking our U.S. representatives and put them back in their territory and let them vote electronically. Get them out of Washington. Get them out of that cesspool.

DJ: That sounds cool. That sounds – Yes, let's get that passed.

BG: Well you know they don't want to do that …

DJ: Of course, they don’t.

BG: …because they're – they're up there out of our sight and do whatever they want but if they're back here not in front of lobbyists all being entertained all the time, you go talk to them in person you get a whole different response than you do than the way you see them act and vote. And today with all that electronic stuff, there's no reason for it. They can go up there once a month or something if they want to have meetings or something. But get them back in their territory.

DJ: I like it. I’ll remember that one. Well, as we part today is there something I haven’t asked you that you think would be important to put down for the record?

BG: Oh no. I've rambled on about too much about stuff already that – but, you know it's – I've been very fortunate. My wife and I have been married fifty-four or five years now whatever it is. Fifty-four, I guess. And you know – and it's been a thing about my family. I know it's rare. I have three siblings and my wife has four siblings and we've never had a divorce in our families and it's – I give it all credit to my parents and stuff and their commitment to family…

DJ: Oh yeah. That’s awesome, especially these days.

BG: … and things like that and so –and we've all had long lives and long marriages. And you, know basically had very much good luck with our children and things like that. And we have one son and – and him and his wife and two grandkids that we just loved to death and they live over Colleyville and she's an only child, his wife, and so we've got four grandparents, so you know what the grandkids are like. [laughs]

DJ: Spoilt. [laughs]

BG: My granddaughter works as a princess. She's 16 years old. They live over in Colleyville and I took her for a job interview for the job and she went in and talked to them, you know, and she came back out. And I said, “How did it go, Amy?”

She said, Oh, went fine.” You know, they never say anything.

And so, I said, “Well where are we going to let you know about the…?”

“Oh granddad, I got that job. What do you –.” You know it's like, you know, “Why would you assume I wouldn't get the job?”

And my wife made the mistake of saying, “Well, Amy is there any training for that?”

She said, “No, I know how to be a princess.” [laughs] And they give parties for little kids, you know, and they dress up like Disney characters.

DJ: Oh, I’ve seen one before actually.

BG: You know, kids just love her. They always want to take her home with them. And she's very good at that. She is a good princess. But so, you know, we think no matter what happens, I mean our health could go to hell tomorrow and everything else. But you know we still have to say we had good lives and are very satisfied with our lives. We didn't make the most money in the world. We made comfortable money. We did well and all that but that's not what life's about. It's about friends and things and I still get – am very active. I belong to the Frontiers of Flight Museum and Hobby Shop and we build models and do things and a whole different group of people down there…

DJ: Oh yeah. That's awesome over there.

BG: …that deal with air and stuff. And so, and I still fly model. I belong to flying club and do stuff like that and enjoy – I enjoy technology. It's one thing I think frustrating that I have not been able to get done is to get more emphasis on technology in our schools. That's the future...

DJ: Oh yeah. You know that’s gotta come. [overtalk]

BG: That’s what we’ve got to give our kids. You know, America is losing out because technology today is all being done in China and India and all those places. And I think we're going to pay a big price for not doing that in the future. And I – I've tried to get our public schools into doing that. You know we have a big piece of land out on the west side of the city that was an old a landfill which be a great area to put technology center where people go fly drones and fly – and we've even got water out there where they could do it in aquatics and get young people stimulated into that technology because that's going to take over our lives. I tell people and you know in 20 years you're not going to be able to physically drive a car on a freeway. It's going to be done automatically. And we've got to have people to work with that technology. You know, you're not going to be putting roofs on houses and mowing yards. That's all going to be done technology.

DJ: That's pretty amazing. But we’re watching it happen.

BG: If you go on YouTube and watch some of the things that happen today. There's a guy on there. I fly drones too, you know the quad things. And this guy did a – it's just typical of the things. But it's a good example. He takes three of those drones and puts a fish net between them. He throws a ball. Those drones run and catch that ball. It’s the three of them together in that fish net and throw it back the ball back to him the same trajectory he threw it to them in. Imagine the technology it takes to do that. You see in the Olympics those things that they were doing the exhibits in the sky. That's all done with computer tech-driven software.

DJ: Pretty amazing.

BG: It is. And I think we've got to get our young people into that. Now the colleges understand it. When I went to them…

DJ: Oh. For sure.

BG: …and talked to them about it they said, “You don't believe because they said we're inundated every day by business community wanting us to train people in that field.” And so – I think that's one of the greatest frustrations I've had, and I've never been able to get our school systems to address that. And it's a chicken and egg syndrome. You talk to them and they say, “Well, we've got to have state money to do that. We're mandated to what we produ– what we present, what we do.”

You go to the state legislature. “We put money into that.” [laughs] Anyway.

DJ: Well thank you Bill for coming in and telling us about your very interesting life and family. So anyway, thanks so much and I’ll sign off.

BG: Oh. You're most welcome.

Memorabilia from the 1984 Republican Convention