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Visionaries: Building Amarillo

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Bill Gilliland, The Gilliland Group
Bill Gilliland grew up in a town he describes as 30 miles from anywhere. The original General Store in Rosston, Texas, was built in 1876 and still sits basically unchanged. He attended a two-room school, and when the day was over, he’d go home to a log cabin where he lived with his parents, John and Thelma, and his sister Bobbie. Bill was 11 years old by the time they got electricity.

“My family settled there before the Civil War,” says the 71-year-old entrepreneur from his office work table on the ground floor of Plaza 2. “It’s a poor part of the world, but it was a great way to be raised. There were a lot of people who came out of Ross Point School who went on to be remarkably successful.”

Funny he should mention that. Bill Gilliland is probably one of the most successful businessmen this side of the Mississippi, and while success takes vision and an entrepreneurial spirit, it also takes good old-fashioned smarts.

“When I was 15 years old, my dad asked me what I was going to do for work one summer, and I told him I was going help a neighbor bale hay for two cents a bale. He said, ‘Let me think about it,’” he recalls. “About two days later he comes back with this old worn out Ford. He said, ‘Now this is your work truck and you owe me $235 for it. You go get eight cents a bale. Don’t work for the other guy.’”

“It was at an early age that I learned I didn’t want to work for someone else,” said Bill. “And I paid him back for the truck.”

The lesson must have stuck because short of a brief stint as an accountant for an oil company in Houston, Bill has worked either with family or for himself. When he wasn’t baling hay in the summers, the teenager worked in the oil fields like his father. It was a job that helped pay for his Business Administration and Accounting degree from The University of North Texas in 1960.

He met his wife, Sandra, in college and as soon as they could afford to leave Houston (and that accounting job he hated), the two moved to Amarillo. By December of 1961, Bill had begun working with his uncle, W.J. Helm, who owned Plains Chevrolet, the only Chevy dealer in town and one of the best in the nation. He quickly caught a vision for what the business could become.

“We started with the basics, selling cars and doing it old school. We eventually bought him out and wound up buying more dealerships in town and in other cities like Denver, Oklahoma City, and Las Vegas,” Bill recalls. “We were the first ones to take the auto retail business public.”

By public, he means the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Bill and Sandra got a temporary apartment in the Big Apple to act as home base while traveling the Wall Street “road show.” In two weeks time, the couple went to three countries, 17 cities and held 83 meetings. They’d close a meeting in London at 5 p.m. and catch a place to be in Philadelphia by 6:30 a.m. the next morning. The schedule was grueling, but it did nothing to faze the visionary pioneer from Amarillo.

“I loved every minute of it,” he laughs. “We’d have 20 or 30 minutes, or whatever they gave us, to pitch our story. They had to decide whether to buy the stock or not buy the stock. By the time we were through we had it ten times oversold.”

Their company, Cross-Continental Auto Retailers, went public in 1996, but within two years, Bill felt the market was getting “overcooked” and he sold the whole corporation to retire.

“On the fourth or fifth day of me being home, I started advising Sandra on how she might manage the household a little better,” he lowers his head with a laugh. “She said – and she never raises her voice – ‘This is not going to work.’ And I said, ‘I know it.’ And that was that.”

In the last 10 years, Bill sold nearly all the commercial real estate he had purchased in between handling the auto retail business. At one point, the Gilliand Group owned all the Atmos Energy real estate, as well as a third of all of the doctor’s offices in town. Now the Group focuses on oil and gas, as well as philanthropy.

“The opportunity is great for energy right now. I’ve preached to every young person that the opportunity is going to be much greater for them – it’s going to be unbelievable. It’s already changing and it’s going to change even more. We’re not going to run out, but it’s going to be far more expensive to find and develop.”

Since moving to Amarillo in 1961, it has never occurred to Bill and Sandra to move. While they own a second place in the Texas Hill Country, they consider the Panhandle to be home. Their passion and commitment to this community is strong, and it shows when you consider they’ve had a hand, on some level, in many of the larger projects and developments in town, specifically, the Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts.

The idea for the center belonged to the late Carol Emeny, a long time friend of the Gilliland family. (Her grandfather owned the basic patent on barbed wire.) When she approached Bill about chairing the project, he couldn’t say no since it fell right in line with what he and his wife seek to do for this city.

“If a city has a good quality of life, the Arts are always involved. No exception,” says Bill. “We’ve always tried to support those things. What makes Santa Fe unique? It probably starts with an opera house, and you may not go to the opera but it will certainly affect the atmosphere. When most people hear ‘Arts,’ they think of a painting. Well, art can be a cowboy quoting poetry.”

Bill has always considered Ft. Worth to be the model for Amarillo, saying the two cities think “a lot a like.” They both believe in hard assets like cattle, wheat, oil and gas, and while the folks in Dallas push the paperwork, the model, according to him, remains to be Ft. Worth. All of its major growth has occurred in the last 20 years.

“For a town the size of Amarillo, you have to work on economic development everyday. If you don’t do that, it’ll die,” he says. “Economic development in bigger cities is automatic when you have a big airport nearby. It’s momentum to make the city grow and we don’t have that here.

“We have the best leadership around. They actually work together. You know, in a lot of other cities we couldn’t have gotten that center built,” he continues, “but we had so many people offering to help that we had $21 million dollars raised before we even knew exactly what it was going to look like.”

The Performing Arts Center is just one on a long list of community projects chaired, financed, or otherwise supported by the Gilliland Group, and the company is quite the family affair. Both of their daughters, Robin Weir and Lori D’Atri, have played an active role in developing Bill’s vision for Amarillo: to make this city a better place to live.

“We have a great life, we travel a lot and play hard, and if you disengage your brain for too long, it’s hard to get it back,” he says. “If you want to do something, just do it. I mean, hell, why not? You have to be afraid. You have to wake up in the morning about half scared to death. If you don’t, you’ll go broke.”

Beth Duke, Center City of Amarillo
After nearly 30 years with the Globe-News, starting out as a copy editor, moving to features and finishing as the city editor, Beth Duke took early retirement to begin a new phase of her life.

“I’d always had a passion for historical preservation and was already involved with such groups long before I thought about applying for this job,” says the four-year Director of Center City of Amarillo. “When the job opened up, I thought, ‘Well, I’m a native, I married a native, I can promote downtown. I can do it.’ And while it sounds like a cliché, I believe that every job leads to the next one. Through the features department at the paper I learned so much about Amarillo, and as the city editor, I learned about local government. I knew I could promote my hometown.”

Beth’s vision for what the downtown could be is closely attached to what it used to be. The goal of Center City is not only to preserve the old buildings but also to give them new life. They may not ever be department stores again, she says, but they can have a new life as something else.

A large part of restoring downtown is being able to understand Amarillo’s unique architecture. Some of the best buildings in the downtown area were built in the late 1920s and early 30s, when Art Deco was all the rage. The movement was toward a modern, more industrial look with geometrical shapes in the design. In this part of the country at the time, people still wanted a strong southwestern influence, which is how Pueblo Deco was created.

“When you’re on the sidewalk level, you might not notice it, but if you look up at the borders and around the windows, you’ll see the mosaic,” says Beth. “Like on the White & Kirk building, which is now owned by Amarillo National Bank, at 6th and Polk. It has a geometric pyramid with the yucca blossom. It used to be a department store.”

It’s clear through her animated descriptions that her interest in downtown revitalization goes beyond the 9-to-5. In fact, history was Beth’s minor at Baylor, so her role at Center City is the culmination of lifelong passions.

Born and raised in Amarillo, Beth graduated from Tascosa High School, attended Baylor in Waco, Texas, and returned to her hometown in 1976 to start her journalism career with the Globe-News. In the same year, she married Ralph Duke, a staff photographer she met the previous year during her internship with the paper. The two just celebrated 32 years of marriage.

“A funny thing about Amarillo is that it used to be known as having one of the best lit downtowns. It was known for its neon signs and lighting down Polk Street. Of course we eventually lost that due to Reno and Las Vegas, but we’re trying to bring some of that excitement back,” she says. “We did that with the Paramount sign. That sign was our biggie, and we decided that we put enough into it that we’d make it part of our brand.”

In her office is a colorful sketch from 1939 of Polk Street looking north from 9th Street. The Paramount sign lights up the night sky while illuminated store front windows and rows of parked cars tell the story of a busy, happening downtown. It’s an image that represents not only what Amarillo used to be, but also what it could be again.

“Amarillo was developed like the spokes on a wheel. The downtown area is the oldest part and it just grew from that,” she says. “It’s great because downtown is virtually 10 minutes from any neighborhood. We want downtown to be ‘everybody’s neighborhood’ because it’s where you come for entertainment, to eat, for concerts and where you can see historic architecture. We have such a diverse, rich population. Everyone can find something here.”

Their motto - Center City is Everybody’s Neighborhood – has been celebrated each August through their Block Party fundraiser. This year, the event is scheduled for August 15th from 4 p.m. to Midnight, when they’ll rope off five blocks downtown, set up five stages and feature four bands on each stage. Restaurants and other nonprofits can rent vender booths and there will be special activities for kids. The goal is simply to get people downtown and see what they’ve been missing.

“In the old days, Amarillo High School was down here on Polk Street, and after it burned down in 1970, it was obviously rebuilt on Fulton and Bell. All of a sudden,we had a generation who didn’t come downtown to school everyday,” says Beth. “Then the city grew and the shopping district moved west. By the 80s, most of the buildings downtown were empty. Our job now is to say, ‘Come back downtown and see what you can discover.’”

The Block Party is just one tool Center City uses to raise money for downtown revitalization. Another is the Hoof Prints public art project, an idea born in 2002, and started with just 20 fiberglass Quarter Horses sold to local businesses and painted by renowned Quarter Horse artists. The quick response has lead to almost 100 horses, each uniquely painted to reflect the businesses that bought them, displayed all over Amarillo.

Fundraising proceeds go directly to Center City revitalization projects, such as Façade Grants, a partnership program with the City of Amarillo designed to create a great first impression of business fronts downtown. Each recipient of the grant has to invest a two-to-one match to receive up to $10,000 towards its re-facing.

As a gift to Amarillo, and another way to bring people downtown, Center City is holding its 15th season of High Noon on the Square, a series of free concerts every Wednesday at noon in June and July at the Potter County Courthouse.

“We have a five-point plan – it’s that downtown is a place to live, work, learn, play and worship. We include worship because we have large churches representing several denominations that bring over 4,000 people downtown every weekend,” says Beth. “If you have a healthy downtown, that becomes the barometer for the rest of your city. It’s a huge recruiting tool.”

A recruiting tool for the immediate future is the long-sought after acquisition of the Courtyard by Marriott slated for the 10-story Fisk Building on Polk. Not only is it an adaptive reuse of a historical building, it’s also a starting point for acquiring additional hotels, restaurants, shops, and, ultimately, a convention center.

“A convention hotel is the final piece of the puzzle for the Civic Center and all of downtown. We can’t start bidding on events until we have the capabilities to have a headquarters,” says Beth.

Until then, Beth, along with Center City, will forge ahead, project by project, reaching to complete the vision she has for her hometown.

Rosemartha Cates, owner of The Donut Stop
Chances are, you don’t need an introduction. The Donut Stop has been a sweet-spot staple in Amarillo for decades - 35 years to be exact. On August 17th, Jim and Rosemartha Cates will blow out the candles on their favorite blueberry cake donut and start the 36th year of serving their customers with the same dedication as before.

It began like any family business. Jim and Rosemartha were newly married when his mother suggested they open up a donut shop. She had experience in the industry after working at Spudnuts in the 1960s, so the deal she offered was that she would teach them how to cook if they ran the place.

“I was 20 years old, and I thought I was an adult,” laughs Rosemartha at The Donut Stop at I-40 and Bell. “But we thought it would be fun, so we did it.”

They found a location on 34th and Georgia, got some equipment out of a storage unit from a man they knew, and got the whole thing started with $2,500. They bought a dry mix from two brothers who were chemists, and after five years of using the mix, they bought the recipe outright.

“We bought it in 1979 and I think we paid it off in 1989,” she says. “The recipe was written on a sheet of legal pad paper.”

Shortly after opening the first Donut Stop, Rosemartha opened a “cold store,” meaning that the donuts were baked on Georgia and sold at the new location at 1300 Grand. The business took off, and at one point, there were 10 Donut Stops across town. Now they have “the lucky seven” – six in Amarillo and one in Canyon – after building bigger stores to combine a few smaller ones.

The venture has proven profitable, but while the Cates family enjoys their fair share of traveling, the bulk of their investment goes right back into the city of Amarillo.

“My passion, really, is giving children a good start. My first real step in giving back was with Opportunity School,” she says. “In 2002, we started donating 10 percent of sales on Saturdays in one month. When my kids were young, I was more limited, but it’s much easier now.”

Jim and Rosemartha have three children, Tyson, who has one son, Parker, 14, Ashton, an architect who lives in San Francisco, and Vanessa, who’s mom to two-year-old “Baby Ashton.” Part of the reason they never left Amarillo was because they believed this was the best place to raise their family.

“Our son Ashton designs our stores, and we let him do whatever he wants,” she says. “Whether you like the design or not, architects just want you to talk about it. They want you to notice it.”

Plans are currently in the making for a new store at I-40 and Grand. In the meantime, Rosemartha will continue to dedicate her time and money to the vision she has for Amarillo.

“Growing up in Mexico City, where you truly see poverty, you get a better sense of how privileged we are,” she says. “I’d love to open up a food bank in Mexico City one day. That’s a retirement goal for me.”

In Amarillo, Rosemartha serves on the boards at the High Plains Food Bank, the Red Cross, the Eveline Rivers Christmas Project, in addition to being an advocate for Family Support Services, a Rotary Club member, and member of the new Environmental Committee. She, along with her parents, is also working with the Randall County Jail to get a program started designed to help offenders re-enter society.

“You know we’re all going to die, and you don’t know how you’re going to feel until you’re there,” she says. “I just want to make a difference, even saving one child. That’s what matters.”

by Jennie Treadway-Miller

Jennie was a columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press for eight years prior to moving to Amarillo in 2008. She is an avid reader, runner and writer.

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