They Were Heroes All Along

When I started planning this month’s Hometown Hero series, I did what any writer does. I started making a list of people who would fit.

And then something happened that I did not expect. The list kept getting longer, not because I was reaching, but because I kept landing on people I had already interviewed. When one of my scheduled interviews for this month fell through, I made a decision. Instead of finding someone new to fill the slot, I went back to the archive, because I already knew the Hometown Hero thread had been showing up in interview after interview. I just had not made it the focus yet.

This month you met Kimbre Collier, Marc Hooks, and Paula Morgan in their own full features. Those three earned every word. But I kept thinking about the others already sitting in this archive, the ones featured as business owners, whose hero story was right there in the transcript, just not at the center of the frame.

This post is a second look. Same people, different lens.

Beatriz Forbes | Adriana Estates

When I interviewed Beatriz, we barely talked about the venue. What took over the conversation was what she did every December. Breakfast with Santa was the story and I wrote it that way on purpose. Coming back to it through this lens, it hits differently.

Beatriz built Adriana Estates in her daughter’s name after losing Adriana to cytomegalovirus. Every year she filled the castle with hundreds of Hunt County families, a full hot breakfast, mountains of toys, and a private system she designed so parents could take gifts home and let their children believe mom and dad made Christmas happen. She built it that way because she remembered going to school after Christmas with nothing to say.

When I talked to her, she was doing all of it during chemotherapy. Her husband asked her to take a year off. She thought about a single mom with young children and a little girl who had read a snowman book more than 400 times since getting it at the previous year’s event. She said no.

Beatriz is facing a very difficult season right now, and this community is holding her in our hearts. What she built, and what she gave to hundreds of families every December, does not need a headline. The families who sat at those tables know. Hunt County knows.

Cheryl Hope | Vintage & Lace and Lee Street Mercantile

I wrote about Cheryl as a store owner who built something charming in Greenville. That is the smallest version of what actually happened.

Cheryl built a structure that made it possible for 55 other people to run businesses. Makers, artists, small-batch creators who had something worth selling but no storefront, no lease, no system. She handles all of that. They handle the creating. Right now, 55 people in Hunt County are running a business at least in part because Cheryl made room for them.

When Greenville’s creative space was closing, local artists were about to lose their only consistent venue. Cheryl stepped in and took it over. COVID closed the doors of Vintage & Lace the same week she signed that lease. She went online, kept filming, and made sure every vendor got paid that first month.

“They get to do all the good part,” she told me. She meant it without a trace of irony.

Lee Wells | Wells Cattle Co.

Lee’s feature was about beef and a ranch built on land his father left behind in debt. Here is what sits underneath it.

When the 2024 Panhandle wildfires wiped out ranching operations across the region, Lee organized supply runs to get feed and hay to ranchers who had lost everything. Fires hit Oklahoma and Kansas not long after, and he did it again. It was not his job and not his region, but he knew what those families needed and he had the means to help.

Beyond the disaster relief, he regularly walks into the kitchens of struggling or newly opened restaurants nearby, including people who are technically his competition, and shares what he has learned across twelve businesses and seven years. He does not call it mentoring. He calls it what people doing the same work in the same community owe each other. On Sundays he pastors a small church, and every day he feeds his neighbors with beef raised on land that carries his father’s name.

“Money, at best, is number three,” he told me. “Number one is people.”

Chris Young | Sweetwater Grill

When I wrote about Sweetwater, the story was about a restaurant near Lake Tawakoni with a loyal following. Here is what I did not put at the center of it.

During COVID, Chris stopped taking a paycheck so he could keep paying his staff, and by the end of it he had kept 95% of his team employed through the entire pandemic. He did not frame it as a sacrifice when he told me about it. In his words, it was simply what they needed to do for the people who showed up for Sweetwater every day.

Over twelve years, Sweetwater has raised more than $200,000 through community fundraisers, donated meals to more than 400 teachers every year, and hosted more than 20 benefit events for local families facing crisis. Chris mentioned all of it the way you mention things that are just part of what you do.

“You’re never going to be a stranger,” he told me. He named the widow sitting alone. The person going through a divorce. The person who hasn’t found the right one yet. He was not speaking in generalities. He was thinking about specific people and making sure the door was open for them.

Twelve years of that. The same welcome, extended to whoever walked in.

Carmen Slagle | Slagle & Co. Woodworks

Carmen’s feature was about custom woodworking and the beautiful things she makes. Here is where her story actually started.

December 26, 2015. A tornado leveled a colleague’s home, shop, and vehicles. Carmen and a friend made Bible verse signs, auctioned them off, and handed over every dollar. No committee, no announcement. Two women who used what they had. The business grew from it. That was never the goal.

Before the woodworking, Carmen spent seventeen years as an art teacher, talking to every single student in every single class, making sure they felt worthy and capable and seen. She left the classroom five years ago but never stopped being a teacher. She kept running summer art camps and kept looking for a way back.

Since our interview, she found one. Carmen was just named the new middle and high school art teacher at Boles ISD. The calling did not go anywhere. It just waited for the right door.

Hunt County has her fingerprints on it in places people walk past every day without knowing.

The Thread

None of these people set out to be heroes. Beatriz set out to channel grief into something with her daughter’s name on it. Cheryl set out to keep a store alive for the vendors who needed it. Lee set out to rebuild what his father left behind. Chris set out to recreate the feeling of a Monday night cookout with friends. Carmen set out to help a colleague who had lost everything.

The heroism showed up anyway, because it was already in them.

This month, Marc, Kimbre, and Paula each got a full feature because their service was the story from the beginning. And when I asked each of them what a hometown hero meant to them, not one of them said it had anything to do with a uniform or a title or a formal role. They described exactly what you have been reading about in this post. Showing up. Putting people first. Deciding that your community is worth the cost. But what I hope this last post makes clear is that posture belongs to the woman running the antique store just as much as it belongs to the police chief, the chaplain, or the veteran. It belongs to the rancher driving hay across state lines and the teacher who went back to the classroom because the kids were still there and she still had something to give.

Hunt County is full of people who decided a long time ago that the people around them were worth showing up for. And honestly, I am still finding them.

The Local Letter is a hyperlocal blog celebrating the people and small businesses of Hunt County and beyond. New features every week.