WORLD WAR II
Son of James Savage ad Ethel Mae Thompson Stanley, husband of Lillian Hutchens. Thomas was named after his grandfather, Captain Thomas Edward Stanley of Marion County, SC.
"Tom's parents abandoned him when he was 5 years old, leaving him on the porch swing at his Aunt Mamie's, who maintained a small cotton farm in South Carolina. His was a meager existence; there was never enough money and never enough time--not when there were hogs to be slopped and corn to be shucked and lessons to be learned. His aunt was a strict disciplinarian, keeping Stanley on a short leash, though he always had some kind of promotion going--selling candy to the kids at recess, apples to the blacks in "colored town"--anything to make money.
Stanley was a natural-born artist, easily teaching himself how to draw, paint and carve. What was harder was cobbling together enough cash to buy art supplies. At 13, he entered a competition sponsored by Fisher Body Co. to replicate the carriage that Josephine took to Notre Dame for her wedding to Napoleon. Since he could not afford the kit that Fisher required of its entrants, he designed the coach from scraps around the farm--corncobs, metal, swatches of velvet and leather. Winning the contest was more than just a source of pride, it was a harbinger of the way he would practice architecture: finding economical ways of expressing himself artistically.
Although college seemed financially out of the question, his aunt insisted he use his savings ($198) and go. He attended Clemson College in South Carolina, majoring in architecture ("I meant to check off agriculture," he would tell his children). Overachieving both in school and out, he was the cartoonist for the college newspaper and the art editor of the yearbook; he taught art classes, painted business signs--whatever he could do to keep himself in food money. At the time, Clemson had a military bent that would serve Tom well when World War II broke out. A bombardier and a flight instructor, at 26 he became the youngest person at that time to obtain the rank of major in the Army Air Corps, says his son Hutch.
Stationed at Ellington Field outside Houston, he fell in love with Texas, its bigness, its brashness and its economic opportunity. To him, Texas was full of action-oriented entrepreneurs and developers, "men of a certain unusual type," he would tell the Dallas Times Herald in 1964, who had the optimism and courage to implement their vision even in difficult economic times. Clearly, Tom Stanley wanted to be one of those men.
Upon his discharge from the Army, Stanley went to Houston and applied for a job with the largest architectural firm he could find, the only one that used bold letters in the phone book, or so the family mythology goes. He literally ran into the firm's renowned owner Wyatt C. Hedrick, who looked at Stanley's drawings and hired him on the spot. Hedrick was quite a showman in his own right, using his farm-fresh demeanor to land big commissions such as the Shamrock Hotel in Houston and the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth. Stanley molded himself after Hedrick, who would get to work every morning by 6:30. Tom Stanley would be there at 5:30.
By 1951, Stanley had moved to Fort Worth as a partner in the firm of Hedrick-Stanley. There he serviced Hedrick's rich clientele of oilmen, ranchers and bankers. There he met his wife, Lillian, a genteel, arty divorcee whom he married 90 days later. From a prior marriage, she had two children, Edward, 5, and Jill, 2, both of whom Tom adopted. To complete his family, two more children, Mamie and Hutch, would follow. Edward (Thomas E. Stanley III) always knew he had been adopted, though he seldom spoke about it; Jill, however, was never told, nor were the other children. Perhaps, as Lillian insists, "It was just our way of not showing partiality toward any of our children." Or perhaps Stanley, ever the Southern gentleman, believed that a good family name was a necessary credential--one that he had been denied but had dedicated his entire working life toward attaining. "Never forget you are a Stanley," he would tell his children.
Thomas E. Stanley II opened his doors in Dallas by 1959 and quickly gained entry to the corridors of power and business, which in Dallas were often the same. His closest friends were mostly business acquaintances: insurance industrialist Carr P. Collins and real estate men J.L. Williams, John Eulich and Henry S. Miller Jr. At the lightning speed he conducted business, there was rarely time to make an acquaintance of any other kind. Partly through his association with Collins, Stanley became one of two architects chosen to design the First National Bank building on Elm Street, which after its completion in 1965 was the tallest building west of the Mississippi at 52 stories. As the first glass box high rise in Dallas, it set the standard for the rest of downtown. It became his signature building, elegant with its classical use of white marble arches and columns, yet modern with its dark glass materials.
Suddenly Stanley was much in demand. His bank and office towers graced downtowns in Oklahoma City, Omaha, New Orleans, Chicago and New York. He was registered to practice architecture in 28 states. The same year he was completing plans for the First National Bank building, he was also designing the massive downtown Sanger-Harris retail store (now the DART headquarters), high-rise apartments in Mexico City, Malta and La Jolla, California, and hotels in the Bahamas and Monterrey, Mexico.
Corporate developers loved his classical elements--that touch of class, which Stanley told them was his way of putting "a little romance in their buildings." What they loved even more was the structures he designed made money for their owners. His buildings were built to lease.
"Attractive design was important to him, but it's not what he was known for," Axberg says. "His true mark was being able to build very efficient buildings. Some developers wanted Tom's name involved in their projects because his reputation with lenders made it easier for them to secure money."
While no architect was more developer-friendly, it was the personal magnetism of the man that closed the deal.
To meet with developers across the country, he would travel on his private jet accompanied by his two pilots wearing red blazers bearing the Stanley family crest. He was always impeccably dressed--pin-striped suit, monogrammed shirt and diamond cufflinks. Although he never drank a second cup of coffee out of the same cup, in his folksy South Carolinian drawl he was the most humble man in the room. Owners were wowed by his high style and down-home homilies--the way he would pull out his felt-tip pen, and a dozen napkins later, have designed them a building with the right blend of economics and "romance" to sweep them off their feet.
"He went into these meetings believing he was going to win," says former Stanley employee and architect Hardy McCullah. "And he generally did."
By the early '70s, Tom Stanley was at the pinnacle of both his professional and personal life. He had an architectural staff of nearly 90, refusing to develop a more corporate structure because he was the business, its sole rainmaker. He had an apartment in New York, a 375-acre horse farm outside McKinney and a Rolls Royce in his driveway. He retained a governess for his four children, a housekeeper to cook and clean and a full-time carpenter just because he could. When he would come home exhausted from his 12-hour days, Lillian, if she hadn't traveled with him, would be standing in the doorway, a cocktail in hand, looking freshly coiffed and playing his favorite Al Jolson standards. Together they might retire to the bedroom and eat dinner, behind closed doors and apart from the children.
If Stanley had kept practicing architecture, not only might he have died a rich man, he could have died a happy one.
There was simply not enough of Tom Stanley to go around. Everyone wanted a piece of him--his clients, his employees, his wife, his children--and everyone came up wanting. "He used to tell me he was spread thinner than piss on a platter," says Bob Sallee, who managed his office. "Either he was chasing business, or the business was chasing him."
Tom's second open-heart surgery in 1978 may have caused Stanley to rethink his life. The pinch of the credit crunch in the mid-'70s made new business harder to find. Perhaps this was the right time to slow down.
Stanley searched for a new revenue stream, turning his firm's direction toward development. He partnered with actor John Wayne, who owned one of Stanley's sculptures, and a wealthy rancher from South Dakota to build a hotel-casino in Lake Tahoe. The Tahoe Palace seemed a natural: The rancher committed $65 million, John Wayne lent his name, and Tom Stanley would design and develop the 1,000-room hotel from production drawings to groundbreaking to finish-out.
Six years of litigation later, all that was built of the Palace was its foundation. The Sierra Club and the state of California took the position that the hotel would be an environmental nightmare and convinced a court to halt its construction.
Although Stanley had no money in the project, it sapped the resources of his firm, which he was forced to downsize to a staff of seven. In the process, Stanley sold his Oak Lawn office building and moved his firm into a Turtle Creek high rise. He leased more space than he could use, optimistic he would see better days. He still had one more project on the drawing board--a resort hotel on Mustang Island in South Texas. In the mid-'70s, he had purchased several tracts of land on the beach, believing the island both underdeveloped and undervalued. He designed and built villas and a 42-unit condominium whose sales were intended to help finance the construction of the El Cortez, a 12-story hotel. Unfortunately, with oil prices plummeting in the early '80s, a depressed Texas economy interfered with his plans. The units just didn't sell. Yet Stanley believed in his vision so wholeheartedly that he dipped into his personal assets to keep the project afloat.
At the same time, he began converting Sycamore Farms into a master-planned residential community called Brookgreene Estates that he intended to market as one-acre lots to busy professionals looking to escape city life. But in 1986, in an effort to save El Cortez, he borrowed $4.3 million from Southwest Savings, putting up what was left of the Brookgreene (200 acres) and 15 units of the Mustang Island condominium as collateral. Then came the real estate crunch and not far behind it, the savings and loan scandal, which would eventually put Southwest Savings into receivership. Interest payments alone were close to $1,200 a day, which Stanley paid out of his own pocket.
"It's kind of ironic," Hardy McCullah says. "For so many years he had done architecture that worked well economically, and here he invests all his resources in a project that's just not economically feasible."
By 1988, Stanley could no longer make the payments, and he traveled across this country and Europe, looking for new sources of funding. With no new money, with his land worth less than half its original value, with his personal assets nearly depleted, Southwest Savings finally posted the property for foreclosure. To stave off financial ruin, he filed for bankruptcy in March 1990, hoping to reorganize his debt. Before it was over, he had lost almost everything, with no way of getting it back.
He had just gotten old at the wrong time in his life.
Although Stanley's heart was failing him--pumping at 20 percent of its capacity--his spirits seldom sagged. Unlike his children, he had risen out of poverty on the strength of his personal genius. Despite his age, he believed he could do it again. Hutch, who took a daily interest in his parents' well-being, encouraged his father to sculpt or paint, but Stanley had one last architectural dream--L'Elyse'e--a high-rise condominium he designed and hoped to develop in Turtle Creek.
"Tom asked me to do the production drawings for the high rise," Dennis Axberg recalls. "I could see that he was tired, and I knew the project was never going anywhere, but I gave him a few drawings anyway. I just wanted the opportunity to talk with him one more time."
As Tom Stanley lay dying, his heart worn down by time, Lillian Stanley searched for ways to console her husband. Each day he spent at Presbyterian Hospital in January, she would gather family and friends around him--those who had loved him and those who had wronged him--so Stanley, 83, could make his peace. Many nights she would refuse to leave his side, sleeping lightly in the chair by his bed, stirring with his every moan.
Theirs had been a grand life, for most of it anyway. Tom had risen from penniless farm boy to master architect, his signature skyscrapers, hotels and high-rise apartments dotting the cityscapes of downtowns across the country; Lillian had dedicated her life to her husband, schmoozing the wives of property owners and developers, serving as goodwill ambassador for her husband's concern.
At one time in the late '60s, Time magazine recognized Tom Stanley's Dallas practice as one of the largest architectural firms in the country. Hard-driving, work-obsessed, unerringly ethical, Stanley won commissions most architects only dream about: First National Bank in Dallas, the Gulf & Western building in New York City, 30 North LaSalle in Chicago. His smaller local projects were some of his best: Lovers Lane United Methodist Church, the Atlantic Richfield campus, the American Airlines Flight Academy. Developers couldn't resist his buildings, which were designed to make them money but were splashed with enough classical elements to give them the feel of art. After all, Stanley was an artist, a sculptor, a piece of work himself. Remembered less for his architectural drawings than his architectural drawing power, he presented himself as an odd oxymoron of folksy humility and flamboyant hubris, Southern gentility and urban hustle.
"More than good architecture and design," says his former employee and Dallas architect Dennis Axberg, "Tom Stanley sold Tom Stanley."
His wife worshipped him, his four children were in awe of him, and for 30 years he seemed invincible, but for the three open-heart surgeries from which he recovered with Dick Cheney-like speed. In the mid-'80s, however, he stumbled hard, investing in his own project, squeezed mercilessly by the real estate crunch and the savings and loan debacle. He fought off his creditors until 1990, when he had little choice but to file bankruptcy.
The story of Tom Stanley is the story of the Texas rich, those can-do entrepreneurs who have so much confidence in their own abilities that they think they are above the laws of supply and demand. It's the story of a Dallas society that allows entry based on merit as well as name, where new money can buy the same access to privilege as old. It's the story of the bitter dysfunction in the family of a man as he completes the circle of his life from rags to riches to rags again." Excerpt from 'Rich Man, Poor Man', written by Mark Donald for The Dallas Observer, August 2, 2001
Son of James Savage ad Ethel Mae Thompson Stanley, husband of Lillian Hutchens. Thomas was named after his grandfather, Captain Thomas Edward Stanley of Marion County, SC.
"Tom's parents abandoned him when he was 5 years old, leaving him on the porch swing at his Aunt Mamie's, who maintained a small cotton farm in South Carolina. His was a meager existence; there was never enough money and never enough time--not when there were hogs to be slopped and corn to be shucked and lessons to be learned. His aunt was a strict disciplinarian, keeping Stanley on a short leash, though he always had some kind of promotion going--selling candy to the kids at recess, apples to the blacks in "colored town"--anything to make money.
Stanley was a natural-born artist, easily teaching himself how to draw, paint and carve. What was harder was cobbling together enough cash to buy art supplies. At 13, he entered a competition sponsored by Fisher Body Co. to replicate the carriage that Josephine took to Notre Dame for her wedding to Napoleon. Since he could not afford the kit that Fisher required of its entrants, he designed the coach from scraps around the farm--corncobs, metal, swatches of velvet and leather. Winning the contest was more than just a source of pride, it was a harbinger of the way he would practice architecture: finding economical ways of expressing himself artistically.
Although college seemed financially out of the question, his aunt insisted he use his savings ($198) and go. He attended Clemson College in South Carolina, majoring in architecture ("I meant to check off agriculture," he would tell his children). Overachieving both in school and out, he was the cartoonist for the college newspaper and the art editor of the yearbook; he taught art classes, painted business signs--whatever he could do to keep himself in food money. At the time, Clemson had a military bent that would serve Tom well when World War II broke out. A bombardier and a flight instructor, at 26 he became the youngest person at that time to obtain the rank of major in the Army Air Corps, says his son Hutch.
Stationed at Ellington Field outside Houston, he fell in love with Texas, its bigness, its brashness and its economic opportunity. To him, Texas was full of action-oriented entrepreneurs and developers, "men of a certain unusual type," he would tell the Dallas Times Herald in 1964, who had the optimism and courage to implement their vision even in difficult economic times. Clearly, Tom Stanley wanted to be one of those men.
Upon his discharge from the Army, Stanley went to Houston and applied for a job with the largest architectural firm he could find, the only one that used bold letters in the phone book, or so the family mythology goes. He literally ran into the firm's renowned owner Wyatt C. Hedrick, who looked at Stanley's drawings and hired him on the spot. Hedrick was quite a showman in his own right, using his farm-fresh demeanor to land big commissions such as the Shamrock Hotel in Houston and the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth. Stanley molded himself after Hedrick, who would get to work every morning by 6:30. Tom Stanley would be there at 5:30.
By 1951, Stanley had moved to Fort Worth as a partner in the firm of Hedrick-Stanley. There he serviced Hedrick's rich clientele of oilmen, ranchers and bankers. There he met his wife, Lillian, a genteel, arty divorcee whom he married 90 days later. From a prior marriage, she had two children, Edward, 5, and Jill, 2, both of whom Tom adopted. To complete his family, two more children, Mamie and Hutch, would follow. Edward (Thomas E. Stanley III) always knew he had been adopted, though he seldom spoke about it; Jill, however, was never told, nor were the other children. Perhaps, as Lillian insists, "It was just our way of not showing partiality toward any of our children." Or perhaps Stanley, ever the Southern gentleman, believed that a good family name was a necessary credential--one that he had been denied but had dedicated his entire working life toward attaining. "Never forget you are a Stanley," he would tell his children.
Thomas E. Stanley II opened his doors in Dallas by 1959 and quickly gained entry to the corridors of power and business, which in Dallas were often the same. His closest friends were mostly business acquaintances: insurance industrialist Carr P. Collins and real estate men J.L. Williams, John Eulich and Henry S. Miller Jr. At the lightning speed he conducted business, there was rarely time to make an acquaintance of any other kind. Partly through his association with Collins, Stanley became one of two architects chosen to design the First National Bank building on Elm Street, which after its completion in 1965 was the tallest building west of the Mississippi at 52 stories. As the first glass box high rise in Dallas, it set the standard for the rest of downtown. It became his signature building, elegant with its classical use of white marble arches and columns, yet modern with its dark glass materials.
Suddenly Stanley was much in demand. His bank and office towers graced downtowns in Oklahoma City, Omaha, New Orleans, Chicago and New York. He was registered to practice architecture in 28 states. The same year he was completing plans for the First National Bank building, he was also designing the massive downtown Sanger-Harris retail store (now the DART headquarters), high-rise apartments in Mexico City, Malta and La Jolla, California, and hotels in the Bahamas and Monterrey, Mexico.
Corporate developers loved his classical elements--that touch of class, which Stanley told them was his way of putting "a little romance in their buildings." What they loved even more was the structures he designed made money for their owners. His buildings were built to lease.
"Attractive design was important to him, but it's not what he was known for," Axberg says. "His true mark was being able to build very efficient buildings. Some developers wanted Tom's name involved in their projects because his reputation with lenders made it easier for them to secure money."
While no architect was more developer-friendly, it was the personal magnetism of the man that closed the deal.
To meet with developers across the country, he would travel on his private jet accompanied by his two pilots wearing red blazers bearing the Stanley family crest. He was always impeccably dressed--pin-striped suit, monogrammed shirt and diamond cufflinks. Although he never drank a second cup of coffee out of the same cup, in his folksy South Carolinian drawl he was the most humble man in the room. Owners were wowed by his high style and down-home homilies--the way he would pull out his felt-tip pen, and a dozen napkins later, have designed them a building with the right blend of economics and "romance" to sweep them off their feet.
"He went into these meetings believing he was going to win," says former Stanley employee and architect Hardy McCullah. "And he generally did."
By the early '70s, Tom Stanley was at the pinnacle of both his professional and personal life. He had an architectural staff of nearly 90, refusing to develop a more corporate structure because he was the business, its sole rainmaker. He had an apartment in New York, a 375-acre horse farm outside McKinney and a Rolls Royce in his driveway. He retained a governess for his four children, a housekeeper to cook and clean and a full-time carpenter just because he could. When he would come home exhausted from his 12-hour days, Lillian, if she hadn't traveled with him, would be standing in the doorway, a cocktail in hand, looking freshly coiffed and playing his favorite Al Jolson standards. Together they might retire to the bedroom and eat dinner, behind closed doors and apart from the children.
If Stanley had kept practicing architecture, not only might he have died a rich man, he could have died a happy one.
There was simply not enough of Tom Stanley to go around. Everyone wanted a piece of him--his clients, his employees, his wife, his children--and everyone came up wanting. "He used to tell me he was spread thinner than piss on a platter," says Bob Sallee, who managed his office. "Either he was chasing business, or the business was chasing him."
Tom's second open-heart surgery in 1978 may have caused Stanley to rethink his life. The pinch of the credit crunch in the mid-'70s made new business harder to find. Perhaps this was the right time to slow down.
Stanley searched for a new revenue stream, turning his firm's direction toward development. He partnered with actor John Wayne, who owned one of Stanley's sculptures, and a wealthy rancher from South Dakota to build a hotel-casino in Lake Tahoe. The Tahoe Palace seemed a natural: The rancher committed $65 million, John Wayne lent his name, and Tom Stanley would design and develop the 1,000-room hotel from production drawings to groundbreaking to finish-out.
Six years of litigation later, all that was built of the Palace was its foundation. The Sierra Club and the state of California took the position that the hotel would be an environmental nightmare and convinced a court to halt its construction.
Although Stanley had no money in the project, it sapped the resources of his firm, which he was forced to downsize to a staff of seven. In the process, Stanley sold his Oak Lawn office building and moved his firm into a Turtle Creek high rise. He leased more space than he could use, optimistic he would see better days. He still had one more project on the drawing board--a resort hotel on Mustang Island in South Texas. In the mid-'70s, he had purchased several tracts of land on the beach, believing the island both underdeveloped and undervalued. He designed and built villas and a 42-unit condominium whose sales were intended to help finance the construction of the El Cortez, a 12-story hotel. Unfortunately, with oil prices plummeting in the early '80s, a depressed Texas economy interfered with his plans. The units just didn't sell. Yet Stanley believed in his vision so wholeheartedly that he dipped into his personal assets to keep the project afloat.
At the same time, he began converting Sycamore Farms into a master-planned residential community called Brookgreene Estates that he intended to market as one-acre lots to busy professionals looking to escape city life. But in 1986, in an effort to save El Cortez, he borrowed $4.3 million from Southwest Savings, putting up what was left of the Brookgreene (200 acres) and 15 units of the Mustang Island condominium as collateral. Then came the real estate crunch and not far behind it, the savings and loan scandal, which would eventually put Southwest Savings into receivership. Interest payments alone were close to $1,200 a day, which Stanley paid out of his own pocket.
"It's kind of ironic," Hardy McCullah says. "For so many years he had done architecture that worked well economically, and here he invests all his resources in a project that's just not economically feasible."
By 1988, Stanley could no longer make the payments, and he traveled across this country and Europe, looking for new sources of funding. With no new money, with his land worth less than half its original value, with his personal assets nearly depleted, Southwest Savings finally posted the property for foreclosure. To stave off financial ruin, he filed for bankruptcy in March 1990, hoping to reorganize his debt. Before it was over, he had lost almost everything, with no way of getting it back.
He had just gotten old at the wrong time in his life.
Although Stanley's heart was failing him--pumping at 20 percent of its capacity--his spirits seldom sagged. Unlike his children, he had risen out of poverty on the strength of his personal genius. Despite his age, he believed he could do it again. Hutch, who took a daily interest in his parents' well-being, encouraged his father to sculpt or paint, but Stanley had one last architectural dream--L'Elyse'e--a high-rise condominium he designed and hoped to develop in Turtle Creek.
"Tom asked me to do the production drawings for the high rise," Dennis Axberg recalls. "I could see that he was tired, and I knew the project was never going anywhere, but I gave him a few drawings anyway. I just wanted the opportunity to talk with him one more time."
As Tom Stanley lay dying, his heart worn down by time, Lillian Stanley searched for ways to console her husband. Each day he spent at Presbyterian Hospital in January, she would gather family and friends around him--those who had loved him and those who had wronged him--so Stanley, 83, could make his peace. Many nights she would refuse to leave his side, sleeping lightly in the chair by his bed, stirring with his every moan.
Theirs had been a grand life, for most of it anyway. Tom had risen from penniless farm boy to master architect, his signature skyscrapers, hotels and high-rise apartments dotting the cityscapes of downtowns across the country; Lillian had dedicated her life to her husband, schmoozing the wives of property owners and developers, serving as goodwill ambassador for her husband's concern.
At one time in the late '60s, Time magazine recognized Tom Stanley's Dallas practice as one of the largest architectural firms in the country. Hard-driving, work-obsessed, unerringly ethical, Stanley won commissions most architects only dream about: First National Bank in Dallas, the Gulf & Western building in New York City, 30 North LaSalle in Chicago. His smaller local projects were some of his best: Lovers Lane United Methodist Church, the Atlantic Richfield campus, the American Airlines Flight Academy. Developers couldn't resist his buildings, which were designed to make them money but were splashed with enough classical elements to give them the feel of art. After all, Stanley was an artist, a sculptor, a piece of work himself. Remembered less for his architectural drawings than his architectural drawing power, he presented himself as an odd oxymoron of folksy humility and flamboyant hubris, Southern gentility and urban hustle.
"More than good architecture and design," says his former employee and Dallas architect Dennis Axberg, "Tom Stanley sold Tom Stanley."
His wife worshipped him, his four children were in awe of him, and for 30 years he seemed invincible, but for the three open-heart surgeries from which he recovered with Dick Cheney-like speed. In the mid-'80s, however, he stumbled hard, investing in his own project, squeezed mercilessly by the real estate crunch and the savings and loan debacle. He fought off his creditors until 1990, when he had little choice but to file bankruptcy.
The story of Tom Stanley is the story of the Texas rich, those can-do entrepreneurs who have so much confidence in their own abilities that they think they are above the laws of supply and demand. It's the story of a Dallas society that allows entry based on merit as well as name, where new money can buy the same access to privilege as old. It's the story of the bitter dysfunction in the family of a man as he completes the circle of his life from rags to riches to rags again." Excerpt from 'Rich Man, Poor Man', written by Mark Donald for The Dallas Observer, August 2, 2001
WORLD WAR II
Son of James Savage ad Ethel Mae Thompson Stanley, husband of Lillian Hutchens. Thomas was named after his grandfather, Captain Thomas Edward Stanley of Marion County, SC.
"Tom's parents abandoned him when he was 5 years old, leaving him on the porch swing at his Aunt Mamie's, who maintained a small cotton farm in South Carolina. His was a meager existence; there was never enough money and never enough time--not when there were hogs to be slopped and corn to be shucked and lessons to be learned. His aunt was a strict disciplinarian, keeping Stanley on a short leash, though he always had some kind of promotion going--selling candy to the kids at recess, apples to the blacks in "colored town"--anything to make money.
Stanley was a natural-born artist, easily teaching himself how to draw, paint and carve. What was harder was cobbling together enough cash to buy art supplies. At 13, he entered a competition sponsored by Fisher Body Co. to replicate the carriage that Josephine took to Notre Dame for her wedding to Napoleon. Since he could not afford the kit that Fisher required of its entrants, he designed the coach from scraps around the farm--corncobs, metal, swatches of velvet and leather. Winning the contest was more than just a source of pride, it was a harbinger of the way he would practice architecture: finding economical ways of expressing himself artistically.
Although college seemed financially out of the question, his aunt insisted he use his savings ($198) and go. He attended Clemson College in South Carolina, majoring in architecture ("I meant to check off agriculture," he would tell his children). Overachieving both in school and out, he was the cartoonist for the college newspaper and the art editor of the yearbook; he taught art classes, painted business signs--whatever he could do to keep himself in food money. At the time, Clemson had a military bent that would serve Tom well when World War II broke out. A bombardier and a flight instructor, at 26 he became the youngest person at that time to obtain the rank of major in the Army Air Corps, says his son Hutch.
Stationed at Ellington Field outside Houston, he fell in love with Texas, its bigness, its brashness and its economic opportunity. To him, Texas was full of action-oriented entrepreneurs and developers, "men of a certain unusual type," he would tell the Dallas Times Herald in 1964, who had the optimism and courage to implement their vision even in difficult economic times. Clearly, Tom Stanley wanted to be one of those men.
Upon his discharge from the Army, Stanley went to Houston and applied for a job with the largest architectural firm he could find, the only one that used bold letters in the phone book, or so the family mythology goes. He literally ran into the firm's renowned owner Wyatt C. Hedrick, who looked at Stanley's drawings and hired him on the spot. Hedrick was quite a showman in his own right, using his farm-fresh demeanor to land big commissions such as the Shamrock Hotel in Houston and the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth. Stanley molded himself after Hedrick, who would get to work every morning by 6:30. Tom Stanley would be there at 5:30.
By 1951, Stanley had moved to Fort Worth as a partner in the firm of Hedrick-Stanley. There he serviced Hedrick's rich clientele of oilmen, ranchers and bankers. There he met his wife, Lillian, a genteel, arty divorcee whom he married 90 days later. From a prior marriage, she had two children, Edward, 5, and Jill, 2, both of whom Tom adopted. To complete his family, two more children, Mamie and Hutch, would follow. Edward (Thomas E. Stanley III) always knew he had been adopted, though he seldom spoke about it; Jill, however, was never told, nor were the other children. Perhaps, as Lillian insists, "It was just our way of not showing partiality toward any of our children." Or perhaps Stanley, ever the Southern gentleman, believed that a good family name was a necessary credential--one that he had been denied but had dedicated his entire working life toward attaining. "Never forget you are a Stanley," he would tell his children.
Thomas E. Stanley II opened his doors in Dallas by 1959 and quickly gained entry to the corridors of power and business, which in Dallas were often the same. His closest friends were mostly business acquaintances: insurance industrialist Carr P. Collins and real estate men J.L. Williams, John Eulich and Henry S. Miller Jr. At the lightning speed he conducted business, there was rarely time to make an acquaintance of any other kind. Partly through his association with Collins, Stanley became one of two architects chosen to design the First National Bank building on Elm Street, which after its completion in 1965 was the tallest building west of the Mississippi at 52 stories. As the first glass box high rise in Dallas, it set the standard for the rest of downtown. It became his signature building, elegant with its classical use of white marble arches and columns, yet modern with its dark glass materials.
Suddenly Stanley was much in demand. His bank and office towers graced downtowns in Oklahoma City, Omaha, New Orleans, Chicago and New York. He was registered to practice architecture in 28 states. The same year he was completing plans for the First National Bank building, he was also designing the massive downtown Sanger-Harris retail store (now the DART headquarters), high-rise apartments in Mexico City, Malta and La Jolla, California, and hotels in the Bahamas and Monterrey, Mexico.
Corporate developers loved his classical elements--that touch of class, which Stanley told them was his way of putting "a little romance in their buildings." What they loved even more was the structures he designed made money for their owners. His buildings were built to lease.
"Attractive design was important to him, but it's not what he was known for," Axberg says. "His true mark was being able to build very efficient buildings. Some developers wanted Tom's name involved in their projects because his reputation with lenders made it easier for them to secure money."
While no architect was more developer-friendly, it was the personal magnetism of the man that closed the deal.
To meet with developers across the country, he would travel on his private jet accompanied by his two pilots wearing red blazers bearing the Stanley family crest. He was always impeccably dressed--pin-striped suit, monogrammed shirt and diamond cufflinks. Although he never drank a second cup of coffee out of the same cup, in his folksy South Carolinian drawl he was the most humble man in the room. Owners were wowed by his high style and down-home homilies--the way he would pull out his felt-tip pen, and a dozen napkins later, have designed them a building with the right blend of economics and "romance" to sweep them off their feet.
"He went into these meetings believing he was going to win," says former Stanley employee and architect Hardy McCullah. "And he generally did."
By the early '70s, Tom Stanley was at the pinnacle of both his professional and personal life. He had an architectural staff of nearly 90, refusing to develop a more corporate structure because he was the business, its sole rainmaker. He had an apartment in New York, a 375-acre horse farm outside McKinney and a Rolls Royce in his driveway. He retained a governess for his four children, a housekeeper to cook and clean and a full-time carpenter just because he could. When he would come home exhausted from his 12-hour days, Lillian, if she hadn't traveled with him, would be standing in the doorway, a cocktail in hand, looking freshly coiffed and playing his favorite Al Jolson standards. Together they might retire to the bedroom and eat dinner, behind closed doors and apart from the children.
If Stanley had kept practicing architecture, not only might he have died a rich man, he could have died a happy one.
There was simply not enough of Tom Stanley to go around. Everyone wanted a piece of him--his clients, his employees, his wife, his children--and everyone came up wanting. "He used to tell me he was spread thinner than piss on a platter," says Bob Sallee, who managed his office. "Either he was chasing business, or the business was chasing him."
Tom's second open-heart surgery in 1978 may have caused Stanley to rethink his life. The pinch of the credit crunch in the mid-'70s made new business harder to find. Perhaps this was the right time to slow down.
Stanley searched for a new revenue stream, turning his firm's direction toward development. He partnered with actor John Wayne, who owned one of Stanley's sculptures, and a wealthy rancher from South Dakota to build a hotel-casino in Lake Tahoe. The Tahoe Palace seemed a natural: The rancher committed $65 million, John Wayne lent his name, and Tom Stanley would design and develop the 1,000-room hotel from production drawings to groundbreaking to finish-out.
Six years of litigation later, all that was built of the Palace was its foundation. The Sierra Club and the state of California took the position that the hotel would be an environmental nightmare and convinced a court to halt its construction.
Although Stanley had no money in the project, it sapped the resources of his firm, which he was forced to downsize to a staff of seven. In the process, Stanley sold his Oak Lawn office building and moved his firm into a Turtle Creek high rise. He leased more space than he could use, optimistic he would see better days. He still had one more project on the drawing board--a resort hotel on Mustang Island in South Texas. In the mid-'70s, he had purchased several tracts of land on the beach, believing the island both underdeveloped and undervalued. He designed and built villas and a 42-unit condominium whose sales were intended to help finance the construction of the El Cortez, a 12-story hotel. Unfortunately, with oil prices plummeting in the early '80s, a depressed Texas economy interfered with his plans. The units just didn't sell. Yet Stanley believed in his vision so wholeheartedly that he dipped into his personal assets to keep the project afloat.
At the same time, he began converting Sycamore Farms into a master-planned residential community called Brookgreene Estates that he intended to market as one-acre lots to busy professionals looking to escape city life. But in 1986, in an effort to save El Cortez, he borrowed $4.3 million from Southwest Savings, putting up what was left of the Brookgreene (200 acres) and 15 units of the Mustang Island condominium as collateral. Then came the real estate crunch and not far behind it, the savings and loan scandal, which would eventually put Southwest Savings into receivership. Interest payments alone were close to $1,200 a day, which Stanley paid out of his own pocket.
"It's kind of ironic," Hardy McCullah says. "For so many years he had done architecture that worked well economically, and here he invests all his resources in a project that's just not economically feasible."
By 1988, Stanley could no longer make the payments, and he traveled across this country and Europe, looking for new sources of funding. With no new money, with his land worth less than half its original value, with his personal assets nearly depleted, Southwest Savings finally posted the property for foreclosure. To stave off financial ruin, he filed for bankruptcy in March 1990, hoping to reorganize his debt. Before it was over, he had lost almost everything, with no way of getting it back.
He had just gotten old at the wrong time in his life.
Although Stanley's heart was failing him--pumping at 20 percent of its capacity--his spirits seldom sagged. Unlike his children, he had risen out of poverty on the strength of his personal genius. Despite his age, he believed he could do it again. Hutch, who took a daily interest in his parents' well-being, encouraged his father to sculpt or paint, but Stanley had one last architectural dream--L'Elyse'e--a high-rise condominium he designed and hoped to develop in Turtle Creek.
"Tom asked me to do the production drawings for the high rise," Dennis Axberg recalls. "I could see that he was tired, and I knew the project was never going anywhere, but I gave him a few drawings anyway. I just wanted the opportunity to talk with him one more time."
As Tom Stanley lay dying, his heart worn down by time, Lillian Stanley searched for ways to console her husband. Each day he spent at Presbyterian Hospital in January, she would gather family and friends around him--those who had loved him and those who had wronged him--so Stanley, 83, could make his peace. Many nights she would refuse to leave his side, sleeping lightly in the chair by his bed, stirring with his every moan.
Theirs had been a grand life, for most of it anyway. Tom had risen from penniless farm boy to master architect, his signature skyscrapers, hotels and high-rise apartments dotting the cityscapes of downtowns across the country; Lillian had dedicated her life to her husband, schmoozing the wives of property owners and developers, serving as goodwill ambassador for her husband's concern.
At one time in the late '60s, Time magazine recognized Tom Stanley's Dallas practice as one of the largest architectural firms in the country. Hard-driving, work-obsessed, unerringly ethical, Stanley won commissions most architects only dream about: First National Bank in Dallas, the Gulf & Western building in New York City, 30 North LaSalle in Chicago. His smaller local projects were some of his best: Lovers Lane United Methodist Church, the Atlantic Richfield campus, the American Airlines Flight Academy. Developers couldn't resist his buildings, which were designed to make them money but were splashed with enough classical elements to give them the feel of art. After all, Stanley was an artist, a sculptor, a piece of work himself. Remembered less for his architectural drawings than his architectural drawing power, he presented himself as an odd oxymoron of folksy humility and flamboyant hubris, Southern gentility and urban hustle.
"More than good architecture and design," says his former employee and Dallas architect Dennis Axberg, "Tom Stanley sold Tom Stanley."
His wife worshipped him, his four children were in awe of him, and for 30 years he seemed invincible, but for the three open-heart surgeries from which he recovered with Dick Cheney-like speed. In the mid-'80s, however, he stumbled hard, investing in his own project, squeezed mercilessly by the real estate crunch and the savings and loan debacle. He fought off his creditors until 1990, when he had little choice but to file bankruptcy.
The story of Tom Stanley is the story of the Texas rich, those can-do entrepreneurs who have so much confidence in their own abilities that they think they are above the laws of supply and demand. It's the story of a Dallas society that allows entry based on merit as well as name, where new money can buy the same access to privilege as old. It's the story of the bitter dysfunction in the family of a man as he completes the circle of his life from rags to riches to rags again." Excerpt from 'Rich Man, Poor Man', written by Mark Donald for The Dallas Observer, August 2, 2001
Son of James Savage ad Ethel Mae Thompson Stanley, husband of Lillian Hutchens. Thomas was named after his grandfather, Captain Thomas Edward Stanley of Marion County, SC.
"Tom's parents abandoned him when he was 5 years old, leaving him on the porch swing at his Aunt Mamie's, who maintained a small cotton farm in South Carolina. His was a meager existence; there was never enough money and never enough time--not when there were hogs to be slopped and corn to be shucked and lessons to be learned. His aunt was a strict disciplinarian, keeping Stanley on a short leash, though he always had some kind of promotion going--selling candy to the kids at recess, apples to the blacks in "colored town"--anything to make money.
Stanley was a natural-born artist, easily teaching himself how to draw, paint and carve. What was harder was cobbling together enough cash to buy art supplies. At 13, he entered a competition sponsored by Fisher Body Co. to replicate the carriage that Josephine took to Notre Dame for her wedding to Napoleon. Since he could not afford the kit that Fisher required of its entrants, he designed the coach from scraps around the farm--corncobs, metal, swatches of velvet and leather. Winning the contest was more than just a source of pride, it was a harbinger of the way he would practice architecture: finding economical ways of expressing himself artistically.
Although college seemed financially out of the question, his aunt insisted he use his savings ($198) and go. He attended Clemson College in South Carolina, majoring in architecture ("I meant to check off agriculture," he would tell his children). Overachieving both in school and out, he was the cartoonist for the college newspaper and the art editor of the yearbook; he taught art classes, painted business signs--whatever he could do to keep himself in food money. At the time, Clemson had a military bent that would serve Tom well when World War II broke out. A bombardier and a flight instructor, at 26 he became the youngest person at that time to obtain the rank of major in the Army Air Corps, says his son Hutch.
Stationed at Ellington Field outside Houston, he fell in love with Texas, its bigness, its brashness and its economic opportunity. To him, Texas was full of action-oriented entrepreneurs and developers, "men of a certain unusual type," he would tell the Dallas Times Herald in 1964, who had the optimism and courage to implement their vision even in difficult economic times. Clearly, Tom Stanley wanted to be one of those men.
Upon his discharge from the Army, Stanley went to Houston and applied for a job with the largest architectural firm he could find, the only one that used bold letters in the phone book, or so the family mythology goes. He literally ran into the firm's renowned owner Wyatt C. Hedrick, who looked at Stanley's drawings and hired him on the spot. Hedrick was quite a showman in his own right, using his farm-fresh demeanor to land big commissions such as the Shamrock Hotel in Houston and the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth. Stanley molded himself after Hedrick, who would get to work every morning by 6:30. Tom Stanley would be there at 5:30.
By 1951, Stanley had moved to Fort Worth as a partner in the firm of Hedrick-Stanley. There he serviced Hedrick's rich clientele of oilmen, ranchers and bankers. There he met his wife, Lillian, a genteel, arty divorcee whom he married 90 days later. From a prior marriage, she had two children, Edward, 5, and Jill, 2, both of whom Tom adopted. To complete his family, two more children, Mamie and Hutch, would follow. Edward (Thomas E. Stanley III) always knew he had been adopted, though he seldom spoke about it; Jill, however, was never told, nor were the other children. Perhaps, as Lillian insists, "It was just our way of not showing partiality toward any of our children." Or perhaps Stanley, ever the Southern gentleman, believed that a good family name was a necessary credential--one that he had been denied but had dedicated his entire working life toward attaining. "Never forget you are a Stanley," he would tell his children.
Thomas E. Stanley II opened his doors in Dallas by 1959 and quickly gained entry to the corridors of power and business, which in Dallas were often the same. His closest friends were mostly business acquaintances: insurance industrialist Carr P. Collins and real estate men J.L. Williams, John Eulich and Henry S. Miller Jr. At the lightning speed he conducted business, there was rarely time to make an acquaintance of any other kind. Partly through his association with Collins, Stanley became one of two architects chosen to design the First National Bank building on Elm Street, which after its completion in 1965 was the tallest building west of the Mississippi at 52 stories. As the first glass box high rise in Dallas, it set the standard for the rest of downtown. It became his signature building, elegant with its classical use of white marble arches and columns, yet modern with its dark glass materials.
Suddenly Stanley was much in demand. His bank and office towers graced downtowns in Oklahoma City, Omaha, New Orleans, Chicago and New York. He was registered to practice architecture in 28 states. The same year he was completing plans for the First National Bank building, he was also designing the massive downtown Sanger-Harris retail store (now the DART headquarters), high-rise apartments in Mexico City, Malta and La Jolla, California, and hotels in the Bahamas and Monterrey, Mexico.
Corporate developers loved his classical elements--that touch of class, which Stanley told them was his way of putting "a little romance in their buildings." What they loved even more was the structures he designed made money for their owners. His buildings were built to lease.
"Attractive design was important to him, but it's not what he was known for," Axberg says. "His true mark was being able to build very efficient buildings. Some developers wanted Tom's name involved in their projects because his reputation with lenders made it easier for them to secure money."
While no architect was more developer-friendly, it was the personal magnetism of the man that closed the deal.
To meet with developers across the country, he would travel on his private jet accompanied by his two pilots wearing red blazers bearing the Stanley family crest. He was always impeccably dressed--pin-striped suit, monogrammed shirt and diamond cufflinks. Although he never drank a second cup of coffee out of the same cup, in his folksy South Carolinian drawl he was the most humble man in the room. Owners were wowed by his high style and down-home homilies--the way he would pull out his felt-tip pen, and a dozen napkins later, have designed them a building with the right blend of economics and "romance" to sweep them off their feet.
"He went into these meetings believing he was going to win," says former Stanley employee and architect Hardy McCullah. "And he generally did."
By the early '70s, Tom Stanley was at the pinnacle of both his professional and personal life. He had an architectural staff of nearly 90, refusing to develop a more corporate structure because he was the business, its sole rainmaker. He had an apartment in New York, a 375-acre horse farm outside McKinney and a Rolls Royce in his driveway. He retained a governess for his four children, a housekeeper to cook and clean and a full-time carpenter just because he could. When he would come home exhausted from his 12-hour days, Lillian, if she hadn't traveled with him, would be standing in the doorway, a cocktail in hand, looking freshly coiffed and playing his favorite Al Jolson standards. Together they might retire to the bedroom and eat dinner, behind closed doors and apart from the children.
If Stanley had kept practicing architecture, not only might he have died a rich man, he could have died a happy one.
There was simply not enough of Tom Stanley to go around. Everyone wanted a piece of him--his clients, his employees, his wife, his children--and everyone came up wanting. "He used to tell me he was spread thinner than piss on a platter," says Bob Sallee, who managed his office. "Either he was chasing business, or the business was chasing him."
Tom's second open-heart surgery in 1978 may have caused Stanley to rethink his life. The pinch of the credit crunch in the mid-'70s made new business harder to find. Perhaps this was the right time to slow down.
Stanley searched for a new revenue stream, turning his firm's direction toward development. He partnered with actor John Wayne, who owned one of Stanley's sculptures, and a wealthy rancher from South Dakota to build a hotel-casino in Lake Tahoe. The Tahoe Palace seemed a natural: The rancher committed $65 million, John Wayne lent his name, and Tom Stanley would design and develop the 1,000-room hotel from production drawings to groundbreaking to finish-out.
Six years of litigation later, all that was built of the Palace was its foundation. The Sierra Club and the state of California took the position that the hotel would be an environmental nightmare and convinced a court to halt its construction.
Although Stanley had no money in the project, it sapped the resources of his firm, which he was forced to downsize to a staff of seven. In the process, Stanley sold his Oak Lawn office building and moved his firm into a Turtle Creek high rise. He leased more space than he could use, optimistic he would see better days. He still had one more project on the drawing board--a resort hotel on Mustang Island in South Texas. In the mid-'70s, he had purchased several tracts of land on the beach, believing the island both underdeveloped and undervalued. He designed and built villas and a 42-unit condominium whose sales were intended to help finance the construction of the El Cortez, a 12-story hotel. Unfortunately, with oil prices plummeting in the early '80s, a depressed Texas economy interfered with his plans. The units just didn't sell. Yet Stanley believed in his vision so wholeheartedly that he dipped into his personal assets to keep the project afloat.
At the same time, he began converting Sycamore Farms into a master-planned residential community called Brookgreene Estates that he intended to market as one-acre lots to busy professionals looking to escape city life. But in 1986, in an effort to save El Cortez, he borrowed $4.3 million from Southwest Savings, putting up what was left of the Brookgreene (200 acres) and 15 units of the Mustang Island condominium as collateral. Then came the real estate crunch and not far behind it, the savings and loan scandal, which would eventually put Southwest Savings into receivership. Interest payments alone were close to $1,200 a day, which Stanley paid out of his own pocket.
"It's kind of ironic," Hardy McCullah says. "For so many years he had done architecture that worked well economically, and here he invests all his resources in a project that's just not economically feasible."
By 1988, Stanley could no longer make the payments, and he traveled across this country and Europe, looking for new sources of funding. With no new money, with his land worth less than half its original value, with his personal assets nearly depleted, Southwest Savings finally posted the property for foreclosure. To stave off financial ruin, he filed for bankruptcy in March 1990, hoping to reorganize his debt. Before it was over, he had lost almost everything, with no way of getting it back.
He had just gotten old at the wrong time in his life.
Although Stanley's heart was failing him--pumping at 20 percent of its capacity--his spirits seldom sagged. Unlike his children, he had risen out of poverty on the strength of his personal genius. Despite his age, he believed he could do it again. Hutch, who took a daily interest in his parents' well-being, encouraged his father to sculpt or paint, but Stanley had one last architectural dream--L'Elyse'e--a high-rise condominium he designed and hoped to develop in Turtle Creek.
"Tom asked me to do the production drawings for the high rise," Dennis Axberg recalls. "I could see that he was tired, and I knew the project was never going anywhere, but I gave him a few drawings anyway. I just wanted the opportunity to talk with him one more time."
As Tom Stanley lay dying, his heart worn down by time, Lillian Stanley searched for ways to console her husband. Each day he spent at Presbyterian Hospital in January, she would gather family and friends around him--those who had loved him and those who had wronged him--so Stanley, 83, could make his peace. Many nights she would refuse to leave his side, sleeping lightly in the chair by his bed, stirring with his every moan.
Theirs had been a grand life, for most of it anyway. Tom had risen from penniless farm boy to master architect, his signature skyscrapers, hotels and high-rise apartments dotting the cityscapes of downtowns across the country; Lillian had dedicated her life to her husband, schmoozing the wives of property owners and developers, serving as goodwill ambassador for her husband's concern.
At one time in the late '60s, Time magazine recognized Tom Stanley's Dallas practice as one of the largest architectural firms in the country. Hard-driving, work-obsessed, unerringly ethical, Stanley won commissions most architects only dream about: First National Bank in Dallas, the Gulf & Western building in New York City, 30 North LaSalle in Chicago. His smaller local projects were some of his best: Lovers Lane United Methodist Church, the Atlantic Richfield campus, the American Airlines Flight Academy. Developers couldn't resist his buildings, which were designed to make them money but were splashed with enough classical elements to give them the feel of art. After all, Stanley was an artist, a sculptor, a piece of work himself. Remembered less for his architectural drawings than his architectural drawing power, he presented himself as an odd oxymoron of folksy humility and flamboyant hubris, Southern gentility and urban hustle.
"More than good architecture and design," says his former employee and Dallas architect Dennis Axberg, "Tom Stanley sold Tom Stanley."
His wife worshipped him, his four children were in awe of him, and for 30 years he seemed invincible, but for the three open-heart surgeries from which he recovered with Dick Cheney-like speed. In the mid-'80s, however, he stumbled hard, investing in his own project, squeezed mercilessly by the real estate crunch and the savings and loan debacle. He fought off his creditors until 1990, when he had little choice but to file bankruptcy.
The story of Tom Stanley is the story of the Texas rich, those can-do entrepreneurs who have so much confidence in their own abilities that they think they are above the laws of supply and demand. It's the story of a Dallas society that allows entry based on merit as well as name, where new money can buy the same access to privilege as old. It's the story of the bitter dysfunction in the family of a man as he completes the circle of his life from rags to riches to rags again." Excerpt from 'Rich Man, Poor Man', written by Mark Donald for The Dallas Observer, August 2, 2001
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