Remembering the Real J.R. Ewing

A Fort Worth attorney who has worked with Douglas on several issues but asked to not be named said he chose Box Family Advisors because of Douglas’ experiences and experience.

Douglas, the attorney said, “is a good man. He’s caring. And that was able to bring a level of comfort to the situation.”

Douglas said you have to “engage in conflict. It’s not a question of whether or not we’re going to have conflict. It’s a question about when we’re going to have conflict.”

Douglas said the biggest challenge he regularly faces is an aging founder who won’t step down soon enough for the next generation to step up.

“What happens is the children, who are my age, are still [seen as] children,” he said.

Although Douglas is about to release his second book and prefers writing to his “real” job, he said he doesn’t really consider himself a writer.

“I consider myself a business guy,” he said. “Maybe when I get this book finished, I’ll let myself think of myself as a writer.”

When his day job is done, Douglas grabs a venti unsweetened iced tea, a Greek yogurt, and “something fattening” from Starbucks, and he returns to his office, disguised as an author, where he writes until around 9:30 p.m.

“Would someone tell me how in the hell can it take me a week to write just three pages?” he recently tweeted one evening.

Cutter Frisco took Douglas more than a year to write, he said, and it was originally part of Texas Patriarch.

“Cutter Frisco was my horse when I was kid,” he said. “He was sired by the championship cutting horse Cutter Bill, which was like the Michael Jordan of the cutting horse world.”

Cutting was born out of the Old West, when cowboys working cattle needed to isolate a calf from the herd because it might need to be branded, dehorned, or require some type of medical treatment.

“I was a little cowboy,” Douglas said. “I learned to cut. The calf naturally tries to come back to the herd, but the horse and the rider are trained to cut him out.”

Douglas described Cutter Frisco as a big, good-natured gelding who was strong and quick on his feet. Douglas was still a boy when Cutter Frisco was sold to the highest bidder.

“I really, really, loved that horse,” he said. “It was a real loss and a real shame when he was sold out from under me.”

Douglas said he understands that the decision to auction off his favorite horse was tax driven –– Cloyce needed to show a profit after so many years of raising horses. However, the air within his father’s cattle baron dream world suddenly seemed more difficult to breathe. His family had lived a “big, Texas-rich lifestyle,” Douglas said, but everything was ephemeral.

“That’s the way things were in my father’s world,” he said. “We had all of this great stuff, and then it went away. Eating that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner [while writing Texas Patriarch] has been hard.”

Douglas said writing has changed his life.

“I wish I had written this book 10 years earlier,” he said. “I’ve taken something that ended on a sour note and kind of turned it around.”

Douglas said Cutter Frisco is mainly about life on the Box Ranch, but the story doesn’t involve much conflict. In contrast, Texas Patriarch contains a lot of dark chapters, especially because Cloyce was known for litigation and controversy.

“He had a very cantankerous spirit about him in terms of doing business,” he said. “It was just the environment he grew up in.”

Douglas’ parents divorced later in life, and both remarried. Douglas said neither the fire nor the demise of the family oil business had any direct effect on Fern.

“She remarried an Air Force guy,” he said. “He treated her real well. My dad was pretty hard on her. He was a hard man. These family-founding patriarchs, they can be pretty hard on their family.”

Fern died of a stroke in 2007 when she was 81.

While his father was always generous to and sometimes overpaid his employees, Douglas said being a member of his family was a different story.

Cloyce, Johnson said, “was a tough guy. And Doug is a tough guy but in a different way. Doug’s tough in that he makes you think about the tough questions that need to be answered. Cloyce was more ‘get out of my way, I’m coming through.’ ”

Douglas decided to write Cutter Frisco several years ago, after becoming a public speaker. He said lots of audience members simply wanted to hear more about the Box family saga. Douglas said he uses the book as a kind of business card to generate more clients

Neither Cutter Frisco nor Texas Patriarch are self-help stories, but they do contain lots of business lessons learned the hard way, Douglas said.

He hopes his forthcoming book will serve as a cautionary tale to families with money, business, and wealth. For these kinds of families to stay together and thrive, he said, the leaders need to ask themselves, “What is wealth, and what are we really about? If it’s all about money, then that might not be enough to keep a family together.”

Douglas feels he’s pretty much seen it all. “I know an awful lot of lonely people who live in big, empty houses,” he said. “And I know what that feels like, because I grew up in a big house. I grew up in the Southfork mansion. A lot of those homes are cold. They’re big. They’re large. They look good from the outside, but on the inside, they are lonely places.”

In the appendix of Cutter Frisco is a transcription of the eulogy given by former New York Giants quarterback and Monday Night Football host Frank Gifford at Cloyce’s funeral.

“When my two sons needed a man larger than their father, I prevailed upon Cloyce,” Gifford said. “He was an extraordinary man.”

Douglas said his father truly was a Texas legend.

“And when [Texas Patriarch] is released, his legend is going to be resurrected,” Douglas said.

A journalism student at the University of Texas-Arlington, Karen Gavis can be reached at karen.gavis@mavs.uta.edu.