Wink Dickey was the first person off the chartered bus that pulled up to the curb at 5904 Hudson.

Walking tall, tool belt draped over his shoulder, he led the parade of 30 or so volunteer home builders, none of whom had ever built a home, onto the concrete foundation in the middle of this vacant, but promising lot on which stood three large trees.

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The volunteers were the insurance industry’s top producers for 1992. They were here from throughout the country to help less-fortunate members of one community.

Their experience was filmed as a motivational tool for the industry, to be previewed at an insurance convention this spring in Hawaii. The movie’s message; learning about leadership.

Their leader today was Dickey, executive director of Dallas Habitat for Humanity and recipient of the 1993 Advocate Award. As he has for many other groups, Dickey was sharing his vision, his inspiration and his craft.

The annual Advocate Award, sponsored by Advocate Community Newspapers and the Lakewood Chamber of Commerce, is designed to recognize outstanding leaders who have had the vision to dedicate their lives to improving our neighborhoods.

And “visionary” is the word friends and associates use most often in reference to Dickey.

“Wink is one of those special people who not only can see a vision, but can carry out that vision.” says Ben Beltzer, director of the Interfaith Housing Coalition, the transitional housing organization that works closely with Habitat for Humanity.

It was Beltzer who encouraged Habitat for Humanity International founder Millard Fuller to create a Dallas affiliate in the mid-1980s.

Dickey’s vision, now a reality, has been a revitalized Garret Park East, a once-forgotten neighborhood bordered by Munger, Live Oak and Ross avenues.

The community’s master plan, which Dickey created after arriving in 1990, is almost complete and entails 40 new affordable homes, another dozen renovations and more than 80 outreach efforts including painting and repairs, with plans for a recreational pocket park.

Back on Hudson Street, the commotion of lights, camera and action is little bother to Dickey on this cool, sunny afternoon. He has, after all, appeared on national television when Oprah Winfrey featured the success of Dallas Habitat for Humanity.

Standing before volunteers who are poised and posed on the concrete foundation, like a choir behind the pulpit, Dickey offers encouragement and a few rules and regulations on the heave-ho and hammering of home building. His speech brings looks of eagerness and excitement to the faces of his audience, who respond with cheers.

Each of the insurance men and women, ages 20 to 50, is issued a canvas bag, provided by the event sponsors. The bag contains the obligatory gimme cap and T-shirt, but more importantly, a tool belt loaded with hammer, tape measure, pencils and speed square.

Let the hammering begin.

A seriousness washes over Dickey as he shifts from inspirational speaker to construction foreman. His smile fades to a stern look of concentration.

Beltzer says of Dickey: “He is an intensive and accountable person with a special gift of working well with people. All of which has enable him to build so many houses in a relatively short time.”

While everyone involved in the Hudson Street project exhibits enthusiastic good intentions,most appear unsure of how to begin. A few begin wielding their hammers, a few huddle in conversation and others wander around, waiting – but not for long. Dickey puts them all to work.

Dickey’s leadership abilities are apparent by the end of the brief work day, when the group has already completed the home’s framework. Day Two brought interior construction and installation of walls and windows.

By sundown Saturday, the last day of this “blitz build”, the future occupants and their neighbors are marveling at the new blue house with white roof and trim, a porch and fresh landscaping. The property is pristine; there isn’t a nail in sight.

All this one what was just days before a rundown lot. Not it is the site of an affordable new home for the Ebodio Gomez family.

By 1990, Dallas Habitat for Humanity had been in operation for almost five years. While the group had completed only a few renovations, its potential for success was great.

Habitat had inherited several lots and rundown homes in Garrett Park East and won a grant from the Meadows Foundation for a new executive director and construction supervisor.

Wink Dickey was in Tennessee at the time, working as a construction supervisor with the Memphis Habitat affiliate. He had earned that two years earlier after many years of service as a volunteer.

But Dickey enjoyed the hands-on experience of home building, not the administrative aspects of the director’s position he had heard was open in Dallas.

“There was simply no reason to leave Tennessee,” Dickey says.

But at the insistence of his co-workers, he decided to fly to Texas and look over the Dallas Habitat job.

He interviewed with Habitat officials, whose offices were then located at Munger Baptist Church, adjacent to Garrett Park East, and then took a walk through the neighborhood survey the houses scheduled for renovation.

“I saw this little triangular neighborhood that had been disowned,” Dickey says. “Yet, when I walked to its borders, LaVista on one side and Swiss Avenue on the other, it was like Disney World!”

Dickey says he “flipped out” over the neighborhood’s promise, but asked of the neglect he saw there: “How could this happen?”

He observed an “overwhelming lack of community,” and wondered why the affluent commonwealth had been uninvolved in the salvation of their neighbors next door.

“Considering the natural flow of crime,” Dickey says, “it seemed to me it would have been in their best interest to support the depressed areas so close to their homes.”

Bill Whitsitt, president of Texas Community Bank (formerly Lakewood National Bank), notes the 60 percent decrease in crime in the area since the rebuilding began.

“This program has been so important in this neighborhood because when families move in, the crooks move out,” says Whitsitt, who also believes Dickey’s talents “could earn him millions, if he were so inclined.”

Dickey admits he can’t resist a challenge, and his disinterest in the administrative aspects of the Dallas Habitat position were suddenly overridden by that challenge he saw in Garrett Park East. He walked back to the office and took the job.

After loading up his Nissan truck and his longtime companion, Boo, a golden retriever named after a character in “To Kill A Mockingbird”, Dickey left Tennessee for Texas.

“The potential was too great to turn down this offer,” Dickey says with a certain but subtle sense of pride. He pauses to focus on the large picture board that sits in the center of the Habitat offices. The board features photos of the new homes built and the older homes renovated in Garret Park East.

After his arrival, first on Director Dickey’s agenda was a house-to-house visit to each of the families waiting for a Habitat home, something he was surprised to learn the existing board had never attempted.

“I was horrified to find out that Habitat for Humanity was the worst slumlord in the neighborhood,” Dickey said, describing the poor living conditions at the organizations’ rental properties.

“Most of these families are Hispanic and speak little or no English,” he says, “and there simply had been no communication between them and the organization.”

Dickey remembered a particular extended family on that winter tour, a winter that had seen temperatures so low that pipes burst in most of the Habitat homes.

“We walked into their house and found the gas fumes so strong, it was a wonder the house had not blown up,” Dickey says with a growl.

“And it would have blown if the house hadn’t been in such bad shape,” he says, referring to the cracks and gaps around the windows and doors that created constant air exchange, preventing an explosion.

Dickey immediately brought in a translator. He learned that most family members living in the house had been sick all winter because of the fumes.

“Needless to say,” Dickey says, “the house became a priority repair.”

Dickey grew up in the country near Germantown, Tenn. His mentors were the fire chief and the judge who also served as his scoutmaster. Dickey was a volunteer fireman by age 16. Later, he founded the community newspaper.

His favorite book, “The Old Man and The Boy”, was handed down from his grandfather and its forward, says Dickey, sums up his childhood: “Anybody who reads this book will realize that I had a really fine time as a child.”

“It’s a book about a boy growing up with the influences of surrogate fathers, grandfathers and uncles,” Dickey says. “And I’ve had the best.”

Raymond E. Dickey Jr. has been called “Wink” since days after his arrival home in 1952, when his older sister, Marion, claimed the newborn kept winking his eyes at her.

“That’s true,” says Marion Brown, who until recently, worked with her brother at Habitat, “and my favorite television show was ‘Winky Dink and You’ – so the name was a natural.”

“I was ‘Winky’ for years,” Dickey says as he tugs at his baseball cap, “but went with the shorter version when I started school.”

Dickey attended Catholic school until his junior year, when he transferred to Germantown High School, from which his father, a Memphis banker, had graduated.

“I was at first terrified,” Dickey says of the transfer from parochial to public school, “because I had never really been around girls before.”

But he adds that it wasn’t long before he wondered why he hadn’t made the transfer sooner.

Since he was “academically light years ahead” of his new classmates, he found time, between putting out fires, to help run the school newspaper. Dickey went on to found the first community newspaper, “The Germantown News”, which is still being published.

His mother, Peggy, who today runs a bridal specialty shop in Germantown, 35 years ago ran the construction site for the home she and Raymond Sr. built on the family land next to the home of Dickey’s paternal grandparents.

Though it might have been unusual during the 1950s for a woman to serve as general contractor on the construction site, the role was a comfortable one for Peggy Dickey.

“My mother’s father was a self-taught architect and custom home builder,” Dickey says, “so she and my two uncles sort of grew up on the job site.”

The Dickey family estate was 34 tree-laden acres of prime country property in Germantown, then a cozy community of 3,500. Now considered part of Memphis suburbia, the town has tripled in size.

“We had cows, horses, pigs, chickens, dogs and cats,” Dickey says.

He recalls being picked up from school and riding out to the family land for his mother’s daily check on the building progress. There were times, he says, the contractors dreaded the visits.

“If the construction did not exactly meet the plans drawn by my grandfather,” Dickey says, “Mom would make them tear it down and start all over. The chimney was completely redone at least three times.”

A few years after the Dickey home was completed, his grandparents’ home burned to the ground.

“The town was so small that most of the fire men worked in Memphis,” he says, “which left no one to man the fire department during business days.”

“My father had been a member of the volunteer fire department for years, so after the fire on our land, he and city officials arranged for the high school boys to take over during workdays.”

Dickey remembers the thrill of hearing the fire alarm as he sat in his classroom – his cue, with permission, to close the books and bolt to the fire house.

“Whoever arrived first got to drive and LaFrance pumper truck,” he says of the volunteer team, “and there would usually be a fight because four of us would show up at the same time and dive into the cab. We all loved that old truck.” Dickey still maintains treasured friendships from his days as a volunteer firefighter.

After graduating from high school, Dickey attended Memphis State University, where he lacks 20 hours to obtain his degree. He quit to join the Tennessee Valley Authority, where he served as an energy conservationist, performing residential audits.

It was here that he learned to appreciate solid home construction, especially when he surveyed the home of one of the most prominent families in the area.

“Here I was in this terrific house that had been built decades before,” Dickey says with excitement, “yet it exceeded all of the current TVA recommendations.”

Impressed by the efficiency of its architectural design, Dickey asked who had built the house.

“The owner boasted that he had fired the best,” Dickey says. He was “a man named Marion Webb – my grandfather.”

Dickey comes from a long line of volunteers. His maternal grandmother founded the Memphis Junior League and headed the town’s Civil Defense League, and his paternal grandmother served as a Red Cross “Grey Lady” during World Ward II.

So, after a brief marriage and divorce, volunteering seemed the natural thing to do when a somewhat depressed Dickey took the advice of his attorney, who suggested he join her for an afternoon at Habitat for Humanity.

“I caught the spirit,” he says.

Since Dickey became executive director for Dallas Habitat for Humanity, the organization has increased its budget from $100,000 to $2 million.

Now that the revitalization of Garrett Park East is almost complete, Dickey and his staff of five are making plans for a new neighborhood on 25 lots at Haskell and Lemmon avenues, adjacent to the CityPlace Corporation, which donated the land.

“The way this organization has taken off since Dickey took over is amazing,” says Jim Pate of the international division of Habitat for Humanity, who nominated Dickey for the Advocate Award.

“He came here and began immediately,” Pate says, “by rewriting the by-laws, restructuring the board and streamlining the overall operation.”

Pate, an attorney, has become a temporary part of the Dallas team, focusing on working with the City for future land grants and agreements.

Working with City officials, however, remains a pet project for Dickey, who says: “I love butting heads.”

As a result of his president lobbying, the City recently awarded Dallas Habitat a $285,000 Community Development Block Grant for street, gutter and other infrastructure needs in Habitat neighborhoods.

While Dickey says he was making “some progress” with City Manager Jan Hart’s office, it wasn’t until a visit from then HUD director Jack Kemp, now a member of the International Board for Habitat for Humanity, that Hart began to take seriously Dickey’s attempts to provide affordable housing.

“Kemp was in town to meet with (developer) Trammell Crow, so we invited him to come out and see the work we had done in Garrett Park East,” Dickey says.

“He was so impressed by the organization’s achievements that he suggested Hart should do everything possible to give us support.”

As support grows for Dallas Habitat, so grows its mailing list. Half of the 8,500 people on the list want to volunteer in some capacity, Dickey says.

“I’ve created a lean and mean crew of volunteers,” Dickey says. He has informed special construction teams responsible for siding, house packaging, interior trim, doors and windows and landscaping.

“Many of us have become semi-professional home builders,” says Habitat volunteer and board member Denell Holt, a quality service specialist for NationsBank.

“We receive a one-on-one training from Wink on a particular trade,” says Holt, who works on the floor-covering crew, “and we stay with that trade on every outing, resulting in great efficiency.”

Several of those team leaders were on hand to help with the building of the Gomez house on Hudson Street, which will be dedicated sometime this month.

“Every time we dedicate a house, I get a special spiritual feeling,” Dickey says, “and I express my spirituality through what I do.

“The ceremonies are so emotional that I usually have to watch from across the street, because in every house, I leave a little bit of me.”