Douglas D. Box gets emotional while driving on Main Street near Preston Road in Frisco.
“It’s very sad. It just pulls at my heartstrings,” he said of passing what remains of his family’s former homestead, a sprawling cattle ranch at the intersection’s northeast corner that these days is known as Brinkmann Ranch.
For decades the place was called Box Ranch, and it was where Box and his older brothers were raised by their mother, Fern, and their football champion-turned-legendary North Texas businessman father Cloyce Box.
“I learned to swim there, I learned how to ride a bike there, I learned how to shoot a gun there, I certainly learned how to ride a horse there,” Douglas D. Box said. “It’s hard on me to … not have a key to the front gate anymore and go in there because it was my home. … It was in my family for decades and it was ... the center of my dad’s world.”
In recent years, Box penned a pair of books featuring tales about the storied property, which served as the original Southfork Ranch during the first season of the megahit CBS drama “Dallas.” He also chronicled his family’s very public rise and fall from fame and fortune.
“Cutter Frisco: Growing Up on the Original Southfork Ranch” was published in 2014, followed two years later by “Texas Patriarch: A Legacy Lost.” Box will discuss both tomes when he appears at a lecture and Q&A session hosted by Celina Public Library, scheduled at 7 p.m. May 17 at Celina City Council Chambers, 112 N. Colorado St. Admission is free.
“I knew my dad was … this extraordinary guy and that he’d done extraordinary things just by virtue of the fact that we were living out there,” Box said of his father, who during the 1950s played for the Detroit Lions before helming Box Energy Corporation, an oil and gas production and exploration company.
“On the other hand, watching my dad operate the business like did, I always suspected the thing was like a house of cards and it could come tumbling down,” he said.
That it did following a series of tragic events – including a fire in the late 1980s that destroyed the stately ranch house, followed by some bad business deals and the elder Box’s unexpected death in 1993 – that all but decimated the family’s bond along with its funds.
Unable to rebuild, reconstruction on the Box family home ceased. The property fell into foreclosure before eventually being purchased by businessman Baxter Brinkmann. More than three decades after the blaze, the house’s hulking steel frame sits unfinished as Frisco has flourished around it.
“It just stands there in effigy, kind of hauntingly,” Box, 61, said. “I call in the Stonehenge of Frisco. It’s kind mysterious and no one knows how it got there, but it’s definitely sad for me.”
These days Box, a resident of North Dallas, travels the country speaking about his books and sharing his memories, as well as financial advice garnered through his personal experiences and professional career as a certified family business consultant.
“The older I get, the more I’ve come to believe that there’s nothing more important than your family,” he said, “and yet nothing can threaten a family more than mismanaged money. … It’s a delicate balance between those things.”