Hometown Hero
Sitting on top of the world Arlington’s Blake Mycoskie – the guy who made philanthropy ‘cool’ – is still blazing trails with the recent partnership between TOMS and the retail giant Target • By Kenneth Perkins Photo: changebydoing.com
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hen B.J. Mycoskie arrived in Arlington in 1951 with a medical degree and great expectations, fewer than 8,000 people called themselves citizens of a rather sparse town with no I-20 or I-30 highways, no Six Flags or Lake Arlington, no General Motors or Texas Rangers. Arlington grew like crazy in the 1950s, though, jumping to 45,000 people, and like its bookends to the west (Fort Worth) and east (Dallas), was quickly morphing into the motto of which it now boasts: the American Dream City. No one dreamed more than B.J. Mycoskie, who somehow convinced a pair of medical school classmates from Ohio to accompany him to the southwest, and when the three surveyed the place to set up shop, the total number of doctors was, all of a sudden, four. Vision is for a doctor to settle in a place that doesn’t have a hospital and no plans for one, although Blake Mycoskie, one of B.J.’s grandkids, would prefer to call what his grandfather did as “a leap of faith” regarding the potential of unfamiliar territory. “As we all know,” Blake Mycoskie says now, “they made a wise decision.” Stepping into unfamiliar territory, whether through faith or something entirely different, has in some ways been a Mycoskie family tra-
dition. Even before people knew what competitive reality television was, Blake Mycoskie and his sister, Paige, were participating in CBS’ The Amazing Race, the series where two-person teams globe trot via cars, trains, planes, bicycles, hot-air balloons, by foot – whatever – for clues that lead them to destinations to perform particular tasks. Covering 52,000 miles in 28 days over five continents and eight different countries, Mycoskie learned how much bigger the world was outside his rather snug bubble in North Texas. Even while he kept his eye on winning the game (the siblings came in third, just shy of nailing the $1 million prize), Blake Mycoskie would never forget the other things he saw. The more he traveled, the more empathy he developed for those who lived far differently from a man whose grandfather was once the medical director of the Texas Rangers baseball team and whose father retired in 2011 as a noted orthopedic surgeon. It was, in fact, a trip to Argentina where Mycoskie ran into some Americans conducting a shoe drive in an impoverished area of Buenos Aires that set him on the path of founding a company known for putting philanthropy ahead of profits. Mycoskie was astounded by the vast number of kids running around in bare feet and was pained to learn that many didn’t go to school due