With the University Union renovations approaching, UNT Dining Services is preparing to relocate the Union’s food court and restaurants in August.

Food vendors will be moved to an outdoor food court between Sage Hall and the International Students Building until the Union’s scheduled re-opening in 2015.

Students will have the same food and beverage options at the new location, including products from Chick-fil-a and the Corner Store, said Kim Schroeder, director of Retail Dining Services.

“We’re trying to incorporate everything into this one unit so students aren’t missing any elements,” Schroeder said.

Student employees, who make up 85 percent of the Dining Services staff, will not lose their jobs because of the relocation, Schroeder said.

In addition to the outdoor food court, new seating will be available at Sage Hall and a new coffee shop serving Caribou Coffee will open in the General Academic Building, said Ken Botts, special projects director with Dining Services.

Caribou Coffee is one of the many new brands that will be on campus when retail-dining returns to the Union, Botts said.

“There will be double the variety we already have,” Botts said.
Existing retailers will remain in the center of campus, neighboring the sandwich stand Khush Roti, until the new spaces are finished. Brandi Chank, who works at Khush Roti, said the relocation would benefit the food stand.

“I think we’ll get more business,” Chank said. “People will actually see us when they come out here to get food.”

Mechanical engineering senior Andrew Pickett works in the Campus Chat food court. He said students need to be made aware of the move and the new location in order to avoid frustration.

“If there are enough signs pointing in the right direction, then it should be fine,” Pickett said.

Administration is developing plans for communicating the changes, including targeting commuter students who may not know about the food selection on campus, Botts said.

The goal is to show students that they can eat well without leaving campus and losing time driving and parking, Botts said.

The retail dining staff is currently in training to be ready for the switch in August, Schroeder said.

“Change is a challenge,” Schroeder said. “If it is well-planned change, then it usually goes well.”

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The Murphy Center for Entrepreneurship at UNT is hosting its fourth annual Entrepreneurship Boot Camp.

The five-week program gives graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to hear from experts in the fields of accounting, legal affairs, investments and other crucial elements of business. The camp began June 6 and runs through July 2.

This year, the boot camp will host a total of 22 participants, 14 of whom are students in a graduate-level business course at UNT.

Dr. Tony Mendes, director of the Murphy Center, said participants of the boot camp learn about the feasibility of a business idea or an already-existing business.

“Some decide they will not go forward,” Mendes said. “Sometimes the capital expense and the revenue they project do not work.”

Information science graduate student Sara Ruppel said she was attending the boot camp in order to get the finishing touches on her non-profit start-up for veterans called Decompression Dynamics Inc.

Ruppel’s non-profit, which she said she hopes to launch in August, would provide counseling services for returning veterans who have directly experienced combat to gradually ease them back into the normal pace of their lives.

“I think it will contribute to a decline not only in PTSD diagnoses but also particularly treatment or misdiagnosis,” Ruppel said.

At the June 6 workshop, attending students heard from April Cain, a certified public accountant at Merki & Associates. Cain spoke to students about the need for growing businesses to constantly maintain their accounting systems.

Participants also heard from Jo Temming, a retired corporate strategist and member of the board of directors for the Murphy Center. Temming spoke to students about how angel investors have changed their strategies since the 2008 financial crisis.

Temming said angel investors, who once predominantly invested in start-ups, are now looking to invest in businesses that are already producing revenue or profit.

“If you’re going to start your own company, you need to have the ability to get enough founder capital to be able to get yourself to the point that you can be attracted to either angel investors or private equity,” Temming said to the participants.

Over the coming weeks, participants will continue developing their business strategies and refining the presentation of their pitches. The participants will be given the opportunity to present their plans to a group of potential investors July 13.

Mendes said he hopes the students will make the most of the opportunity the boot camp provides for them.

“I hope that they learn what it takes to successfully launch and sustain their venture,” Mendes said. “I want to provide them with all the tools they need to succeed in their entrepreneurial venture.”

Temming, who is in her third year with the boot camp, said the business world is brutal and no entrepreneur succeeds without first acquiring some scars.

“If sharing some of the strategies that I have learned or developed, or the experiences that I have had can help another entrepreneur either become more successful and/or avoid some costly mistakes, then it just creates bigger, farther-reaching ripples that turn into waves of positive change.” Temming said. “And for a person like me that enjoys making waves, it makes all of the scars from entrepreneurship mean something.”

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Modern genetic mapping requires no needles, blood or discomfort but mailing in a kit containing a vial of saliva. From this alone, DNA can be extracted and amplified, giving scientists enough genetic material to carry out genotyping and allow the production of a unique genetic report for each participant. After only eight weeks, one simply logs in to an online account and has full access to a report containing a multitude of information regarding ancestry and health risks.

This process offers insights into the medical future of patients that are currently unparalleled. Ancestral predispositions are factored in to allow the confident estimation of the risk of someone developing serious diseases and medical disorders including type II diabetes, cystic fibrosis, breast cancer, and Tay-Sachs disease.

In addition to playing a proactive role in preventative medicine, the test can also deduce whether or not a specific person would be sensitive to particular drugs that may be used in the treatment or prevention of medical conditions. Finally, the results can even provide information on whether or not the offspring of the individual may be at risk.

Despite the advantages, gene mapping can be intimidating. The pioneering company in the field of home diagnostics, 23andMe, is clearly trying to attract customers by offering its services for $99, a price substantially reduced from the former cost of $999. But what they are essentially selling is a list of what diseases – 249 of them and counting – a person is likely to encounter in their lives. In other words, a guide to the likely quality and length of a person’s life.

Some may find that information empowering, an opportunity to try and avoid, or at least reduce the risks up ahead. But for those who find they are facing unavoidable, incurable or crippling diseases, and for those who cannot afford prevention and treatment, the information is more akin to a horrible threat that they can do little about. Many may find such information scary or traumatic – after all, a crystal ball making dire predictions about the future cannot be taken lightly when it’s based on hard science.

If genetic mapping has a position in the revolution of healthcare, there are numerous philosophical problems that must be addressed. Should genetic mapping ever become a standardized procedure for every newborn, would that strip the individual of their autonomy?

In a clinical setting, if a physician knows that their patient is a ticking time bomb and the patient does not want that knowledge, is the doctor breaching the Hippocratic Oath by sitting back and allowing harm to come to the patient?
Would insurance companies be entitled to either deny coverage to or excessively charge patients who have genes that suggest greater expenses?

One should thoroughly think through the existential ramifications when considering whether or not they wish to open this Pandora’s box of health.

Shari Esquenazi is a pre-psychology senior. She can be reached at shariesquenazi@yahoo.com.

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Photos by James Coreas / Editor in Chief

Denton celebrated its 43rd Juneteenth festival this weekend at Fred Moore Park. Events took place Friday and Saturday, including live music, games and booths for children, softball tournaments and more than a dozen food vendors offering festival fare.

Juneteenth is a state holiday commemorating the freeing of the slaves by Union soldiers on June 18th and 19th of 1865. The observance of the holiday corresponds with Emancipation Day on a national level. Texas slaves were not freed until the 19^th of June by Union General Gordon Granger and a few thousand troops.

Owner and operator of the catering truck Fried Ribs To Go Darwin Mims said he enjoyed his second straight Denton Juneteenth Festival.

“I’m enjoying it,” Mims said. “The festival is good, the music is good.”

Denton Police investigator Cleo Birckbichler , a 15-plus year veteran of the Denton Juneteenth Festival said the festival has gotten better with every passing year.

“I like Friday night [of the festival], because I like the Gospel music,” Birckbichler said.

More photos can be found in the slideshow below.

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Julia Wood turned her plane straight up and shut her engine off. Her momentum carried her further into the sky as she rotated the plane in the opposite direction of the propeller. Eventually she began to drop, and she let herself fall for a few seconds before recovering to various “oo’s” and “ah’s” from the crowd.

More than 12,000 air enthusiasts came and went from the 2013 Denton Airshow to enjoy funnel cake, aerobatics and restored airplanes Saturday. It was a record-setting day for the event’s attendance.

Army and Air Force veteran J.D. Daniel has been performing in air shows for 30 years. He is a member of the Texas Twisters, a six-flier group that performs formations.

“It’s for the precision of flying. It helps pay for our hobby, but we don’t do it for the money,” he said. “We need to motivate people to get into aviation, because it is a long struggle and the entry level pay isn’t very good.”

Daniel also said keeping the planes in use was important.

“If we didn’t do this, these airplanes would be in a junk yard somewhere,” he said.

On the ground, more than 20 aircraft were on display for attendees. The Commemorative Air Force was there with Ready 4 Duty, a 1944 transport aircraft, and two WWII-era training planes. Air Force veteran and curator Jim Breitenstine said these trainers were to make sure pilots could fly before they were invested in further.

Pilots would take their first flights in primary trainers to see if their stomachs could handle flight.

“It’s cheaper, easier and simpler to get somebody in a little airplane to see if they could fly.” Breitenstine said that around half of prospective pilots couldn’t handle the primary trainer.

UNT students, such as chemistry doctoral student Casey Thurber, were part of the turnout.

Thurber brought his wife and two sons out to enjoy the day.

“My older son really likes airplanes so I figured he’d like coming out here and seeing the airplanes and sitting in the cockpit and things like that,” Thurber said. “My son really liked that [first aerobatics flyer Andrew Wright]. Food’s good.”

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Barnes & Noble College’s upcoming takeover of the UNT bookstore will cause temporary closings before the store relocates later this summer for the two-year University Union renovations.

The bookstore will be closed June 24 through 28 while Barnes & Noble College moves in as the store’s new operator.

Barnes & Noble College will officially take over operations Jul. 1, said Zane Reif, director of the University Union.

The retail area of the bookstore will permanently close on July 21 in preparation for the Union renovations.

UNT’s book store will move to its temporary location at the intersection of Avenue C and Chestnut Street on August 12th, Reif said.

A temporary bookstore will be fully functional for the start of the fall semester and there is a comprehensive plan for communicating the changes to new and current students, Reif said.

The bookstore is expected to re-open in the Union in 2015 after renovations are completed.

Barnes & Noble College is likely to honor the textbook rental and buyback policies that are currently in place and student employees will be able to keep their positions, Reif said.

“We’re going to make sure that no students are harmed in this transition,” Reif said.

Assistant textbooks manager Joe Armstrong said the change will not affect book prices, as publishers determine the costs of textbooks.

Students are most likely to encounter problems when the bookstore closes for the transition, Armstrong said.

“I think initially it’s going to be upsetting, or more frustrating, just from the sheer fact of not having access,” Armstrong said.

A new operator was sought out when UNT’s 12-year contract with Follett Corp. expired earlier this year, Reif said.

“We were just looking for a little bit better value for students,” Reif said. “We were also looking for some name recognition, and Barnes & Noble has that.”

Theater arts sophomore Conor Warren works at the bookstore and said he feels that it is unlikely that students will notice any changes beyond the new name.

The refurbished bookstore is going to be more accessible and easier to navigate inside the Union, Reif said.

“There’s going to be an exterior entrance to the bookstore so they can operate their own hours independent of the actual Union,” Reif said.

Until the bookstore’s return to the Union, textbooks and merchandise will be housed in a structure consisting of either wood or concrete walls and a roof of tight, tent material, Reif said.

“We’ve worked very closely with Barnes & Noble to make sure that security isn’t an issue, and safety isn’t an issue,” Reif said. “Our architects and our contractors have assured us that it is very safe and secure.”

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Josh Berthume, CEO and creative director of local advertising agency Swash Labs, attempts to vacuum dog hair off his futon in his office in a two-story house on University Drive.

The vacuum blows a fuse in the house and he laughingly rattles off swear words, deciding to just sit down and eat leftover pita bread from a home-cooked meal before diving into the day’s work.

From his company’s loft offices in Denton to his pet corgi, Noodles – jokingly called the human resources director – UNT alumnus Josh Berthume and the employees of Swash Labs bring their own brand of business to the city.

Berthume fused Denton’s artsy, creative vibe with his educational background in analysis and political science to found the advertising agency Swash Labs in October 2010.

“We’re a full service ad agency,” Berthume said. “That’s the easy way to say it, but the math and the science behind how we measure our campaigns and the stuff that we do is a lot deeper than that. It actually marries well with social science.”

Team relationship

The differentiating factor between Swash Labs and other ad agencies is its laid-back approach to working with clients and managing employees.

When asked how Swash Labs’ clients feel about the company’s easy-going style, he said that it probably hurts the company as much as it helps, but the company’s identity is very important to staff and clientele.

“People like to feel like the brands that they use or the places they go or the things that they do or the things that they buy are their friends,” he said.

The Swash Labs employees and clients could not agree more.

“You never know where things are going to come from,” art director Joan Wells said. “But I think if you’re really, really structured, sometimes it can inhibit your ability to come up with new ideas because most of the time new ideas are not coming from an ‘A-to-B-to-C’ space. Sometimes you have to get your brain out of the office to come up with new ideas.”

Marcus Watson and Chris Hawley, co-owners of Little Guys Movers and Swash Labs clients, said the agency’s style merged well with their company.

“It is very intimate, and a marketing company needs to know the ins and outs of your business, the ins and outs of your personality and the spirit of your company,” Hawley said. “Josh and his crew are very intuitive about focusing on that and then they don’t forget it.”

Andi Harman, who is also a UNT alumna, originally came to Swash Labs as an intern before becoming a graphic designer after graduation.

She said that the employees have a comfortable working environment.

“Besides having a pretty healthy working relationship, we all are friends,” Harman said. “We can joke with each other, we can blow off steam with each other. I don’t think I would have been well-equipped to work anywhere but here because it is so lax, and we all can give really honest feedback and not get offended. It’s not stressful.”

Political roots

Born in Michigan, Berthume grew up in Cleburne, Texas, and was originally introduced to UNT because he was a member of the north Texas percussion community.

He originally went to the University of California-Berkeley, but transferred to UNT after a hand injury, in hopes of continuing his education in music.

Once he realized that was not a possibility, Berthume pursued a degree in political science and began to work with advertising agencies while taking classes.

“I would take classes that would naturally allow me to learn more about the stuff that was interesting to me,” he said. “To me it was very much a ‘I’m not getting a political science degree that I can use in the traditional sense and go be a professor someplace.’ There were very specific things and practices that I wanted to get out of it.”

Berthume continued to get field experience while at UNT. In 2004, he worked in electoral politics with the Democratic Party. He said that this work was familiar to him because his work in his classes focused primarily on analyzing why people identify with and vote for certain political parties and candidates.

“I was always really fascinated with why people decided to vote for a candidate or buy a product or go to one website over another and stuff like that,” Berthume said. “That all came out of starting work on the Internet, websites and digital advertising before even Google existed.”

Swash Labs still does some work on political campaigns.

After remaining at UNT to earn his Master’s and before opening Swash Labs, Berthume took a job with Exclusive Analysis – a political risk analysis firm in London.

The company

Four other UNT alumni work at Swash Labs alongside Berthume, who graduated in 2005.

Though he said he does not actively seek out UNT graduates for hiring, he said that the university does an excellent job preparing its students for the real world because it does not “hold a student’s hand” while they are in school.

Though the website claims that the company is an agency “focused on digital and emerging media, social business and brand development,” Berthume said the short version is the company “tells stories and solves problems.”

“The era of everyone being able to advertise like a used car commercial and just have somebody shout at you constantly is over,” Berthume said. “It can’t feel like you’re preaching to people, it can’t feel like you’re yelling at them, you can’t hit them with a hard sell all the time. So if you can tell a compelling story about who you are, what you do and why you do things the way you do them, then I think you have a better chance of engaging someone in a meaningful relationship where they will recommend you or they will advocate for you.”

Swash Labs’ client list includes several local companies and nonprofits like AccessBank Texas and the Denton Animal Shelter Foundation, and brands like Lily of the Desert – the largest grower and processor of aloe vera that is sold in grocery stores across the country.

Even the company’s name comes from a mixture of fun and business.

“Swash,” comes from an ornamental figure that Berthume and friends used in their early advertising days. He said although the figure is “plainly a tiger,” his friends named him “Swash the Can Bear” and he has no idea the reason why.

When Berthume visited Washington D.C. for President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2008, a friend gave Swash to him and after it sat on his desk for a few years, his budding company needed a name.

“Swash Labs” became the throwaway option in a list of names that were tested in front of a focus group of more than 300 people, and Berthume said that, although no one knew what the name meant, the results were overwhelmingly in favor of “Swash Labs.”

He said that at a later time someone told him that “Swash” is defined as “the turbulent, leading edge of a breaking wave,” – a definition he said was fitting for the company.

Denton: north of ordinary

When he decided to open Swash Labs, Berthume said it was a “really deliberate decision” to open the company in Denton.

He said that for seven or eight years, while working freelance in the DFW area, he complained because there was no business in Denton that did meaningful work.

In addition to that, Berthume said he loves the way Denton feels. He said that he likes the way the artistic community mixes with the business side, and that it is the perfect place for he and his wife, Diana, to raise their two-year-old daughter, Harper Mae.

“I like the idea of raising my kid here,” he said. “I like the people that are here. Being as socially progressive and liberal as I am, there’s plenty about Texas that I’m not crazy about, but Denton overcomes that. In a cost-benefit analysis there’s more that I like than stuff that I don’t.”

Unify. Simply. Amplify.

When working with a new client, Swash Labs goes through a process to get the project going on the right track.

Berthume said the first step is to unify all the members with the purpose of the client’s company.

“You would be amazed that if there are 12 board members in the room, how often we get 12 different answers,” he said.

After getting a variety of lengthy descriptions about the purpose of the company from the client, the next step, Berthume said, is to simplify the answer into a short sentence that anyone could understand.

Swash Labs then helps the company find a cost-effective way to tell the world why it should want to use its product or service, like the case with Little Guys Movers.

The local moving company began in 1992 as a summer side project for its founders to make some extra cash, but it has grown into a franchised company with 13 locations in various American college towns like San Marcos, Texas; Norman, Okla. and Fayetteville, Ark.

Watson said the company has grown more than he or Hawley had ever imagined it would. With such growth, Little Guys needed a way to communicate and market their company on a national level.

Hawley said it took Little Guys a lot longer than it should have to get on board with how companies like Swash Labs utilize marketing and social media.

“We held off for a long time without really recognizing the value of professional marketing,” he said. “We felt like, and I think a lot of small businesses do, that it was a needless expense. We can do it ourselves. We had only really acknowledged the value in a marketing company in the past three or four years.”

He said that he agreed that Swash Labs’ style works well with Little Guys Movers, which he called a “rough bunch of dudes.”

As small, local businesses like Little Guys realize the need for creative advertising and storytelling and Swash Labs continues to grow, Berthume feels like Denton will always be the company’s home.

“We’re doing cool things in Denton and I think that we’ve been able to prove for a number of clients in the last year or so that we can do absolutely world-class work and it doesn’t cost as much as it would cost in San Francisco or New York,” he said.

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Sitting behind a tall, rectangular modern pine desk and flanked by dozens of examples of his work on the walls behind him, Sean Starr appears tired but determined. Grayscale Latin words, “Expiscor Veritas,” line Starr’s hardened forearms. The phrase is incorporated into his company’s logo and serves as a mantra for his life and work. Roughly translated, it means “Aggressively seek the truth.”

“I think it influences my whole life,” Starr said.

The steely-eyed 45-year-old sign painter has been extremely busy since returning to Texas a little more than a year ago, starting with a tattoo parlor in Dallas on Lower Greenville. His first Denton job was painting the Bookish Coffee sign on the Square, and since then, mostly by word of mouth, Starr’s designs have popped up all over town. To establish his business, Starr said he would hound owners until they gave him work.

His hand-painted artwork adorns the windows of several local businesses – Royal’s Bagels, Jupiter House Coffee, Atomic Candy, Bullseye Bicycle shop and others in the area – and his company, Starr Studios, is booked solid through the end of July.

Joey Hawkins, owner of Jupiter House Coffee and Royal’s Bagels, said Starr’s re-design of the coffee shop has contributed to increased revenue.

“He has a way of kind of bringing an old school look that doesn’t feel dated,” Hawkins said. “I trust him enough that I let him surprise me.”

History

Starr began sign painting in the late 1980s after deeming work as a window washer unsatisfying.

As soon as he was old enough to work, Starr hit the road in West Texas with his Ukranian, former Golden-Glove boxer father, “the hardest man on earth to work for.”

Starr said his father would drag him out of bed at 4:30 a.m., before the sun rose, and work him until the sun went down, painting signs, cars, trucks and in a bit of occasional glamour, Willie Nelson’s tour bus.

“I got like zero credentials,” Starr said. “I guess technically I apprenticed under my dad, but we weren’t sophisticated enough to know even what that meant at the time.”

Starting Starr Studios

When his father passed away 15 years ago, Starr sought design work in Washington, first in Seattle, Washington, and then in Tacoma, Washington.

In 2005, after working at different design and sign painting companies, Starr headed south to San Francisco, California and settled in the Mission District where he founded Starr Studios. During this time, his style transformed into a mix of Victorian – which utilizes retro-styled fonts – and old school Texan sign painting.

Sign Painting

Starr said sign painting is an industry with closely kept trade secrets, and that some of the same techniques used by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel are still employed.

“It’s the same way that people have done it for thousands of years,” he said.

Starr, however, is not the type of man who guardedly holds knowledge over subordinates or competitors, his 21-year-old apprentice Cole Bridges said.

Bridges sat quietly next to Starr, listening to every word from his mentor, absorbing the craft he started learning in Dallas after high school. He spent a year in China on a mission, where he said he was able to focus on his art, something that has served him well since he began working for Starr in January.

“He’s very giving,” Bridges said. “For me, particularly with knowledge and the trade aspect. He’s very free with it.”

Historically, sign painters have had their own areas of town where their influence was obvious, Starr said.

“I appreciate that he’s been able to come here and give character to things,” Bridges said.

With little competition in Denton – only one other sign painter actively works the area – Starr has been able to develop a clientele base that could soon be expanding across the DFW area, thanks in part to teaching Bridges.

“Anybody that’s still around doing sign painting usually has more work than they can keep up with,” Starr said. “It’s not really adversarial.”

All Roads Lead to Texas

Starr came home to his DFW-based family, including two sisters in Denton, when the “cost of breathing” in California became too much. He brought his wife, Kayleigh, and his business with him.

“We were able to get things rolling really quickly [in California] and it was embraced there,” Starr said. “But living and doing business there was insane.”

Starr had arranged sign painting work in Dallas before his arrival and has not looked back since, completing jobs and putting his fingerprints all over Denton and the DFW area.

His studio, on Acme Street behind Frosty’s Hamburgers, is down an alley in an industrialized area and at first appears unwelcoming.

Once inside, though, the soul of Starr Studios is immediately apparent. Signs and photographs line the walls, red oak risers give the ceiling a rustic look and on the floor, just in front of the doors, a quote by Pablo Picasso perfectly illustrates the attitude of Starr: “Inspiration exists but it has to find you working.”

Starr recently finished work on the decor of Rusty Tacos on Hickory Street and work on the Square One Cafe in Lewisville, an area he said is beginning to come into its own.

Although Starr only recently settled in Denton, his career has already been hugely successful. He’s published several books including “You, Me and Morrissey” which was an official entrant for the 2008 Pulitzer in Letters, serves as an editor of a tradecraft magazine and will curate the upcoming Texas premiere of the sign-painting documentary “Sign Painters.”

Signpainting Sidebar:

Starr begins each job by meeting with the client to get a feel for what they want. He sits down and does mulitple sketches by hand and once those are solidified, he scans them into his computer for a vector version. By creating a vector version, Starr is able to expand his drawings to any size. He makes a scale mock up and once the client approves, Starr and company make several patterns on all different sizes of paper, from projecting it to hand drawing. The paper gets “pounced”, which is a technique using an instrument called an electric pounce wheel. The apparatus has an electric stylus, nicknamed a sparkler, that zaps holes into paper which is then padded with a graphite bag, creating a pattern. Starr currently uses an electric pouncer, although finding it was very difficult as they are no longer produced. “We just pray every day that it doesn’t break,” Starr said. If his machine were to break, Starr would revert to using a pounce wheel, a small, pen-sized instrument with a spiked wheel attached to one end, to manually perforate the paper. After he has perforated the holes, either with the “sparkler machine” or with a pounce wheel, Starr and company then paint and render every inch by hand.

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Nadia Hill/Managing Editor and James Coreas/Editor-in-Chief

Keith Dennis heard the sirens wailing from two miles out, patiently listening and waiting for his sister’s voice on the other line to reassure him she was alive. She was wrapped in blankets, padded by all of her pillows and huddled under a foam mattress topper in a closet. The wind screamed and windows shattered. He knew she was rain soaked, alone and in shock.

An hour later, Dennis and his 22-year-old sister Sarah Torrey picked apart her life, one scrap at a time, and looked over as her neighbors did the same to their homes. The buckled brown wooden beams were piled across the bleak landscape for miles after one of the deadliest tornadoes in Oklahoma history destroyed homes and took lives.

At 2:56 p.m. May 20, 16 minutes after a tornado warning was issued for the area, an EF-5 twister ripped a 12-mile path across southern Oklahoma for 40 minutes, with winds peaking at 210 mph. The storm killed 24 people, seven of them children after two elementary schools collapsed – Plaza Towers in Moore, Oklah., and Briarwood in Oklahoma City. More than 120 were injured and sent to local hospitals for treatment.

“I thought I was dead. I just kept telling him I loved him and hoped for the best,” Torrey said. “I just feel incredibly lucky to be alive. There are lots of people without loved ones. I’m glad to be here and all of my family’s safe.”

Torrey lives in Moore, a suburb 11 miles south of Oklahoma City, which was hit the hardest by the deadly tornado. Some neighborhoods crumbled while others remained untouched, and 20 of the dead were from the city of 56,000. The May 20 tornado was eerily reminiscent of Moore’s infamous May 1999 storm, another EF-5 cyclone with 302 mph winds. The storm killed 42 people and traveled the same path as this year’s tornado.

This time, Dennis sat a mile south of the town, inching closer in heavy traffic to his family, watching cars, homes, rain and hail get thrown in all directions. After the warning was issued, he immediately called Torrey to make sure she stayed safe. She didn’t pick up. He called six or seven times, and when she finally answered, Dennis said it was too late to make it to a shelter. They mentally went through everything in her house that could protect her, and she wound up in the house’s center hallway with pillows, blankets, a foam mattress topper and her small dog.

“We had cell reception the whole time so I was able to talk her through it,” Dennis said. “Then she was able to verbally tell me on two or three occasions, ‘I can hear it, I’m starting to hear it.’ She said it’s getting closer, it’s getting louder, that she could hear it. And by then of course I could hear it on the phone.”

As the mile-wide tornado descended on the house, Torrey put her phone on speaker and sat it next to her. She clutched her dog as the storm tore through her home. Dennis heard all the noises in the background and continued to talk to her, even though she wasn’t responding. When she came back on the line, Torrey was just taking deep breaths. Then it was all over.

“I just laid there with my dog in my arms and he told me to stay calm and talked me through it,” Torrey said. “Then I crawled out the window to try and find anyone that was trapped.”

Dennis watched the tornado cross I-35 and gave his sister the all clear to go outside.

A recent nursing school grad, Torrey felt compelled to find and help anyone she could, after determining she was fine. While she was checking on her neighbors, Dennis was trying to drive into her neighborhood to find his sister and assess the damage. It took more than an hour for them to reunite, but he eventually found her at 10^th and Telephone Streets, a major intersection in town.

He jumped out of his truck, hugged her and they immediately went back to her house, which was in shambles. Part of the roof had fallen in, mud was splattered throughout the entire house and Torrey’s car was encased with debris.

“You feel like you’re shopping for your own stuff again,” Dennis said. “Our first intention was to get extremely valuable stuff. Now we’re trying to figure out what’s left.”

While Torrey was able to salvage a few things like electronics, clothes and her grandmother’s jewelry box, others were not so lucky. Search and rescue wrapped up May 21, more than 24 hours after the tornado struck, with the death toll stabilizing at 24. Initial reports had it at 91 with 70 children injured.

The Oklahoma Insurance Department initially estimated the damage at about $2 million, and President Obama recently traveled to console victims and assess the devastation.

How you can help:

Starbucks at 288 and 35 is accepting non-perishable donations

Denton Kiwanis Club is sending care packages

ServeDenton has organized relief efforts

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When Paul Echols graduated from the University of North Texas in May 2009 with a degree in economics, he had no idea he would one day own Square 205, a branding and interactive design agency based in Denton.

Back then, he said his only concern was building a website that would get him made. He developed the idea for Urban Dive, a social network based around the rating of local restaurants and services. But websites like Yelp and Urbanspoon were already providing that kind of service.

“It came down to one of two things,” Echols said. “I could either keep playing with this idea, or sell the domain name to some Brazilian guys for $5,000.”

Echols chose the latter, and in September 2011, Echols created the agency Square 205 as a spin-off of Storied Productions, Echols’ video production company. The company provides a range of services in branding, website design and digital marketing.

It was also in 2011 that District 1 council representative Kevin Roden was first elected to the Denton City Council. A year after being elected, Roden pitched the idea of something he dubbed the Creative Jobs Initiative, a plan that would place an emphasis on fostering the development of a strong job market for tech-centered professions.

For Roden, it is very simple – “We’ve created the kind of city people want to live in.”

As Roden sees it, visual arts students from the University of North Texas and Texas Women’s University find themselves in a precarious situation after graduation – stay in the city they love or leave for a larger city with a stronger job market in their area of expertise.

Roden said he sees a pool of young creatives ready to delve in the fields of graphic design, web design, app development and filmmaking.

“People want to make it here,” Roden said. “But there aren’t any jobs here, and they have to move to Austin or Dallas.”

Echols said it was the business-friendly environment in Denton that led him to establish his company in the city.

“I felt that Denton was supportive of new entrepreneurs,” Echols said. “It’s affordable to start a business here.”

Roden said it is the fact that Denton hosts two universities that ultimately maximizes the potential for his plans.

As a business owner, Echols said he feels the presence of college-aged students also provides him reassurance for his business’ future.

“I know people that are either in college or in the age group that are potential employees,” Echols said. “There is a constant flow for potential employees and interns.”

But Roden’s initiative has also had an impact on businesses that focus on the more traditional, tangible areas of the arts.

A byproduct of the initiative was a series of mixers where students, community leaders, and owners of both tech-centered arts and tangible arts businesses gathered to discuss Dentonites’ creative potential. The first of these mixers took place Oct. 22 at the Oak Street Drafthouse.

Present at the October mixer were Shelley Christner and Rachel Aughtry, co-owners and curators of The DIME Store. At the time, Christner and Aughtry were operating online as Etsy Denton to sell their handmade crafts, but after seeing the members of the creative community business come together, Christner said the two felt inspired to move forward with their business plan.

“It was at that event that we began to see the possible reality that we really could do a creative business in Denton,” Christner said. “[The mixer] kind of gave us the energy and courage to move forward.”

Christner and Aughtry then changed their operation’s name to The DIME Store, which stands for Denton Independent Maker Exchange. The store hosts more than 20 local crafts makers who sell their handmade goods.

As of now, Roden said most of the initiative has played out through the network of creative businesses, and has not required any official actions on behalf of the Denton City Council.

In the coming months, as the city begins to hash out its budget, Roden said he plans on pushing his fellow city council members to launch an economic development study to measure the growth, if any, of Denton’s creative economy. Roden submitted the idea in his budget suggestions at the beginning of May.

Another part of Roden’s plan that would require a vote from the city council would be the branding of a part of downtown Denton as an innovation district. Roden said it could be like the design center in Boston, Mass., which is a one-stop shop for a design-seeking clientele, according to Boston Design Center’s website.

“If we work together to develop the potential of this grassroots type of movement, we can create a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Roden said.

District 3 city council member Jim Engelbrecht said he thinks the city should investigate assisting any group interested in helping Denton’s economy develop.

“We have a great many creative folks,” Engelbrecht said. “We could certainly attract a lot more with a better infrastructure.”

Echols said he feels it will take some time before Denton’s creative potential is recognized, but for the most part, business is progressing in the right direction.

“I think that companies like Square 205 and Swash Labs are becoming more widely known,” Echols said. “As that happens for current companies, that will help future companies and potential clients in finding the right place to set up shop or find an agency to do their advertising.”

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