The Grand Dame of Dallas Real Estate: Listen to Candy on KERA’s Ebby Halliday Memorial

Upon hearing the news that the “Grand Dame of Dallas Real Estate” had passed, KERA’s Kat Chow and Eric Aasen called up Candy to get her impression on what a loss this was for our community. An icon of entrepreneurship and a household name in North Texas, Ebby was so widely adored that her name was trending on social media yesterday. Nationally. Maybe internationally!

She was born in 1911 in a small town in Arkansas. Her father died when she was 5 years old. She moved to a farm in Kansas with her mother and stepfather.

“Ebby took that grit — I call it Midwestern grit — and she turned it into a powerhouse,” said Candy Evans, who runs a local real estate blog, Candy’s Dirt.

Evans says that even when Halliday was a kid, she was an entrepreneur. When Halliday was 8 years old, she’d ride her pony from farm to farm, selling Cloverine ointment to soothe burns and bug bites.

This taught her how to hustle, how to run a small business.

“And what she did was, she went into sales,” Evans said. “She had a lovely personality, she was a beautiful woman. … And so she sold.”

You can listen to the segment online to hear the whole story or watch some of the great interviews that took a closer look at this amazing woman.