Jamey meets Joan
It was a meeting of the past, the present and the future when Jamey Ice met and hugged Joan Kline.
Jamey, at 33, along with his wife, Melissa, is rebuilding one house and commercial building at a time on Fort Worth’s Southside. Joan built, rebuilt, and kept the foundation intact on the Southside for decades.
She’s ageless, sweet – grandmotherly, if I may say so. She raised nine children with her late husband, Art. A person would be unwise to think of her as passive. Quietly hiding behind her kind demeanor lies a woman who can fight like a tiger.
Joan Kline was fighting for the Southside before it was cool. Nothing stood in her way to protect and nurture the neighborhood around Ryan Place, where she lives on Elizabeth Boulevard.
Jamey and Melissa – you take them, you’ve got cool. Joan describes herself as “just continuing to evolve.”
The Ices and Kline were at the April 25 “40 Under 40” event where Melissa and other emerging community leaders were honored by the Business Press for making a difference in their business, family and civic lives. Joan was there to see her granddaughter, Elizabeth Blake, accept an award. Elizabeth’s mother, Margie Blake, is Joan’s daughter.
Jamey Ice had never met Joan so when he spied her at the event, he walked to her table, introduced himself and hugged her. Snapping a selfie with Joan to commemorate the occasion, Jamey told her, “My work is centered around the work you started. Without you my business would not exist.”
Jamey and his partner, Jimmy Williams, a childhood friend and Fort Worth police officer, started 6th Avenue Homes in 2014 and have now bought and rebuilt for sale over 50 homes – and helped another 20 clients buy and renovate old homes in the neighborhood.
Ice still plays lead guitar with his chart-topping band, “Green River Ordinance,” but after years of touring and recording top 10 Billboard hits in folk and country music the band members are now mostly raising families.
Jamey decided on real estate after remodeling his first house with Melissa and selling it for more money than he could make in a year of playing music.
He knew nothing of remodeling until Melissa hooked him up with a homeless man who had been a contractor. Each day that man, “Carl,” would take a bus to the Ice home and teach Jamey remodeling. It’s true that in giving you get back.
Ice now has a real estate brokerage and 14 real estate agents.
His company just opened a building on South Main, The 4 Eleven, a refurbished 20,000 square foot warehouse with space for retail, events, and a restaurant.
Melissa Ice was a 40 Under 40 honoree for her work with Jamey in the real estate business, including the opening of their coffee shop “Brewed” on Magnolia Avenue in 2012 and for her work as executive director of The NET Fort Worth, which she founded in 2013.
The NET is a nonprofit dedicated to helping women and children who are homeless and those who have been sexually exploited. It hosts up to 40 fundraising events a year to raise money for the cause.
Melissa, too, has much in common with Joan Kline, who has spent a lifetime on issues of equality, especially in the civil rights movement.
As Elizabeth Blake said of her fierce, pioneering and loving grandmother: “Throughout my youth, my grandmother exposed me to political rallies in Fort Worth and taught me the importance of standing up for those who don’t have a voice.”
The future of leadership in Fort Worth is unfolding before our eyes. My generation of business people here obviously has aged, some have retired, and some are still hanging on. This is a city with a strong legacy of business and civic leadership, folks who get things done, and younger people such as Jamey and Melissa Ice, following in the footsteps of the Joan Klines of this world, are at the forefront of a new generation of leaders.
And they intend to pave the way for those who follow them as well. The Ices’ 2½-year-old daughter, Roosevelt Pearl, is named after Teddy Roosevelt because of his famous “Man in the Arena” speech and its clarion call for civic responsibility:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly … who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat…”
Richard Connor is president and publisher of the Fort Worth Business Press. Contact him at rconnor@bizpress.net