Kids bullied her in kindergarten because of her clothes.

Now she sells school uniforms so it doesn't happen to anyone else.

Maybe it was the time her friend in kindergarten was having a birthday party and told her, “I'm not gonna invite you because your socks are never matching.” Or how people teased her because she wore the same shirt and pair of pants every day. “To me, to go to the gym was awful. And then for me to go to school, I mean, I didn't wanna be there,” says Socorro Hernández Dismore, now 48. “I didn't realize that that experience would come into play many, many, many years later.”

Back then, though, she was just five years old. She didn’t know how to speak up for herself. “I just thought that was part of it. I really didn’t know.”

Besides, her folks didn’t have money laying around. Her mom, dad, and 11 older siblings had just moved from Laredo and settled in the modest Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas in 1981. Soon after, her baby brother was born. School shopping meant a pair of shoes from Payless and a one school outfit from Levines each. They lived in a 700-square-foot house, all 15 of them sleeping on mattresses that they would put down on the floor at night and up against the walls in the morning. Mom and dad slept in the living room, the kids in the single bedroom. The house had one bathroom “and a little bitty small kitchen,” she says.

Little Socorro finally learned she was poor when a friend at school invited her to her house on the same block. “She had her own room, and she had matching clothes and all this stuff. And I was just like, oh, wow. And I went home and I realized, oh, wow,” says Socorro. Still, “I don't wanna say we were poor because we were real happy.” (Socorro prefers the term “economically inconvenienced”.)

She became anxious. She was afraid of the teasing that would come after class. She didn’t want to be called on because she was self-conscious of her English, so she never really paid attention or gave it her all because she was always worried about being made fun of. “Being bullied ‘cause of the way you look and the way you're dressed is something that becomes traumatizing to a child,” she says.

Finally, she spoke up and told her mom about the teasing, so her mom took her to the Salvation Army and bought her a pair of shoes without noticing a crucial detail. These were tap shoes, and mom, unfamiliar with tap dancing, sent Socorro to school without removing the metal plates. “To this day when I run into girls that went to school with me in elementary, they say, ‘Do you remember when you went to school in your tap dancing shoes?’”

That’s the way it went all through elementary school, shoes at Payless, a shirt and a pair of pants at Levines, and whatever socks were around, until around the age of nine she started making extra money ironing her brothers’ restaurant uniforms, doing their chores, watching her sisters’ children and cleaning their houses. At 11 she started working weekends at the Bargin (pronounced “bargain,” but spelled that way, I promise) City Bazaar, making $20 working per 10-hour shift selling toys for an old woman.

Her brothers gave much of what they made at restaurant jobs to their mom, but not Socorro. “I kept it so that I could buy some clothes,” she says. “What can you buy with $20? So I would buy me T-shirts. I would go, you know, to Levines.”

In middle school she cleaned the office and did odd jobs for a natural doctor and when she was old enough to get paid above the table she got a job in a restaurant. “I worked there a summer, and then I got pregnant,” she says. “And I got real sick with my pregnancy.”

Her complicated pregnancy forced her to drop out of school in the ninth grade, which is a shame because by then she’d gotten a whiff of what she could do. She was on the debate team with plans to go to law school, she told her mom, “so I can help people like y’all. And then my mom was like, okay, whatever.” She never went back to school and instead got her GED. “Then I started working at Levines.”

Why Levines?

“Well, my baby needed clothes, right? Remember I’m real adamant about the clothes,” she said, who remembered all the hazing she endured when she was little. “It's not happening to my girl,” she promised.

She got herself into another situation there. Her manager, David Dismore, the son of Don Dismore, the owner, kept asking her out. She’d put him off, trying to explain to him that she was the baby girl to a dozen siblings. To them, she wasn’t a working mother, she was their little girl, and they weren’t going to let her go out on a date. What was he thinking?

“So anyways, he went and talked to my parents, and then we ended up getting married. And then come to find out like two months into that, he had substance abuse problems. So we dealt with that for 13 years,” she said.

By that time her brothers were flipping houses. Two relatives were loan officers. What they didn’t have was a realtor. Her way out of the marriage was getting into real estate. “I ate up real estate,” she says. “It actually became the best time of my life. I was able to do something by myself. And I was able to help people.”

She specialized in lower-income families that other realtors avoided. “I helped a lot of families like my parents,” she says. “I would get more from that than I think the money that I was making.”

She hustled for them, picking clients up at their apartment, taking them to the bank, taking them to get the letter from the electric utility they needed, and generally doing all the stuff her clients needed.

This was the first time in her life she ever had to dress professionally. She noticed other realtors working in higher brackets who sold houses wearing shorts and T-shirts. What the heck are these people? she thought to herself. She also noticed that her manager came into the office every day wearing a suit. She noticed that when her mentor would come in every day at six in the morning to teach her about contracts, he was wearing a suit, too. Socorro wore suits.

She put the hours in, and soon she was the top producer at the office. And then in 2005, she won the Century 21 Award as the top producer in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area. Five successful years in real estate had made her a lot of money, and this time she was buying a lot more than clothes. Her mentor advised her to invest in real estate as a hedge against a down market, so she made a five-year plan to buy three houses. She did it in two years, paying cash.

She made a five-year plan. She did it in two years.

Her mentors thought she was being foolish, but if something happened she didn’t want to need help from anyone. She couldn’t ask her parents and would never ask her brothers. And her father-in-law, Don Dismore? Everyone was always asking him for help. He helped out plenty with the kids. He even made sure his son adopted the baby girl she had at 16. She wasn’t going to be yet another hand out.

Turns out, he needed her. In 2007, he had a heart attack and asked her to help out at the store, which also functioned as the headquarters of the chain of juvenile department stores with locations in Abilene, Lubbock, and Tyler as well. She helped them during the back-to-school rushes, working the floor and talking to customers.

Often, customers ask if they carried plaid skirts or blue blazers for school uniforms, which were common in Dallas schools then but not as much as they are now. All Levines stocked were some standard dark pants and white shirts. Socorro talked to the moms about the inexpensive uniforms that would fall apart after a few washes or the good-quality uniforms that were too pricey.

“Why don't we go to the schools and start offering them uniforms?” she suggested to her father-in-law.

“No, I’m never gonna do that,” he said.

“Why not?

“Because then you get into all this contract stuff,” he said. “Oh, I don't wanna do that. I’m too old for that.”

She told him about all the moms asking for them in July, August, and September.

“No, I’m never gonna get into that. I don’t wanna do it,” he said. “Because then they’ll start getting into the plaids and then they change their mind about the plaids. And then you get stuck with the plaids.”

(He did have a point there. Public education can be a plaid, plaid world. I’ll see myself out.)

She stayed involved for a couple years, helping families on the floor during back-to-school season, until he got cancer and died, leaving his share of the business to his son, David, who by this time had been separated from Socorro for five years.

“You know what, Socorro,” said David, who was getting clean and sober. “I'm not gonna be able to do this by myself.” There was a lot of debt, and his father’s second wife was trying to take him to the cleaners. “Can you help me to, you know, run the business and stuff?”

And that’s when he told Socorro that the business owed $1.5 million, and if they didn't pay, the bank was going to take her father-in-law’s estate, and they were gonna be left with nothing. She was fine no matter what, but she wasn’t going to let the bank take her children’s legacy.

The meeting in the Inwood Bank conference room was seven hours long. David Dismore’s partner had a lawyer. David brought a lawyer. Rob Ivy, the soft-spoken, diminutive the bank president, had two lawyers, and then there was Socorro. The partner just wanted out, and clearly the banker wanted him out, too. The bank was about to pull the plug when Socorro asked to speak.

She told the banker her family’s story, how her parents came from Jalisco to Laredo and then to Dallas to find better opportunities for their children. And how her youngest daughter was about to go to college, and she wanted both her children to go to college because she never got a chance to. She told him about how she and David separated because because of his substance abuse problems — with him sitting right there! — and remade herself as a real estate agent, and a pretty successful one at that.

Socorro told him about the obstacles in her life and how she overcame them. She told them how now she had a vision for her children and a goal that she’s been working toward. Everything had worked out somehow for her somehow, she told him, and she felt if the bank gave her an opportunity that she could make this work for everyone.

“I need you to trust me,” she told this man she’d never known before walking into the bank that day. “I need you to give me an opportunity. I was never in the picture, it’s always been, you know, the partner was there and David was there. It's always been them. But I need you to give me an opportunity. That’s all I’m asking. You’re gonna take all of this, but are you really gonna be able to sleep at night, knowing that you could have given me a chance, and you didn’t?”

The partner went ballistic, asking why the wife of the son of the late owner was even in the room. They didn’t know her history with Levines or the Dismores, whose name she keeps to this day. This was family.

First, the banker said that she had to keep the partner where he couldn’t put his hands on the money.

Socorro agreed — with him sitting right there.

Then the banker told her she was going to have to liquidate the stores in Lubbock, Abilene, and Tyler to raise the $1.5 million.

“Give me an opportunity to let me liquidate,” she said.

The banker asked if she had any experience in liquidation. She did not.

The banker looked her in the eye for a beat while he considered whether he was really going to say what he was going to say.

“I don’t know why I’m feeling this, and I don’t know why I’m doing this, but I’m gonna go with my gut feeling, and I’m gonna let you do this. I’m gonna let you go and liquidate,” he told her, giving her four months to raise $1.5 million.

The truth was she didn’t even know the meaning of the word. “I didn't really understand what ‘liquidation’ meant,” she said later, but she had the good sense not to share that with Ron at the time.

After the meeting, she sat David, from whom she was separated, down for a come-to-Jesus chat. 

“I will stay and help you with the business,” she said. “But you’re gonna have to let me own the majority of it. I have to be the majority owner of this company. And then I’m gonna change it until what I think that it needs to be changed into. It’ll never be the same.”

But before she could remake Levines, she had to save it.

Socorro, who liked to say she relied only on God and herself, had to ask for help. But the fact that she asked for help meant she really needed it, so the next day she was headed for Lubbock in a U-Haul followed by her younger brother’s family. They only packed for a week. They stayed long enough that the seasons changed and had to buy winter coats. “We got new boots and everything,” she says.

“I've always had the gift to know when to make a move and how to make a move when I had no business experience,” she says now. “I never went to school, never went to nothing. And I just feel that urgency, and I have these feelings, and I just go with them.”

Add to that the sad, skill-building process of raising a family when your husband will disappear for months at a time. You just figure out how to make it work. Her ability to see opportunity got her into this mess. Her ability to make order out of chaos got her through it.

Every day, Ron would coach Socorro. He told her to watch out for the employees. Once they knew the story was being liquidated, inventory would go missing. So she went to the Levines in Lubbock and walked to the wall where the Dickie’s merchandise should have been. “There was nothing there. Nothing there. You’re talking about thousands and thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. We realized right away that day that there was a mess.” She told Ron the only way she was going to get his money was by baby-sitting the store herself. “As long as it takes,” she told him.

She returned to Dallas four months later. She had raised $1.2 million in the liquidation. Ron discounted the debt by $65,000, and she wrote a check for the difference. Levines was hers. Ron apologized that she needed to find a line of credit at a different bank because of what happened. “You know, the board is not gonna support me in that decision,” he said. She nodded, telling him that she understood, not admitting that she didn’t know what a board was.

He did, however, give a glowing recommendation when her next bank called for a reference. He told them that they needed to give her a chance because “Socorro is gonna make sure that you get your money,” he said. “If anything were to ever happen, Socorro will always make sure you get your money.” Besides, the new bankers were impressed she owned three houses free and clear. Turns out not mortgaging her houses had come in handy when things went south.

By this time other clothing stores were closing their stores and migrating online, making her even more sure about her old idea about transforming her junior department store into a uniform store. Sure, you could sell uniforms online, but this was 2014. And besides, “I do this because I wanna help my community,” she says. And her community was filled with people who wore uniforms to work or to school, who lived paycheck to paycheck, often sending part of it home to Mexico and Latin America. She kept the storefront, and in 2016 went all-in on uniforms.

“You know what, if this works, I’m gonna be able to do something about when I was a kid getting bullied and stuff,” she told her sister-in-law, who is now her assistant and store manager. “I’m gonna be doing something about that. You know? Where I thought that nobody was gonna do anything about it. And people don't know what it's like to go through that unless they do. But I do. I know what it’s like. So if I can help a child not have to deal with it in school and focus on whatever it is that they're doing… Yeah, that would be amazing.”

It’s OK if you’re crying. When she told me, I cried a little bit, too.

In the back of the store, she put up a whiteboard to keep track of which schools she had approached, which schools she wanted to sell to, and where she was selling them. She did not lack persistence. She was not shy. Sometimes she got the feeling that procurement people gave her contracts just to make her go away and set unreasonable terms in hopes she’d never come back. But do you want to bet against Socorro? The average time it took to get a uniform to a student was four months; Levines did it in a week.

You do not bet against Socorro.

Now she sells the plaid skirts and blue blazers at prices families in the neighborhood can afford. Look at her pride in that picture above. She’s showing me that Levines sells blazers cut for girls, too, so they don’t look boxy and can be proud of how they look.

Of the 40 people who work year-round at Levines — they nearly triple in size during back-to-school season — a dozen are relatives. Others have been at Levines for 30 or 40 years. “They saw me get there when I was 17 years old. They saw me and, you know, it’s very, very personal,” she says, wiping a tear. 

See? It’s OK.

“To me, I don’t feel like I'm working a day in my life. I love what I do every day,” she says.

Remember that white board where she wrote down lists of targets and prospects? Business grew so fast that they had to abandon the white board or they would have spent all day writing down names of schools that wanted their uniforms. She told me that they now sell to 120 schools, most of them public in four school districts, plus a few charter and parochial schools. The white board still hangs on the wall covered with their early plans like framing the first dollar a store earned. She beamed when she showed it to me.

I asked how much revenue they make every year, and Socorro admitted that she leaves that to her accountant, preferring to keep her focus on making sure customers and her staff got what they needed. But she did put me on the phone with him.

When I hung up, Socorro was nervously fingering her paper napkin. For a couple hours, she’d been confident, quick and witty. Suddenly, she was timid.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“You make $6.5 million a year, and your revenues have been increasing by about $200,000 a year.” It felt oddly thrilling to be giving her this news. I asked her how it felt.

She mentioned something sincere and heartfelt about feeling the favor of God, and then she said this:

“You know why? ‘Cause I encourage education a lot to the kids, especially to my own kids. I encourage it a lot because I know how hard it’s been, and I don’t know why God gave me the opportunity to be able to get to where I am today. Because I did not have the opportunity to go to college, and I would’ve wanted to…” No, go back and say what 's in your heart, Socorro. “I would've loved to have done that. But my school has been life, you know, and wanting to do something and wanting to help others and give and looking always for the right people that really are gonna appreciate what I give. I wanna give it to somebody that’s gonna do something with it or that really needs it. And I don’t wanna just give of myself, you know, I wanna give and make a difference. And that, I think, has been the key to being able to hit those numbers because people can always tell, Jason, when you are just wanting to get to them to make a dollar.”

What Socorro has not yet learned is that life is everyone’s school. People can smell a fake right off. And the sincerity of any enterprise’s purpose, whether it’s a church or a uniform store, is correlated to its results. Corrupt preachers fleece their flocks and honest ones heal lives. Socorro makes sure thousands of children a year feel confident in what they wear to school so they can pay attention, get good grades, and go to college. That way, she reasons, all her hard work will result in children she’s never met living better lives than she has.

That’s not completely true, though. Those children will probably live better lives than they would have had they not gone to college, but I’m not sure anyone will live a better life than Socorro is living right now.  

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Email him at jason31170@gmail.com.

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