It’s all happening crazy fast. Life is moving at a robber’s speed, with people lost inside their houses and no one knowing what killer jolts the next fearsome chapter might bring.

In other words, it’s like a book in which we’re all part of the crush of chapters, with no one knowing how the story will end. You are a character on a page, in a plot you can’t control. So, why not do something you can control?

“This,” says Nancy Perot, “is a time when people need to be reading books" — instead of feeling like a character in one. "They might have more time. They might need to get their minds on other things and escape a little bit.”

On March 14, Perot was sitting in the store she owns, Interabang Books on Lovers Lane, and yes, people were walking in and out, even with social distancing the new norm. But by March 17, it no longer felt practical or responsible to stay open, so starting March 20, Interabang opted to “curtail in-store shopping … for an indefinite number of weeks.”

After a tornado wiped out their store in the Preston Royal Village, Interabang Books reopened at 5600 W. Lovers Lane, near the North Dallas Tollway, shown here on in November of 2019. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

The store’s announcement proclaims that you can still order online. Which seems like a good idea, but for us, the one thought that keeps rattling around, inescapably, is …

What a year it’s been for Interabang and the woman who opened her dream business in July 2017.

In October, the tornado that ripped through Preston Hollow and other parts of Dallas destroyed Interabang, which was part of a strip mall at the corner of Preston Road and Royal Lane. The store lost its entire inventory.

“Of all things you worry about, a tornado was not on the list,” she says. “And so, it really was disbelief. Complete disbelief. At the same time, nobody was hurt. We had good, solid insurance. Everything was completely replaceable. There were other people who suffered so much more.”

Calm in the storm

For Perot, a simple twist of fate capped an almost idyllic October day. Her husband was at AT&T Stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys were actually winning a game, beating the Philadelphia Eagles 37-10 on NBC’s Sunday Night Football. Perot was home alone, having gone to the Dallas Opera with her mom to see The Magic Flute.

“It was,” she says, “a beautiful evening” — until it wasn’t.

She got word around 9:30 p.m., when friends started sending her pictures from the devastation invading Interabang like an aerial bombardment.

She called her general manager and co-owner, Kyle Hall, who told her “it was every bit as bad as everyone was saying.”

The interior of the Interabang Books store was demolished by a tornado in the Preston Royal shopping center in Dallas, Monday, October 21, 2019. A tornado tore through the entire shopping center. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News) (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

She’s “endlessly relieved,” however, that no one was in the store, that the shopping center in which Interabang made its home had been closed for hours. In Nashville, Tenn., where a recent tornado killed 25 people, it happened in the middle of the night, killing people as they slept.

Although he’s no longer alive, Perot speaks of feeling the influence of her father, the late Ross Perot Sr., a self-made billionaire who ran for president in 1992. What would he have done? For one, he was known for being a protector of employees. So much so that he once orchestrated his own rescue mission to free a pair of underlings who’d been imprisoned in Iran. That led to the bestseller On Wings of Eagles: The Inspiring True Story of One Man’s Patriotic Spirit — and His Heroic Mission to Save His Countrymen, by Ken Follett, which, yes, you can buy at Interabang.

“I felt I needed to reassure my wonderful staff that we would reopen and that their jobs were secure,” says Ross Sr.'s oldest daughter. “Yes, it was a low point, but then I think the high point was to see how the community responded. I think it made us deeply aware in a way that we had not seen before that people deeply cared about this store. Far more people than I would have even known.”

Daughters Katherine Reeves, Suzanne McGee, Nancy Perot and Carolyn Rathjen hug Ross Perot in his office in 1996. (Courtesy Ross Perot Family)

A fresh start — and a plan

No one who knows her is surprised by how quickly she responded, opening her new store on Lovers Lane on Nov. 20, even before Thanksgiving, when she agreed to a five-year lease.

Young though it is, it’s already her headquarters, her flagship, and why do we say flagship? Because in the midst of everything else, she hopes to open a second store. She doesn’t know where or when, but she likes the idea.

The oldest Perot daughter may appear to be soft-spoken, but she is, as her friends say, confident. Resilient. Like a quarterback who doesn’t get flustered.

“By Monday afternoon, we were looking at other locations — by lunchtime,” says Hall. “I was still so stunned by what had happened. My head was swimming with thoughts of insurance claims, our landlord, that I could not fathom doing that. It seemed too soon to me.

“But when we got together and went looking, one of the things Nancy said was, ‘If we don’t settle on a place soon, with so many other retailers dislocated like us, we won’t be able to find a good one. This simply can’t wait.’ The minute she said it, I realized she was exactly right.” And suddenly, “I wasn’t unsettled anymore.”

Nancy Perot, photographed in the store she owns, Interabang Books, on Lovers Lane in Dallas, Saturday March 14, 2020. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

Her leadership, Hall says, “was so confident, so matter-of-fact. So irrefutable. It was Nancy who realized there was no time to waste. The steady leadership she provides makes possible what all the rest of us do.”

Perot has appointed Lori Feathers, who’s also a co-owner, as the buyer of adult books. Lisa Plummer does the same with children’s books.

“Nancy recognizes in them their ability and lets them go to work,” Hall says. “None of us feel as though someone is looking over our shoulder.”

Even so, three months into the very strange year that is 2020, Perot has been put to a test that few business owners ever experience. First, the tornado, and now, a global pandemic that calls to mind the darkest chapters of a Stephen King novel, such as, say, The Stand.

In the face of such moments, Perot believes that all you can do is, well, stand. You really have no other choice.

The Perot family members are shown in Bermuda during Easter 2019. Front row: (L-R) son Ross Perot Jr., Margot and Ross Perot. Back row: (L-R) daughters Nancy Perot, Suzanne Perot McGee, Carolyn Perot Rathjen and Katherine Perot Reeves. (Courtesy Ross Perot family)

Family values

Now 59, she’s one of five children born to Ross Perot and his widow, Margot, who is 86. Her only male sibling, older brother Ross Perot Jr., owned the Dallas Mavericks before he sold the team to Mark Cuban.

Of course, she feels blessed to have been born into a family of wealth and privilege, but as she will tell you, it was more than that. Regardless of what you might have thought of him politically, her father was never better than during a crisis. He headed up one of America’s most successful companies, and his wife is widely regarded as one of Dallas’ most beloved philanthropists.

Born in Dallas, Nancy attended St. Michael’s, which is now the Episcopal School of Dallas, before graduating from The Hockaday School and Vanderbilt University in Nashville. From 1982 to 1985, she worked as a staff member for President Ronald Reagan, before coming home to Dallas to assume a role in the family investment business, which still has an office on Turtle Creek Boulevard.

Soon, she was a full-time mom. She and her second husband, Rod Jones, share six children — Nancy’s four boys, ranging in age between 20 and 30, and Rod’s children, who are 18 and 20. In recent years, she has worked as a writer, having served as a contributing editor for Veranda magazine, which specializes in design and home decorating. And, as one might expect, she’s a passionate reader. As a girl, she loved A Wrinkle in Time and The Secret Garden. As an adult, her favorites include Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

She benefited from having a mother who’s “a special, wonderful person and so intelligent. Deeply thoughtful. And my dad was such a wonderful man, just a force of nature, so original and deeply compassionate.”

And, of course, not everyone’s father ends up being imitated on Saturday Night Live. She calls Dana Carvey’s imitation of him “so clever and funny. It was a riot.”

And somewhere along the way, she inherited a sense of elegance and taste that defines Interabang as much as its content.

Why bookstores still matter

Throughout the ages, people have been drawn to bookstores for ambiance as much as inventory, and Interabang is no exception. Scrolling through an algorithm on a screen is so inferior, Perot contends, to “going in and talking to people about what’s new, what they might enjoy, good recommendations and then, of course, I think the author events we host are such a draw for people.”

In the days before the coronavirus shutdown, Interabang welcomed an appearance by John Freeman, who wrote the new book, Dictionary of the Undoing. The author interviewing Freeman during his appearance was novelist Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk).

Ryan Raffaelli, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, says independent booksellers such as Interabang are spearheading a renaissance, “because they break the mold on what was expected.” Interabang and examples like it across the country are flourishing, he contends, via the three C’s: community, curation, convening."

Dallas author James Donovan (Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11) agrees, saying Interabang “went from good to excellent quickly. I’ve been in the book business a long time, and I don’t think I’ve seen a Dallas bookstore better at working with the community. Barnes & Noble is still important, and does a good job and carries more titles, but bookstores like Interabang are more nimble and if run by experienced and smart book people, invaluable.”





The collapse of chain bookstores has been well documented, as has the stranglehold of Amazon.com. Even so, Perot contends that bookstores have “staying power. They represent community, and they can be very sociable places. There’s also a real value to local businesses, and Dallas is really becoming aware of that — how important it is to support local businesses to give the community personality and depth. We need our community to keep the doors open.”

As much as anything, she loves the diversity of author events. “In any given week, we can have an astronaut or a Holocaust survivor. Or a wonderful cookbook author. Or a historian."

Interabang recently hosted Martha MacCallum, who wrote Unknown Valor: A Story of Family, Courage, and Sacrifice from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima, “and there were 300 people there,” Perot says. “They were lining up around the block.”

Variety alone, she says, makes it “an endlessly fascinating business. No two days are alike. We don’t want to be seen as pushing any particular agenda. The importance of the bookstore is that it allows people to pause and reflect and think deeply and hear different points of view, and I think that’s extremely important in today’s culture and society.”

The tornado taught her how deeply people have come to value Interabang. It also showed her that “the worst thing that ever happened to us has managed to produce several silver linings.”

The ceiling fell in, the walls fell in, the sprinklers came on. It started raining in Interabang.

It found a cool new home, but then came the storm of COVID-19. And yet, Interabang is thriving. Alive, resilient, confident — much like its owner.