A dream with a whiff of BBQ sauce
When Curt Sheard looks around the neighborhoods of Dunbar, he sees the sweetest of memories: summer days when he and friends walked home from the pool, sticky with the juice of mangoes they’d pluck from trees.
Today, Dunbar can be rife with danger. But dreamers like Sheard, 43, have visions of a safe, prosperous community.
“I’ve never sold drugs. I’ve never done drugs,” said Sheard, who is on the cusp of the biggest deal of his life. “At the same time, I am Dunbar. … I’ve traveled around the world and there’s no place like home.”
His dream is his survival tool. The father of two works to exhaustion, running on four hours of sleep most nights as he launches his Big Boi’s BBQ rubs and sauces into 16 Walmarts from Bradenton to Naples, along with working full time as a construction project manager and volunteering as vice president of a local youth football travel league, the Dunbar Rattlers. Big Boi’s is set to arrive in stores Oct. 7. Sheard scored the deal after pitching during an open call this summer at Walmart headquarters.
Five years ago, Fort Myers ranked fifth in the U.S. among cities its size for murder, beating out the once-notorious Compton, Calif. The bloodshed has not abated. Often, victims and perpetrators of violent crimes have ties to Dunbar.
But that’s not the Dunbar Sheard focuses on. He points out the basketball courts and football fields teeming with kids and the warmth and respect extended by passersby.
This season, the Rattlers began barricading streets near its practice fields so kids and parents would feel safer without cars driving by. They rent lights for the fields.
“I’m not living in a world with rose-colored lenses. ... I see the negativity, but I refuse to allow it to separate me from my goal or ambition.”
Sheard’s goals include broad distribution of Big Boi’s sauces and one day opening a manufacturing plant in Dunbar to bring jobs to a community with a smattering of opportunities.
Says the former Army officer who once sold jars of sauce out of the back of his Honda Accord: “We can bring the economic values back to Dunbar.”