Haltom City, April 20, 2007: James Van Blaricum, CEO of Signal Oil and Gas, based out of Haltom City has announced several significant charitable contributions to help rebuild after the devastating tornado of last week. "It was no easy task to get to the office that next day," says Van Blaricum. "The building next to us had significant damage as well as other business in the area. I felt we were very fortunate and I wanted to set an example for other businesses and individuals in the area."
Signal Oil and Gas has started with $5,000 in contributions for victims of the tornado.
Jerry and Clarice Kurosky's lives changed that dreadful afternoon. Kurosky, who owns a lumberyard business near Signal Oil and Gas, had his ear nearly severed off from flying debris. Van Blaricum helped to set up a fund for the family to help then with medical bills and getting back on their feet. He donated $2,000.00 to help start the fund.
At the end of the nineties, Van Blaricum decided to pursue building a fast food chain and towards that end hired several people away from a prominent west coast fast food chain "I was intrigued by the fast food business in the late 90s and started a hamburger chain," states Van Blaricum. "I had hired some other people from another chain that I highly respected. In the course of developing our chain we wanted to make sure we weren't copying them and made the appropriate efforts to make the business changes that we needed to protect ourselves from a legal point of view. In spite of that, the other chain, which I respect highly to this day, took us to task, and we got caught in the downturn of 9/11 and lost all of our financing and subsequently ended up having to close the business down. In the course of this, one of the local newspapers got a hold of some information that was pretty much one-sided and published a report that had a lot of information in it that I thought was incorrect."
Van Blaricum invited the local journal to hear his side but they never came out or put forth an effort to interview Van Blaricum.
James Van Blaricum at myspace.com
About James Van Blaricum
