Charles McAnally is a veteran who lives on the outskirts of Flower Mound.
He served as a U.S. motor pool mechanic during his military service and now makes his home in a town strewn with beauty and bounty.
But McAnally’s house doesn’t reflect the honor due an American soldier or his hometown. The mobile home where he and his daughter live is unsafe and in need of tremendous repair, according to the group Keep Flower Mound Beautiful.
Members of the group found McAnally’s home, with holes in the roof and pots inside to collect water when it rains.
“At first it just looked like he needed help with his fence and a limb and that,” said Marilyn Lawson, a member of KFMB.
The group was out last October cleaning up a yard in the area.
“But as we got to know him more we found out that he needs a lot more,” she said, adding that the group had a mobile home leveler take a look around.
The doors and windows won’t close when it rains.
His floors are rotten. He has no air conditioning and no heat. The mobile home, on Sunrise Circle off Highway 377, cannot be repaired.
“After [the leveler] took a look he called me and he was really upset,” Lawson told the Flower Mound Town Council at recent meeting. “He said, ‘Have you seen his living conditions? No one, especially a vet, should be living under these conditions.'”
But how did it get to this point?
After suffering a stroke in early 2014, McAnally was forced to quit his job as a short haul driver for Yellow Freight. His wife Carolyn died last September from complications of heart disease, which she had suffered from for years.
Medical bills piled up and so did other things. Before she died, Carolyn became a hoarder, Lawson said.
McAnally’s adult daughter cares for him, but is limited in what she can do for a living by his needs and her own medical issues.
So he lives on social security and pension incomes, which don’t even cover the deluge of medical bills for treatment that he and Carolyn needed before she died.
McAnally can’t pay his mortgage, though he does own the land his mobile home stands on.
It’s time for the veteran to get a full home makeover. His part of town requires that a modular home be set up, not a manufactured home, Lawson said.
Keep Flower Mound Beautiful has set up a GoFundMe.com page to raise funds to get McAnally a new home. They are hoping to raise 100K are are soliciting the help of Flower Mound residents to give McAnally a place to live that he can really call a home.
In the six days since the campaign began, $1,465 has been raised.
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