DISH — It was more than awkward.

Mayor Calvin Tillman was en route, for the third time in recent months, to address groups in Pennsylvania and New York about the effects of natural gas drilling on communities.

Many energy companies, having cut their drill bits in the Barnett Shale, are expanding operations in the Marcellus Shale of the northeastern U.S., another shale area with the potential to supply trillions of cubic feet of clean-burning natural gas — once the messy process of hydraulic fracturing releases it from the rock.

DRC/David Minton

Dish Mayor Calvin Tillman is shown Thursday in his office.

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After Tillman arrived in Pennsylvania, he was supposed to join New York state Sen. Antoine Thompson, D-Erie, chairman of that body’s Environmental Conservation Committee, and several other senators and representatives from New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection on its second fact-finding tour.

The first stop was Towanda and Chesapeake Energy’s model drill site, but Chesapeake’s New York attorney sent word that Tillman “was not welcome,” according to Michael Lebron, a local volunteer.

Tillman heard a couple of different reasons why, he said, including that he was anti-drilling and that the industry was suspect about whom he represented.

Tillman has said several times that he paid for the trips himself.

Accustomed to letting volunteers drive him when he visits communities in the Marcellus Shale, he rolled with the schedule change. Lebron took Tillman, instead, to tour nearby areas that had been ravaged by drilling, including Dimock, where Houston-based Cabot Oil and Gas has been ordered — so far — to plug three gas wells, permanently provide drinking water for 14 homes and pay a $240,000 fine, after its operations compromised the water supply for many families there.

Not including Tillman on the tour “was a really stupid blunder on their part,” Lebron said, referring to the attorney’s law firm, which also handles public relations for Chesapeake.

When Lebron and Tillman met up with the senators later, in Dimock, the attorney asked to continue on the tour. Initially, some in the group resisted. Eventually, cooler heads, including Tillman’s, prevailed, and the attorney was allowed to come along.

Unexpected voice

Tillman, 37, catches up on Dish town business most Saturday mornings, combing through notices and paperwork, discussing grant opportunities and answering questions from Dish’s two part-time employees.

Meanwhile, his two sons, Clay, 7, and Josh, 5, sit in chairs — sometimes — in front of the flat-screen television in the community room, watching Nick Jr. cartoons on the satellite service the town is named for.

“Josh, get up off the floor, buddy,” Tillman hollers through his office door, explaining that just like the preacher’s child sees the sanctuary, his boys see Dish Town Hall as an extension of the family home, which happens to be across the street.

A safety expert for the Federal Aviation Administration, Tillman is far better known — locally and nationwide — as an outspoken advocate, defending his community against the negative effects of the natural gas industry.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s director for Region 6, Al Armendariz, stopped in Dish during a tour of Barnett Shale facilities with the agency’s enforcement officials in early May. He discussed the agency’s progress in rewriting rules for oil and gas development to better protect human health and the environment.

He told Tillman and other residents attending the meeting that there are many other communities near refineries, chemical plants and toxic waste sites that have tried to get the attention of state and federal officials as well as the media — some for decades — without much success. They have not had the success that Dish has had in changing the national conversation about the impact of shale drilling, he said.

“It’s going to take a while and it’s frustrating that you got to this point, but the ball is moving forward,” Armendariz said, commending Tillman to his constituents for being a strong voice and willing to speak nationally on the topic.

When environmental activists in upstate New York extended their first invitation to come talk to them, Tillman said he didn’t deliver what they were seeking.

“You feel the weight of the stares before you even get started,” Tillman said. “You could see in people’s faces, they were ready to fight.”

As Tillman works through his presentation — which isn’t anti-drilling, but advocates for best practices — people’s faces change.

“After that first tour, I got both sides thinking,” Tillman said.

Chesapeake’s New York attorney cornered Tillman at one point during his third speaking tour — which included a panel discussion at the Cooper Union, the same place where Abraham Lincoln urged New Yorkers to not capitulate to Southern demands for slavery — asking whether Tillman would endorse a set of best practices if his client came up with them.

“I have to give him credit for that,” Tillman said. “He tried to back me into a corner.”

In every room, every time he talks, Tillman says, he tries to find common ground, having people raise their hand if they want to breathe clean air and drink clean water.

“When I get done with my presentations, very few people don’t agree with at least part of what I say,” Tillman said.

Some critics call Tillman an anti-drilling zealot and environmental wacko. They say his views on the negative effects of drilling represent a fringe element rather than the practical concerns of average people.

If a New York landowner walks away from a million-dollar lease, or variances in Flower Mound get denied, somehow the critics make it out to be his fault, Tillman said.

He doesn’t laugh off the criticism, but he doesn’t belabor it either.

“I don’t get bogged down in their rhetoric,” Tillman said.

Family values

The youngest member of a blended family, Tillman grew up in Jennings, one of many small towns to boom and bust with the Oklahoma oil fields. He joined the U.S. Air Force when he was 17. At 23, he was still serving when his father, a roughneck who later worked for American Airlines, died unexpectedly.

“I was living the life of a young GI, traveling the world and partying,” Tillman said. The shock changed everything as he — his father’s only son — was thrust to the head of the family.

But the experience also cemented his parents’ early lessons.

As a boy, Tillman was not allowed to bully anyone, nor was he allowed to stand by and watch as someone else was bullied.

He’s not sure why that lesson was so important to his parents, though he notes his parents were older when he was born, and both came of age in the Great Depression.

Later, after marrying the college girl he met on the dance floor of a honky-tonk between Jennings and Stillwater, Tillman began his civilian career in aviation, with the couple moving first to Bartlesville, north of Tulsa, and then to Chicago.

Calvin and Tiffiney Tillman’s first child, Clay, was born 10 weeks premature. At least one of them went every day to the neonatal intensive care unit in Racine, Wis., to be with their baby. Over time, the couple noticed many preemies had no visitors. They learned, he said, those babies are often abandoned.

They vowed that they would adopt as soon as they were able — no adoption agency would let them take home another baby until Clay was 2 years old.

The family moved to Texas in 2003. Tillman was sleeping soundly when his wife awoke him one night in 2005 after she’d heard about a month-old baby abandoned at a Dallas fire station on the nightly news. She told him she’d made some calls.

“I think I groggily said something like ‘that’s great,’ and then a couple of hours later she put a baby down next to me,” Tillman said.

The adoption went smoothly, and since that night, the Tillman family is the only family Josh has ever known, he said.

For now, the couple is busy with their two boys.

“Who knows what will touch our hearts later on?” Tillman said. “Both boys have developmental delays, and it’s better for us to focus on that.

“The world needs people like that, but you can’t fix everything that’s wrong in the world. It’s tough. You really want to, but you can’t.”

School of politics

Tillman first ran for town commissioner in 2005, campaigning together with Bill Merritt, who defeated the town’s founder, L.E. Clark, in a hard-fought, and court-challenged, mayoral election.

Not long after Merritt took office, a controversy arose over a rumored “secret” meeting for a housing development, Tillman said. He realized that, no matter whether the rumors were true, he needed to do much more in studying applicable codes and teaching himself about his responsibilities as an elected representative.

“At the time, I didn’t have access to the town’s attorney, at least not the way I do now,” Tillman said.

Later, in the middle of his first term, he mailed a three-page letter to every household in town and tipped the media that he had asked residents the existential question: Should the town be abolished?

He was concerned the battle between Clark and Merritt showed no signs of waning, and the legal fees could bankrupt the town. Residents responded to the letter, coming out in force and saying they didn’t want to abolish the town and to just rein in the costs.

Tillman was skeptical.

“The wounds are cut too deep,” he said at that time. “It’s all emotionally driven.”

When the 2007 election rolled around, Tillman laid down the gauntlet, filing to challenge Merritt for the mayor’s seat. Merritt withdrew from the race.

That skill for self-education served him well, he said.

By the time he was up for re-election in 2009, the town had all but forgotten the mayoral feud that Jon Stewart and The Daily Show parodied in January 2006. Dish was embroiled in another existential battle, one that pitted the lives of residents, their livestock and pets, and their very way of life, against the rapid proliferation of pipelines (more than 20), treatment equipment and compressors (at least 11) and metering facilities (three inside town limits) needed to push trillions of cubic feet of Barnett Shale gas on to an energy-hungry nation.

And Tillman, an independent who has been known to attend a “tea party” rally or two, had tuned in to residents’ issues about property and safety, while other officials in Austin remained tone-deaf to people’s concerns.

He and others in Denton County campaigned vigorously last year for legislation to close a loophole in pipeline legislation that allows private energy companies to form public utilities with eminent domain powers.

They lost.

Later, Tillman watched Deborah Medina’s rise during the Republican primary with interest.

“While they [Gov. Perry and Sen. Hutchison] were bickering, she was picking their pockets,” Tillman said, adding that the problems in Austin are exacerbated by Perry’s entrenchment.

When the Texas Department of State Health Services released its report this month, claiming it found no pattern of communitywide exposure to emissions from natural gas extraction, Dish town commissioner William Sciscoe echoed the skepticism Tillman and many Dish residents have about the breadth and scope of Perry’s appointees and their effect on state regulators.

That department, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Railroad Commission “now speak with one voice, telling Texans everywhere that toxins in your air and water hundreds of times the EPA short-term and long-term exposure levels will not harm you or your children,” Sciscoe said in a prepared statement.

Tillman waves a copy of the sign-in sheet he requested to see who visited TCEQ’s executive director on Dec. 22, around the time the agency was performing air quality tests in Fort Worth, and points out the signatures of several industry lobbyists, including the Texas Pipeline Association.

He keeps a blog, baddish. blogspot.com, and released this week his own assessment of the problem between industry and state regulators.

“Their argument is not whether they are cleaning up, or releasing, or not releasing,” Tillman said. “Their argument is whether it exists.

“I’m a pretty common-sense guy. Someday something will come out — there will be a cancer cluster in Fort Worth — all because they didn’t do the right thing.”

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com.