FORMER CAPE MAN FEATURED AT HEARTLAND WOMEN'S SHOW

Michael Holigan, host of the syndicated TV show "Your New House" and owner of the largest home-building company in Tennessee, will appear Saturday at the Heartland Women's Show.

The 30-year-old Holigan already has some memories of Cape Girardeau. He attended Alma Schrader Elementary School during first, second and part of third grade before his family moved to Kansas City. His father, Harold, was the district manager for Southwestern Bell.

The family still owns a 1,600-acre farm near Puxico.

The Holigan family eventually lived in New Jersey, Houston and San Antonio and Dallas.

Holigan graduated from Texas Tech in 1987 and was involved in land development projects across the country when his father started building a few homes in Nashville in 1990.

"Now we're the No. 1 builder in the state of Tennessee," he said in a phone interview from the company's headquarters in Dallas. Holigan, his wife Debbi and their 4-year-old son Brandon live in Dallas.

Holigan Homes will build more than 1,000 homes throughout Dallas, Nashville and Salt Lake City during 1996. Holigan said the company's use of hurricane straps to prevent home from blowing over in tornadoes and its use of extra insulation are two reasons why has become so popular.

His TV career began because his sales people were having difficulty explaining why homes need hurricane straps and more insulation. "So we made an infomercial-type video and it was put on the air 10 times," he said. "We were overrun."

Holigan said he'd tapped into a market of customers who wanted to buy or improve a normal house and wanted to know how to go about it.

Now his syndicated show, which is shown on KFVS-TV, is starting only its second season and already is aired in 145 markets over 83 percent of the country.

Saturday, Holigan will conduct three seminars at the Heartland Women's Show. The first at 11:30 a.m. will demonstrate how to sponge-paint a wall. At 2 p.m. Holigan will do "ragging on" and "ragging off," painting techniques he recently demonstrated on "The Today Show."

At 4 p.m. he will teach people how to buy a home.