Flashback : Dallas

Big D Kodachrome

by Paula Bosse

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so why not now? These are things I’ve collected over the past months which I am now adding to old posts in order to keep everything together.

The first is the color photo above, showing the super-fab Walgreens at the corner of Commerce and Akard (see my favorite photo of it in this post), with the view looking north on Akard. I’ve added it to the 2021 post “Downtown Dallas in Color — 1940s & 1950s.” (Source: eBay)

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I’ve added some text and a couple of photos about Ernest Oates, the Englishman who brought soccer to Dallas, to the 2014 post “The Dallas Athletics, Dallas’ First Soccer Team — 1908.” (Source, 1922 Dallas city directory)

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I’ve added this 1961 ad to the perhaps-too-exhaustingly-exhaustive post from 2018, “Sam Ventura’s Italian Village, Oak Lawn.” (Source: Diane Wisdom Papers, Archives of Women of the Southwest, DeGolyer Library, SMU, here)

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I try to avoid posting photos with watermarks, but I love this, so I’ve added it to one of my favorite posts, “Ghost Rails of the Belmont Streetcar Line” from 2018. It shows a Belmont car in front of the Palace Theatre at Elm and Ervay. The marquee shows that “New Moon” — starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy — is playing. “New Moon” opened at the Palace on July 4, 1940 and ran for a week. (Source: eBay)

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Do people still say “funeral parlor”? This ad from 1937 for the Weever Funeral Home has been added to the 2015 post “Not Dead Yet at McKinney & Routh.” The building at 2533 McKinney was built in 1927 and was a strikingly beautiful (and pricey) funeral home — it’s still standing and has been occupied in recent years by a string of Uptown restaurants. This ad proudly notes that “Weever advertises his prices” — he is completely transparent about the fact that the price of a silver-plated casket is gonna set you back $2,250 (the equivalent in today’s money of $45,000). Can’t say you weren’t warned. (Source: 1937 Dallas city directory)

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These two photos have to do with a concrete house built in University Park around 1914 (I was kind of obsessed with it a few years ago). They have been added to the 2018 post “Dallas in ‘The Western Architect,’ 1914: Park Cities Residences” (this is one in a ridiculously crammed-full-of-information 7-part series I wrote about buildings featured in an architectural journal — I  probably learned more about early-20th-century buildings in Dallas from researching and writing those posts than from anything else I’ve done). The first photo (the concrete house, looking a lot less dynamic than when it was brand new) was taken around 1931; the second photo (the Presley Apartments, which replaced the concrete house when it was demolished) is from about 1956. (Source: the “Brown Books” from the University Park Library, which I wrote about here — Dear University Park Library: I can no longer get this incredibly useful site to work!)

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Below, a charming ad for the skating rink at Fair Park. It has been added to the charming 2014 post “Skate Date!” (“charming” if you skim over the prostitution bits). (Source: eBay)

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I’ve added this photo of the construction of the Dallas Athletic Club — taken by Charles Erwin Arnold — to the 2015 post “The Dallas Athletic Club Building, 1925-1981.” Kinda low-res and watermarked, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before, and I really like it. The intersection is Elm and St. Paul, and the view is to the south. (Source: Arnold Photographic Collection, Dallas Historical Society. Want it high-res with no watermark? Hie thee to the DHS and ask for item A.68.28.17.)

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This Mohr Chevrolet ad from 1975 has been added to the 2021 post “Simms Super Service Station, Cedar Springs & Maple — 1930.” (Source: 1975 Dallas city directory)

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Lastly, I’ve added a few articles and images to the 2014 post “Roger Corman Does Dallas,” about a painfully groovy, super-low-budget, anti-establishment movie, a few scenes of which were filmed in downtown Dallas and on the SMU campus in 1969. The official movie title is complicated and irritatingly punctuated — let’s just call it “Gas” to make things easier. Here’s one of the things I’ve added to the original post, a 1970 ad from the SMU campus newspaper (click to see a larger image). (Source: SMU Daily Campus, Nov. 4, 1970, Student Newspapers collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)

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Until next time….

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