Woodrow Teens Hang Around — 1948
by Paula Bosse
by Paula Bosse
Photos from the 1948 Woodrow Wilson High School yearbook show how kids hung out in post-war Lakewood and Lower Greenville. I don’t know where some of these photos were taken — if you do, please let me know!
Above, there were lots of soda shops/pharmacy fountains to patronize. Including Harrell’s, in the familiar-to-anyone-who-has-spent-any-time-in-Lakewood turreted still-there building, below.
And here:
And here:
And here, where dressed-up teens are waiting for a table:
And here, the “fancy” Sammy’s on Greenville Avenue (right across the street from the less fancy Sammy’s):
I have been obsessed with this building (just south of the intersection of Greenville and Ross) my whole life. Was there open-air dining upstairs? Dancing?
Since I mentioned it, these were the three Sammy’s which were in operation in 1945 — the two on Greenville and one in Highland Park Village:
So, yeah, there was lots of hanging around for Woodrow kids back in 1948.
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Sources & Notes
All images (except the ad for Sammy’s) are from the 1948 Crusader, the yearbook of Woodrow Wilson High School.
Sammy’s ad is from the 1945 Highland Park High School yearbook.
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Copyright © 2023 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
Wow, Paula. You continue to unearth the amazing history of Dallas! My mom graduated from Adamson back in the early 40’s. The sports director there was Mr. Griffith who later became the principal at Sunset when I graduated in ’67. I recently, by accident, found a pic of my mom who worked at the aircraft manufacturing plant (not sure if it was LTV) but it was her with a notepad on the bomber assembly plant. I say, accidentally, as I was researching for a screenplay which I worked on about the women at the aircraft assembly plant. She married my father, Harold Grant, who was a bomber pilot during WW2. I’ll try to dig up that pic and more pics of the DFW (no one would ever use DFW at that time as it was believed that the horrible sewerage smell that when toilets were flushed in Ft. Worth, that was the cause of the smell. LOL. Who knows? That could have been true!
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Your mom probably knew mine: Virginia “LaYvonne” Peterson as she was known then. She was a ’44 Adamson graduate. I graduated from Woodrow in ’85. [Yes, she had me at almost 41.]
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Your mother probably worked at the North American Aviation plant in Grand Prairie which made, among other planes, the B-24 bomber. The Consolidated plant in Fort Worth also produced the B-24 during the war but it would have been a long commute.
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Grew up in the Lower Greenville/Lower Skillman area, and saw that building go through lots of iterations from the mid-’70s onward: restaurant, bar, clothing store, tire and automotive shop, and now, gym. What’s upstairs is still a beautiful mystery.
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I’ve always been fascinated by that building Sammy’s was in (next to Ships Lounge), it was a tex mex restaurant in the 80’s & 90’s and the back part was Spot Lite lingerie and later a skate shop.
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The top photo of the boy and girl was taken at Harrell’s. The boy in the photo was my dad’s first cousin, Curtis “Buddy” Musgrove. He was very popular at Woodrow (WW ’49). Even today, I still get asked if I am related to Buddy!
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Ha! I knew you’d know! Thanks, Teresa!
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Classic shots! Looks like they could be used by a movie producer who wants an authentic look!
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Peggy, your right, and that’s exactly what I do. I often work with Production Designers, an often ignored title, and the way I work with them, especially on a period piece, is to find lots of old photos like this. Often, we look at thousands of photos until we get the right design. All of that is passed on to me an the Director of Photography, the Set Decorator and together we make the hopefully right decisions. A lot of other people, including the stars are brought into the discussion until we decide we have the right “look”. I always want everyone to have some agreement. Oh, I forgot to mention the costume director, they. play a large role as well. It’s actually very complex and I’m often more of a arbitrator between department heads. All of this takes place weeks before the “shoot”.
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I don’t get it. The 15 year old boys look like 15 year old boys and the 15 year old girls look like their 33rd birthday is next week.
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Haha! I know!
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Looks like the 1516 Greenville Sammy’s was demolished sometime between May 2012 and August 2013. Shame. Cute little building.
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Nice work, Paula! Thanks for highlighting Woodrow!
I’m a wildcat, ‘72, and lived at lower Greenville during those years. The Sammy’s drive-inn building looks like a restaurant we had our graduating rehearsal breakfast a day or two before graduation night.
It seems you are so knowledgeable about our neighborhood, I wonder if you know about a small, mom and pop burger joint on Greenville and Vickery…I think the name was “Here ‘Tis”, it was 1968-1969, that I used to go there a lot. Good, cheap burgers!
Do you remember seeing it?
Robert Garcia
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Hi, Robert. Thanks! Yes, I remember Here ‘Tis!
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Here ‘Tis – a small chain of burger joints. There was one on Henderson, I’m pretty sure. As a little boy I was fascinated by their sign which had one of those pairs of counter-rotating dumbbells that looked like they were going back and forth. I think the whole sign was “Here ‘Tis – Good Food”.
A family joke was that my grandmother who occasionally made malapropisms could never quite get the name straight and always referred to the place as “There Was”.
At that point in my life if we went for burgers it was either to Charco’s on Mockingbird/Abrams, or a bit later to the Burger King on Mockingbird just east of Central. I expect my parents had eaten at “Here ‘Tis” back in the 50s. I don’t remember ever setting foot in “Here ‘Tis”.
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Ha. Our family joke was when we passed the sign, someone in the car would say “Here ‘Tis”! And the response would always be — as we passed by — “There ‘Twas.”
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