Flashback : Dallas

All hail the Highland Park Cafeteria…

by Paula Bosse

2023 is over! Years end, people put things in lists. Like this! These are the most popular posts of the past year, as determined by page views, clicks, likes, shares, and comments. There are a couple of surprises, and fully half of the top 10 are food/drink-related. As always, thank you for spending some of your time stopping by Flashback Dallas, and I wish everyone a Happy 2024!

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These are the most-read (or at least most looked-at!) Flashback Dallas posts of 2023, starting with the most popular. To see each full post, click on the title; to see larger images of the thumbnails, click on the picture.

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1.  “HIGHLAND PARK CAFETERIA AND THE KNOX STREET BUSINESS DISTRICT”  (August)

I know people loved the Highland Park Cafeteria, but I was pretty surprised by the sheer number of hits this post got and continues to get. There’s not much to it, really — a photo and a map. It’s hard to believe the HPC powers-that-be could just let a place as popular as this close down. Perhaps it will rise again one day.

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2.  “AUNT STELLE’S SNO CONE”  (September)

I knew this would be a popular post, even though I had never heard of Aunt Stelle or her sno cones. I became aware of this Oak Cliff institution only after having seen several ads for it in Sunset High School yearbooks. I enjoyed reading people’s memories of the place on the Flashback Dallas Facebook page (where it received an unbelievable number of likes, comments, and shares). Oak Cliff people are pretty hardcore.

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3.  “EX-SLAVES IN DALLAS — 1937”  (June)

This is perhaps the biggest surprise on this list. The photographs and oral histories of Dallas residents who had lived some of their lives as enslaved people (not necessarily in Texas) was part of a WPA project. When I grew up, it never entered my mind that there had been slaves in Dallas — either people living as slaves in Dallas during the time of slavery, or people who had been slaves living in Dallas up through the 1940s and 1950s. One of the most sobering posts I’ve ever written is a collection of ads about slaves in Dallas from the 1850s and 1860s — it’s linked at the bottom of this post.

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4.  “DR PEPPER BOTTLING PLANT, SECOND AVE. & HICKORY — ca. 1938”  (August)

Before it relocated to its beautiful Art Deco headquarters on Mockingbird, Dr Pepper’s HQ was in a building that is still standing between Fair Park and Deep Ellum. See photos of what it looked like inside.

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5.  “GRITTY DALLAS — 1969”  (July)

Thank you, SMU theology students for making this odd little documentary featuring footage of parts of the city not often captured on film. I hope SMU has a cleaner, sharper copy of this film somewhere. It’s worth a watch (but keep that finger at the ready on the fast-forward button during the slower bits!).

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6.  “EL CHICO FOODS / CUELLAR FOODS”  (February)

Dallas loves its Tex-Mex. I had no idea the Cuellars had expanded so far into retail food manufacturing. My greatest discovery while researching this was that canned tortillas ever existed. They did. Think how much better we have things now, at least in matters tortilla-related.

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7.  “DALLAS FIRE STATIONS — 1951”  (May)

I loved this. So many photos! And several of these buildings are still standing. If there’s one thing Dallas loves as much as Oak Cliff and Tex-Mex, it’s firehouses.

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8.  “ST. MARK’S FROM THE AIR”  (April)

I love aerial photos of Dallas before choking sprawl clogged up everything. When these photos were taken in the early 1960s, there was still a lot of open land in areas that are now completely developed.

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9.  “OAK CLIFF SCHOOLS — 1916”  (December)

Oak Cliff, back again. A lot of the schools seen in this post are still around. For a lot of places, it’s not a big deal when buildings cross the century mark. But it is for Dallas. Dallas likes new, new, new! I always appreciate buildings that have somehow survived and feel like I should give them a little pep talk to encourage them to keep on keeping on.

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10.  “TEX-MEX IN A CAN (WITH BONUS CHILI-BURGER RECIPE) — 1953/1954”  (February)

You must read the excerpts from this recipe booklet which was prepared to teach customers not familiar with Tex-Mex what various dishes were. Mexican food was not as widely available in the 1950s as it is now. Adventurous people in non-Southwestern states buying a can of refried beans might have had no idea what to do with it (imagine seeing your first can of refried beans in, say, Minnesota). The recipe for the Chili Burger (tantalizingly, no beef patties are involved…) is worth the price of admission. I’m so glad this one squeaked into the year’s Top 10.

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UNSTOPPABLE: The most popular Flashback Dallas post ever is “BONNIE PARKER: ‘BURIED IN AN ICE-BLUE NEGLIGEE’ — 1934” (from April 2016). It’s actually the most popular post of 2023, but the Year-End Top 10 is for new posts only. Otherwise, just assume this will be the most popular post of every year.

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HONORABLE MENTION: A post I wrote back in 2018 had a sudden huge surge in hits this year: “‘DR. DANTE’ DODGES BULLETS IN DALLAS — 1970,” about a stage hypnotist who was also a conman and an ex-husband of Lana Turner. While in Dallas for a show, he claimed to have been shot at by Frank Sinatra’s “people.” This is one of my all-time favorite posts, but I couldn’t figure out why there was suddenly so much interest in it, seemingly out of nowhere. It wasn’t until a person commented and said she had found my post after listening to a new true-crime podcast, “Chameleon: Gallery of Lies, Dr. Dante.” There’s been a short documentary about Dante, but there really needs to be a full-length bio-pic. I’m sure someone’s working on it. (This post also ranked higher than any in the 2023 Top 10, but being almost 6 years old, it is out of the running for 2023 glory.)

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And, with that, the final post of 2023 can be laid to rest (in an ice-blue negligee). Thanks to everyone who stops by! Let’s all have a happy 2024!

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Sources & Notes

See all three 2023 Year-End “best of” lists here.

See all Flashback Dallas Year-End lists — past and present — here.

If you would like to support me on Patreon, please check out my page here. I post exclusive short Dallas history posts there every day.

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Copyright © 2023 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.