Flashback : Dallas

A Miscellany: History, Ads, Pop Culture

Category: Bonnie & Clyde

May 7, 2015

Clyde Barrow In a Sailor Suit

clyde-barrow_sister_1925_utsa_smClyde Barrow & his sister Nell

by Paula Bosse

Behold, a teenage Clyde Barrow in a sailor suit. Bonnie & Clyde lore has it that Clyde attempted to join the United States Navy but was rejected because of lingering problems from a childhood illness, but on a quick sprint across the internet, I’ve been unable to find any specifics about Clyde’s having tried to enlist in the Navy. But he was certainly pro-navy: not only does he appear to have enjoyed wearing the sailor’s outfit, but he apparently also had a “USN” tattoo.

But what about this outfit? It certainly looks like a navy uniform. Is it an actual navy uniform? Maybe a relative’s? Is it a costume? Is it some sort of facsimile someone whipped up for him so he could slip into it whenever he felt like it? Is he play-acting? Dressing up for a party? And what about that “medal”?

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The back of this photo reads “Nell Barrow and Clyde / 1925.” Could it have been 1926 instead? On his birthday in 1925, Clyde (who was born on March 24, 1909) would have turned 16 years old. The minimum age for enlistment in the U.S. Navy jumped back and forth between 17 and 18 years old, but by the time his birthday rolled around in March of 1926, the enlistment age was 17. By the end of that year Clyde had been arrested for stealing a car, and even though charges were eventually dropped, this police record may have been enough to prevent him from enlisting even if he hadn’t failed a physical. Whatever the case, if he DID want to join the navy, he had a very limited window in which to do it: from his 17th birthday on March 24, 1926 to his first arrest on December 3, 1926.

Imagine how different things would have been if Clyde Barrow had joined the navy and sailed the Seven Seas instead of hooking up with Bonnie Parker and terrorizing the Southwest?

navy-recruiting-poster

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Sources & Notes

Photo, titled “Clyde Barrow and sister Nell Barrow, Dallas, Texas,” is from the University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections, and is accessible here. Photo loaned to UTSA by Henry J. Williams (other photos from Mr. Williams’ collection are dated 1926, some of which I used in my previous post “Babyface Barrow — 1926” here).

If anyone has more information about Clyde’s uniform in this photo, I’d love to hear from you. Similar uniforms can be seen here.

Just to be ruthlessly detailed, if Clyde Barrow visited the United States Navy recruiting office in Dallas, it was on the second floor at 206 ½ Browder Street, at Commerce, its new headquarters as of June, 1925; station physician was Lieut. Jack Terry. (Wonder if Lieut. Terry was the one who gave Clyde his walking papers? If so, I wonder if he ever knew?)

A list of requirements to join the U.S. Navy — published in The Scranton Republican on Feb. 10, 1927 — can be found here.

For previous Flashback Dallas posts on Bonnie and Clyde, click here.

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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

3 Comments
May 23, 2014

The Shooting of “Bonnie & Clyde” — 1966

bonnie-clyde_unt_113066On location: Greenville Avenue (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

Today is the 80th anniversary of the ambush and killing of Bonnie and Clyde. Since I’ve written about Ted Hinton (one of the ambushers and erstwhile motor lodge operator) and Clyde Barrow (as a not-yet-completely-delinquent 17-year old) (and dressed up in a sailor suit), why not a brief look at the movie?

I was hoping to find a bunch of local as-it-was-happening anecdotes in the newspaper archives, but I found very little. (Hey, Dallas — you had a major motion picture with Hollywood celebrites in it — couldn’t you have devoted a little more ink to it?)

The photo at the top is the only one I could find that showed shooting (…as it were) at a Dallas location. The above was shot at the Vickery Courts motor lodge at 6949 Greenville Avenue (just north of Park Lane, across Greenville and up a bit from where the old Vickery Feed Store was).

So photos were practically non-existent, but I did learn that the interiors were shot at a large soundstage on Dyer, just off Greenville, called Stage 2, owned by Bill Stokes of Bill Stokes & Associates (where I spent a blink-of-an-eye interning back in high school).

Below are two photos of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway between shots in Lavon, Texas, just outside Wylie — talking with one of the extras, Billy Joe Rogers, a saddlemaker from Wylie.

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The reactions to the finished movie from the local critics was interesting. The reviewer for The Dallas Morning News hated it. Hated it.

Bonnie and Clyde were a couple of rat punks who created terror in a vast area simply because they had no hesitation in gunning down those who stood in their way. […] They became for a brief span the nation’s most hunted outlaws and finally were shot down […] like the mad dogs they were. […] In a word: There is nothing entertaining about mad dogs; they should be killed — and quickly. (William A. Payne, DMN, Sept. 14, 1967)

I don’t know anything about the reviewer, William A. Payne, but my guess is that he vividly remembered the real-life Bonnie and Clyde and, like many other reviewers of the time, deplored the perceived glamorization of violence. (As an aside, I wondered why I wasn’t finding listings for “Bonnie and Clyde” in the early ’30s when I searched through the Dallas Morning News archives. As I learned from Mr. Payne, the two were commonly known as “Clyde and Bonnie” back then. So there you go!)

The review from Elston Brooks of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, on the other hand, was ecstatic.

“Bonnie and Clyde,” which had every right to be a B-grade gangster shootout in double-breasted suits, is instead a shattering emotional experience, a fascinating film and  — oddly enough — an important motion picture. (Elston Brooks, FWST, Sept. 15, 1967)

My guess is that Brooks was about 30 years younger than Payne and had little, if any, personal connection to the real-life outlaws who killed real people.

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The film ran up against a lot of studio problems. Warner Bros. head Jack Warner called it “the longest two hours and ten minutes I ever spent,” and the plan was to dump the movie in drive-ins and second-string-movie houses and be done with it. But producer-star Beatty was persistent and got it into the Montreal Film Festival where the positive reviews as well as the 9,000-word rave from Pauline Kael in The New Yorker assured it got the attention it merited. And it did. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and is considered a classic move of the 1960s.

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The movie had its Southwestern premiere at the Campus Theater in Denton in September, 1967. Watch (silent) news footage of the premiere from WBAP-TV (Ch. 5) at the Portal to Texas History, here (it begins about the 4:41 mark). Here’s a screen capture of Warren Beatty that day — also appearing were Michael J. Pollard and Estelle Parsons.

bonnie-and-clyde-movie_beatty_denton-premiere_wbap-tv_091367_portal

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One last little interesting tidbit was what happened after the movie wrapped production in Dallas. Warren Beatty donated the so-called “death car” to a local wax museum. Unfortunately for the wax museum, the car’s bullet holes had been filled in to shoot another scene, so the museum had to search for someone to professionally and authentically re-riddle the car with bullet holes.

It’s always something.

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Sources & Notes

Top dark and grainy photo of location shooting at Vickery Courts from The Campus Chat (newspaper of North Texas State University, Denton), Nov. 30, 1966.

Photos of Beatty and Dunaway in Lavon, Texas from The Wylie News, Oct. 20, 1966. An article and more photos from the set (local extras, etc.) can be found here and here.

Here’s a bonus Fort Worth Star-Telegram article on the fun and unusual bus trip that Beatty and other stars of the film took to some of the small towns they’d filmed in when they were back in the area for the local premiere in Denton (click to read):

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FWST, Sept. 14, 1967

And a good overview of the making of the film can be found at TCM’s website here.

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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

 

15 Comments
April 19, 2014

Babyface Barrow — 1926

clyde-barrow_with-car_1926_utsa17-year old Clyde Barrow, 1926 (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

These photos of a 17-year old Clyde Barrow belonged to one of Clyde’s first girlfriends, Eleanor Williams, a student at Forest Avenue High School in 1926. For all anyone knew, Clyde was just an ordinary kid who liked to dress up and show off his car. (Or “a” car — he was arrested for stealing his first car the same the year this photo was taken — 1926 — so I’m not sure whose car this actually is….)

clyde-barrow_eleanor-williams_1926_utsaEleanor and Clyde (whose unsubtle attempt to appear taller by standing on … something … is unconvincing and a little ridiculous).

clyde-barrow_1926_utsaSuch a babyface. In a few short years, his name and face would be splashed across the country’s newspapers as Bonnie and Clyde’s violent killing spree made him and Bonnie Parker outlaw celebrities.

clyde-barrow_no-hat_1926_utsaHe looks a lot younger than 17 here.

clyde-barrow_car_1926_utsaThe reverse of both this original photo and the top one — the car photos — have a hand-written “1926” on them as well as the film processing stamp “Finished by The National Studio, 1205 1/2 Elm St., Dallas, Texas.”

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Photographs from University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections, Copy and Reuse Restrictions Apply. Photos loaned to UTSA by Henry J. Williams, nephew of Eleanor B. Williams. All photos have “1926” on the back.

The Handbook of Texas entry for Clyde Barrow (1909-1934) is here.

Additional photos of Eleanor Williams can be seen on the Bonnie and Clyde “Texas Hideout” site here.

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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

3 Comments
February 8, 2014

Ted Hinton’s Motor Lodge — From Bonnie & Clyde to Motel Heliport

hintons-motor-lodge_front“7 miles from Downtown Dallas” — choppers welcome

by Paula Bosse

What does a man who ambushed and killed Bonnie and Clyde do once he’s retired from law enforcement? He opens a motor lodge, of course!

I was initially drawn to this image because of an unexplained lifelong fascination with Howard Johnson’s restaurants (I think I was only ever in one — the one on Mockingbird at Central, where my father introduced me to the inexplicable root beer float). But the interesting thing about this postcard is not the HoJo’s, it’s the motel next door, Hinton’s Motor Lodge, an establishment that was in business from 1955 to 1970, in Irving, very near to where Texas Stadium would be built in 1971 (Loop 12 at Hwy. 183). Why would a motor lodge be interesting? Because the owner was Ted Hinton (1904-1977), the former Dallas County Deputy Sheriff who was one of the six men who tracked down, ambushed, and killed Bonnie and Clyde in 1934. (Hinton was recruited for the posse because he would be able to identify both of them: he had known Clyde Barrow growing up, and he had apparently had a crush on Bonnie Parker in the days when she was working as a waitress and he was working for the post office.)

After killing two of the most notorious celebrity outlaws of all-time, it must have been hard to know where to turn next. He retired from the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department in 1941 and, as he was a pilot, he trained flyers for the US Army Air Corps during WWII. The fact that Hinton was a pilot MUST explain the inclusion of a “heliport” (!) in the list of motel amenities, alongside Beauty Rest mattresses, a swimming pool, and a playground for the kids.

I’m sure that, on occasion, Hinton ate next door at Howard Johnson’s. But I bet none of the other patrons had any idea that the guy sipping coffee in the next booth was one of the men who gunned down Bonnie and Clyde in a hail of gunfire that even Sam Peckinpah might have considered “a bit much.”

Aerial View of Hinton's Motor Lodge Dallas

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ad-hinton-motor-lodge_dallas-mag-june-1956_reddit“Dallas” magazine, June 1954 (via Reddit)

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Sources & Notes

An interesting short video about Ted Hinton’s connections to Bonnie and Clyde in his youth is recounted here by Hinton’s son “Boots.”

And a newsreel featuring film footage of the aftermath of the ambush — and apparently shot by Hinton himself with a 16mm movie camera loaned to him by a Dallas Times Herald photographer — can be seen here.

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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

9 Comments