Leisure | Flashback : Dallas

February 20, 2014

Speaking of the Arcadia and Its “Rustic Simplicity”…

Arcadia Theater, 1927…

by Paula Bosse

Above is a rendering of architect W. Scott Dunne’s design for the Arcadia Theater on Greenville Avenue, at Sears Street, between Ross Avenue and Belmont. (The low-flying bi-plane is a nice touch.) Among the many Dallas theaters designed by Dunne were the Esquire in Oak Lawn and the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff (as well as another entertainment mecca, the Fair Park Band Shell).

The Dallas Morning News had this to say about Dunne’s concept for the new “suburban theater” in 1927:

W. Scott Dunne, architect of Arcadia, is working out an interior design that should prove in harmony with the theater’s name — an atmospheric design of as near rustic simplicity as is possible in a theater.

“Rustic”!

A photo of the not-particularly-rustic exterior in 1930:

1930

The fabulous giant tree marquee, posted previously (link to post below), from about this time can be seen here.

All went well for many years until 1940 or ’41 when the original 1927 building was badly damaged in a fire; it had to be gutted and completely overhauled by architects Pettigrew & Worley. John A. Worley wrote an article for Box Office magazine about the rebuilding process (link below), including the hard-to-believe tidbit that the firm had been “vigorously instructed to studiously avoid any pretense of ‘super-colossal’ — or, more thoroughly defined, we were told to steer clear of that ‘regal’ air, which had been known to impel theater patrons to take off their shoes before daring to walk across the foyer.”

The article even has a photo of the lopped-off, now-sadly diminished tree sign. (The author — in something of a reach — explains that the “stump” was there as a symbol of the “Arcadian” nature of the theater.) (You just know that both Pettigrew and Worley were praying for the go-ahead to just get rid of it already.)

1941

There was another bad fire in 1958, which led to further renovation. By then, that tree was loooooong gone and but a dim memory.

There sure were a lot of fires at the ol’ Arcadia. Including the final, fatal one, in 2006. R.I.P. And from the ashes sprang the present-day Trader Joe’s.

***

Sources & Notes

Photo showing “The Vagabond King” (1930), from the Hardin-Simmons University Library via the Portal to Texas History, here.

Photo showing “stump” is from the June 21, 1941 issue of Boxoffice.

An interesting article on the Arcadia — and life along Lowest Greenville — can be found in a Lakewood Advocate article “The Rise and Fall of the Arcadia,” here.

The original post that spurred a further look into the early days of the Arcadia — and the one with the crazy huge electric tree marquee — can be found in the Flashback Dallas post “The Arcadia Theater Sign You’ve Never Seen,” here.

3 Comments

February 19, 2014

The Arcadia Theater Sign You’ve Never Seen

Best theater marquee EVER! Lower Greenville, late ’20s (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

I LOVE this photo! Forget the sign for a moment (difficult though that may be…) — take a look at Greenville Avenue in the late-1920s! That building at the top right, across the street from the (late, lamented) Arcadia, is still there. The car heading north is just about to pass where the 7-Eleven is now (at Richmond). As for that tree-shaped sign … wow. I’ve never seen anything like that. The photo was used in a promotional campaign for a new sort of electric marquee technology.

Here’s what Arcadia manager Wally Akin (pictured above) had to say about this new-fangled Vendope Changeable ‘Lectric Letter thing:

I’m not sure the Vendope Service System took off, but, damn, that sign is cool. Here’s a another view, from 1930, looking up Greenville from about Alta — you can see how close to the curb the sign was. Imagine driving up the street and seeing that lit up in front of you.

It was a little less cool, though, by 1937 when the “tree” had been pruned and tampered with almost beyond recognition, but, still, that is one weird eye-catcher of a marquee.

UPDATE: The following information comes from a comment to me from the estimable Angus Wynne, who took over the Arcadia in the 1980s (and 1990s?) and booked some great live shows there (several of which I paid to see): “The tree sign evolved from a lesser marquee that was installed in a real tree which grew in the original parkway formerly located adjacent to the street. A very unusual attraction, it remained there for many years until the tree died, upon which the owner had it concreted over and had the electric branches added, pictured here. It was torn down when the theater’s facade and interior were renovated during the 1940’s.”

What a shame that something so wonderful didn’t survive. All those lights! I’d have loved to have seen it lit up at night, back when this lowest stretch of Greenville Avenue was called a “northern” and “remote” part of the city.

***

Sources & Notes

First three images, including top photo, from the Hardin-Simmons University Library, via the Portal to Texas History — these and other Arcadia Theatre images from this collection can be viewed here. The main photo (MUCH larger when clicked) is undated, but it’s sometime between the Arcadia’s opening in 1927 and the Publix theater chain’s plummet into receivership around 1931. UPDATE: When I posted this photo back in February, 2014, I was excited to think I had stumbled across something that had been unseen for years. At almost the exact time I posted this, Troy Sherrod’s great book Historic Dallas Theatres was published … and this photo was in it. Troy beat me to it!

If you’re into patent-perusing, just google “Vendope” and you’ll see oodles — an example of one them is here. I’m not sure if this is part of the same system described above, but this patent is dated 1931. The inventor (apparently of Fort Worth) had the unlikely name of Vendope L. Pistocco. Or maybe Van Lawrence Vendope. …There’s a Vendope in there somewhere.

1930 view of Lowest Greenville, looking north from Alta, is from the archives of the Dallas Public Library.

For further exploration of the Arcadia (and another photo of the barely recognizable tree), see my follow-up post here.

8 Comments

February 18, 2014

L. Craddock & Co. — Pioneer Whiskey Purveyors

L. Craddock ad, 1912

by Paula Bosse

L. Craddock, an Alabama native born in 1847, arrived in Dallas in 1875 and opened a liquor business at Main and Austin streets in a building built by the Odd Fellows. It was a success, becoming one of the largest such businesses in a young, thirsty city.

Feeling a flush of civic pride, Mr. Craddock branched out beyond the retail world of alcohol sales, and in the late 1870s he opened the city’s second theatrical “opera house,” conveniently housed on the second floor of his liquor emporium, above his saloon and retail business. The theater was immensely popular and hosted the important performers and lecturers of the day, until the much larger Dallas Opera House arrived on the scene and siphoned off Craddock’s audiences. He closed the second-floor theater in the mid-1880s (a space which, presumably, continued to be used as an IOOF meeting hall) but kept the business on the ground floor.

The first location, at Main & Austin, with theater on second floor (1880s)

In 1887 Craddock decided to change careers. He sold his company to Messrs. Swope and Mangold (more on them later) and retired from the liquor trade — if only temporarily. I’m not sure what prompted this somewhat unexpected decision (I’d like to think there was some juicy, illicit reason), but, for whatever reason, he decided to give real estate a whirl. Craddock was certainly a savvy wheeler-dealer and he probably did well buying and selling properties in booming Dallas, but (again, for whatever reason) he seems to have tired of real estate, and, by at least 1894 (if not sooner), he had returned to the whiskey trade and had built up an even more massive wholesale liquor business than before.

1907 (click for much larger image)

He had a new, larger building, this time on Elm, between N. Lamar and Griffin. In the company’s incessant barrage of advertising, he touted the company’s unequaled, unstoppable success as purveyors of the finest alcohol available. One ad even took on something of a hectoring, lecturing tone as it admonished the reader with this snappy tagline:

“We are the Largest Shippers of Whiskey to the Consumer in the South. Does it not seem Plain to you that the reason for this is that we sell the Best Goods for the Money.”

1906

Arrogant or just supremely confident, Craddock was rolling in the dough for many, many years. Until … disaster struck. Prohibition. With the inevitable apocalypse about to hit the alcoholic beverage industry, L. Craddock threw in the towel and retired. For good this time. I’m sure many a faithful L. Craddock & Co. customer stocked up on as much as they could hoard in the final weeks of the prices-way-WAY-higher-than-normal going-out-of-business sale.

Craddock retired to Colorado, but in 1922, he returned to present to the city a valuable ten-acre tract of land in the old Cedar Springs area — land he asked be used as a park. Craddock Park remains a part of the Dallas Parks system today.

Dallas Morning News, Dec. 3, 1922

It’s interesting to note that in every article about Mr. Craddock that appeared during and after Prohibition — such as the articles reporting his generous gift to the city — there was never any mention of what kind of business he had been in or how he had made his great fortune. Even in his obituary. He was always vaguely described as a “pioneer businessman.”

Speaking of his obituary (which, by the way, was the place I actually saw his first name finally revealed — it was Lemuel), L. Craddock — Dallas’ great retailer of beer, wine, and spirits — died on December 2, 1933. Three days before the repeal of Prohibition. THREE DAYS. O, cruel fate.

ADDED: Interesting tidbit about a legal matter brought by Federal prosecutors. In 1914, Craddock was found guilty of “illicit liquor dealing” — shipping barrels of whiskey (labeled “floor sweep”) into the former Indian Territory of Oklahoma. Craddock wrote a check for the fine of $5,000 right there in the courtroom. The three men who actually did the deed were sentenced to a year and a day at Leavenworth. (I’m never sure how much faith to put in the Inflation Calculator, but according to said calculator, $5,000 in today’s money would be approaching $115,000. I think ol’ Lemuel was doing all right, money-wise. I’m guessing this “floor sweep” thing was not an isolated incident.)

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 19, 1914

***

Sources & Notes

Top L. Craddock & Co. ad from 1912.

Photograph of first location, with theater, from Historic Dallas Theaters by Troy Sherrod (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2014).

Ad featuring rendering of second Craddock location at Elm & Poydras, signed Fishburn Co. Dallas, from 1906.

Photograph of L. Craddock from a Dallas Morning News interview in which he reminisces about the Craddock Opera House, published December 3, 1925. It’s an informative interview about early Dallas (like REALLY early Dallas) — the article can be read here.

Update: I’ve wondered if this building downtown is the Craddock building, cut down and uglified. The current address is 911 Elm (I assume that the addresses for that stretch of Elm changed when the cross-street configuration changed). The Dallas Central Appraisal District gives the construction date of that building as 1937, but the DCAD dates are frequently not accurate. I don’t know. It’s very similar (missing the third floor…) and in about the exact same spot. Looks like it to me. That poor 100-plus-year-old building needs some loving attention. Here is a Google street view from early 2014:

Most images in this post are larger when clicked.

22 Comments

February 17, 2014

Gus Roos Men’s Clothing — 1951

Elm and Akard and familiar skyline…

by Paula Bosse

One of the top men’s clothiers, right there at Roos Corner. (Pegasus!)

2 Comments

February 17, 2014

Jerry Scoggins, From WFAA Staff Musician to Pop Culture Icon

Jerry Scoggins in the WFAA studios, 1941

by Paula Bosse

You know Jerry Scoggins. You DO. You can sing along with his most famous recording. But you might not know his name — even if you do know it, you’re not sure why you know it. And you’ve almost certainly never seen a picture of him. But there he is in the photo above, in 1941, at the studios of WFAA radio where he was a staff musician and occasional on-air personality. The caption reads: “Guitarist Jerry Scoggins arrives for a rehearsal in shiny cowboy boots.”

During his time at WFAA (he was there almost a decade — he started when the station still had studios in the Baker Hotel), Jerry was in countless bands — in fact, he often had several going at the same time. Some of his bands were: The Bumblebees, the Tune Tumblers (with a then-unknown Dale Evans as the group’s “girl singer”), Three Cats & a Canary, The Baboleers, and The Cowhands.

His main group, though, was the Cass County Kids, a popular trio that performed western music and who claimed to have a repertoire of over 500 songs (!).

In 1945, after years of working as mostly anonymous radio musicians, the Kids finally hit the big time. Gene Autry asked them to join him, and they left Dallas for Hollywood, changing their name in the process — at Autry’s request — to the (slightly) more age-appropriate Cass County Boys. They appeared in movies, on television, and on record with Autry for several years, and from all accounts, the Cass County Boys had a long and happy career.

cass-county-kids_wfaa-postcard_det_ebay

By 1962, Jerry was still in California, but at that point he was working as a stockbroker, singing only on weekends. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but — seemingly out of the blue — he was asked by TV producers to sing the theme song for a new CBS television show called The Beverly Hillbillies. Backed by the great Flatt & Scruggs, Jerry sang “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” and his voice became known to millions of people, overnight. And here it is more than fifty years later, and I bet you know all the words to the song. It has become a permanent fixture in American pop culture.

And that’s why you know Jerry Scoggins.

ADDED, Sept. 2023: A reader just sent me this clip showing Scoggins (with Earl Scruggs, Roy Clark, and others) performing the song in 1993 as Buddy Ebsen dances along. This is so great!!

scoggins-jerry_1993_youtube Jerry Scoggins, 1993 (from YouTube video)

And here’s Jerry with the Cass County Boys, singing a novelty song called “Which Way’d They Go?” (Jerry’s the good-looking one on the right):

***

Sources & Notes

The top photo of Jerry Scoggins and the large photo of the Cass County Kids are from the WFAA-KGKO-WBAP Combined Family Album (Dallas, 1941). The small photo of the Cass County Kids is from eBay.

Jerry Scoggins was born in 1911 in Mount Pleasant, Texas (in Titus County, right next door to Cass County). He died in 2004 at the age of 93. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times is here. More on Jerry from Wikipedia, here.

A nice overview of the Cass County Kids/Boys is here.

2 Comments

February 16, 2014

Red Bryan’s Smokehouse — BBQ, Oak Cliff-Style

by Paula Bosse

Everybody in Dallas knows about Sonny Bryan, and some remember Red Bryan, but I didn’t know there was another Bryan forebear, who started the family barbecue dynasty: Elias Bryan. Elias and his wife, Sadie, arrived in Oak Cliff from Cincinnati in 1910 and opened a barbecue stand. Elias begat Red, and Red begat Sonny. And there was much trans-generational smoking of meat. The Bryans have been a BBQ fixture in Dallas for over 100 years.

Fun facts about William Jennings “Red” Bryan:

Red studied botany at SMU, which might explain his initial career as a florist until he was inevitably pulled back into the family business. He opened his first place in the early 1930s in a retired Interurban car, known affectionately as “The Tin Shack.”
In the late ’40s, now well established and wanting swankier digs, he commissioned the respected architect Charles Dilbeck to design the new restaurant. (Dilbeck designed some of the most beautiful homes in Dallas, several of which are in Lakewood, but this was probably his first — and only — barbecue joint.)

And the rest is, as they say, barbecue — and Oak Cliff — history.

Red, 1951

***

Sources & Notes

Postcard (circa 1950) at top from eBay. This is printed on the back:

Ad from 1956.

Much more on Red Bryan’s Smokehouse, with lots of photos of its construction, can be found in the Oak Cliff Advocate article “The King of Oak Cliff Barbecue” by Gayla Brooks, here.

Even more cool stuff, including early photos of the family business, can be found in the Texas Monthly article “Bryan Family Artifacts and Mementos” by Daniel Vaughn, here.

Sonny Bryan’s website is here.

16 Comments

February 14, 2014

From Deep in the Heart of Texas, I Give You Love Field — 1919

Love is in the air

by Paula Bosse

It’s Valentine’s Day — a perfect time to turn to Love Field (…which, like “Lovers Lane,” must sound a little cutesy to outsiders). The above image shows the letterhead of the U.S. Army Air Service Flying School Detachment, a consolidation of World War I squadrons based at Love Field from November 1918 to November 1919.

One of the young pilots stationed there wrote a four-page letter on this stationery. The letter, dated March 11, 1919, was addressed to Miss Mabel Anderson in Petersburg, Pennsylvania. They seem to have begun a sort of pen-pal correspondence, and he is certainly very happy to have received a letter from her. (“Your wellcome [sic] letter was at hand today. Am delighted to answer at once.”) He asks if she would send him a photograph and tells her he’d like to meet her. He says that he is hopeful that, the war finally over, he will be discharged at the end of the month — he thinks he will be because, “I am allways [sic] lucky.”

This is an item for sale on eBay, and only the first page is scanned, so the identity of the author of the letter will remain unknown to those of us merely browsing an auction listing, interested but unwilling to cough up the cash to buy it and read any further. I wonder what happened? If he wanted to meet her, then perhaps he, too, was from Pennsylvania — they might have met when he arrived back home. He certainly sounds excited and hopeful and flirtatious, and he should, because not only was he “allways lucky,” but the long war had finally ended and he was headed home with his whole life ahead of him. Where’s Paul Harvey to tell us the rest of the story?

Happy Valentine’s Day!

***

This four-page letter on Love Field letterhead was recently up for auction on eBay, with the following description: “Letter from airman to a young girl asking for her picture and wanting to meet her. Very early US Army Air Service stationery from Love Field in Dallas Texas. Just after the end of WWI. Scarce Item.”

Here is the first page, with a transcription (spelling corrected) below (click to see a larger image).

Miss Mabel Anderson
Petersburg, Pa.

Dear friend,

Your welcome letter was at hand today. Am delighted to answer at once.

First of all I must tell you the good news. All but 65 men are going to get their discharges the last of the month. I may be lucky and get mine this time. Of course I am not sure of mine because the married men and men with dependents go first. That will leave about 200 men, for the 65 men to be picked from. I am in that bunch, so it will only be luck if I make it ok. I am always lucky. I am happy anyway. I am too happy to be able to think about anything nice to write about.

I sure was surprised to receive such a nice letter from you. You are a very good writer. I am ashamed to let you know what kind of a handwriting I have, but as you asked me to write my letter in place of printing [it], I will do so.

Here are two stories about how the airmen stationed at Love Field responded to the announcement that all flying would cease at noon on March 10, 1919 before demobilization began. It sounds like something from a movie: a sky full of something like 30 airplanes looping and “skylarking,” their pilots celebrating their fast-approaching military discharge by flying their favorite “machines” for the last time.

love-field_galveston-news_031119 Galveston News, March 11, 1919

Dallas Morning News, March 11, 1919 (click for larger image)

1 Comment

February 12, 2014

Meet Me at the Kitten Lounge — 1968

kitten-lounge_1968

by Paula Bosse

KITTEN LOUNGE
Best Place in Dallas to Party and Dance
“Best Service West of Mississippi”
Pretty Go-Go Girls
Curley Smith, Manager
TA 3-0576
4100 Elm Street
Dallas, Texas

From the manly, go-go-girl-loving pages of a 1968 issue of Texas Peace Officer magazine. No doubt a happening place, at Elm & Haskell. Peace officers welcome!

February 11, 2014

Delta Air Lines’ First Passenger Flight — 1929

by Paula Bosse

Delta Air Lines has had a longer — and more important — association with Dallas than you might think. On June 17, 1929, Delta made its first-ever passenger flight, from Dallas to Jackson, Mississippi via Shreveport and Monroe, Louisiana. According to the Love Field website, “Early flights operated from a passenger terminal near Bachman Lake, which later served as Southwest Airlines’ first headquarters building.” On that first flight, the five passengers sat in wicker chairs and could roll down windows (!) for needed ventilation. The flight took five hours. One of the first ads, from the Delta Flight Museum page, looked like this:

Delta passenger service ad ca. September 1929.

Forty-some-odd years later, the ads — and Dallas — got a bit more sophisticated.

delta_dallas_fur

delta_dallas_fredric-sweney_playing-cards Artist: Fredric Sweney

And we can’t leave out Cowtown!

delta_fort-worth

UPDATE, June 20, 2017: This almost-three-year-old post got a TON of hits yesterday, and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually, though, I tracked it down: it had to do with yesterday’s Final Jeopardy question (or is it “answer”?):

delta_jeopardy_061917

Nice to see that Jeopardy is incorporating Dallas history into the show!

***

Top travel poster — showing Fort Worth in the distance, I guess? — by Jack Laycox.

For a really well-researched article by Timothy Harper describing that first flight, click here (the Dallas bit is contained in the last seven paragraphs).

1 Comment

February 11, 2014

Ned Riddle: Dallas Artist and Creator of “Mr. Tweedy”

The Texan Visits New York City … “New York CITY?!”

by Paula Bosse

A few years ago, I came across the cartoon above in Joe E. Cooper’s chili bible, With or Without Beans, and I was delighted to see that the cartoonist was Ned Riddle, who, though having begun his career as a staff artist for the Dallas Morning News, is known primarily for his syndicated comic panel “Mr. Tweedy,” which I loved as a kid.

A couple of interesting tidbits about Mr. Riddle, who was a Dallas resident until his death in 2003: during WWII, he served on a submarine with the unspeakably perfect name, the USS Piranha, and — unlikely as it seems — while studying art at Washington University in St. Louis, he apparently studied under the great Expressionist artist Max Beckmann.

I loved “Mr. Tweedy” — the look of it, the simple one-panel jokes, and the fact that (as I recall) the somewhat optimistic-though-beleaguered Mr. Tweedy rarely actually spoke. Sort of Mr. Bean-like. I also knew that the cartoonist was from Dallas, and I was always trying to spot any sort of hidden homage to the city (as far as I know that never happened, but it SHOULD have!). “Mr. Tweedy” began in 1954 and ended in 1988. That’s a good run.

Here are a few Mr. Tweedy panels.

tweedy-2 1959

tweedy3 1959

tweedy_panel_110569 1969

And some photos of Ned Riddle at his drawing board over the years.

tweedy1

ned_riddle_drawing_board_flickr

Oct. 15, 1988, the final panel….

***

Sources & Notes

“The Texan Visits New York” cartoon appeared in With or Without Beans, An Informal Biography of Chili by Joe E. Cooper (Dallas: William S. Henson, Inc., 1952). Find (pricey) out-of-print copies for sale here.

First two “Mr. Tweedy” panels from Mr. Tweedy by Ned Riddle (NY: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1960; reprinted in 1977).

Later photo of Ned Riddle found on Flickr here.

8 Comments

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