Several years ago, I was flipping through a promotional booklet for radio stations WFAA, WBAP, and KGKO, and I came across the photo above. I think about this photo a lot. It shows radio personality “Uncle Scooter” lying on the floor next to a KGKO microphone, reading the comics over the air to a vast audience of children and pointing out something pertinent to his trusty companion, a fox terrier named Little Man. I love this photograph. It makes me smile every time I see it. Wouldn’t it be great if this was how he actually conducted his broadcasts — on the floor with his doggie next to him? Here’s the caption:
Clarence E. Tonahill (1904-1954) — known to everyone as “Scooter” — appears to have begun his radio career in Waco at the appropriately named station WACO. He then worked at KGKB in Tyler, then returned for a few years to WACO, and then to KTSA in San Antonio. Like most people in broadcasting in those days, he did a little bit of everything: he was an announcer, a newsreader, a sportscaster, and an entertainer. One of his most popular shows was just him reading the Sunday comics over the air for children. Below, a WACO ad from 1937 showing Uncle Scooter, again, lying on the studio floor (no dog, though).
Waco Tribune-Herald, Jan. 3, 1937
Around September 1939, he moved to Fort Worth to begin a busy stint at KGKO, a DFW station co-owned by The Dallas Morning News and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (this was part of the very unusual WFAA-WBAP radio broadcasting partnership). He started as an “announcer” (which might well have included cleaning up the studio!), but he quickly graduated to doing a lot of sports-announcing and color commentary (football and boxing), man-on-the-street interviews, and personal appearances. He also hosted several shows, including a weekday morning show called “Sunrise Frolic.” But Sundays… Sunday mornings were set aside for his funnies-reading.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 1940
FWST, Sept. 1940
FWST, March 1941
The Sunday lineup on KGKO, before and after the funnies:
Bryan Eagle, Dec. 1940
I see listings for the show in 1940 and 1941 — and then, briefly, in 1947. His obituary says that Tonahill retired from his career as a broadcasting personality in 1946 and opened his own business in Fort Worth, Scooter’s Radio Supply (a supplier of broadcasting equipment to stations around the country).
He must have been a bright, friendly voice on the radio. I’d love to know the role Little Man played (Little Man was Scooter’s real-life pet and was described in a magazine profile as Scooter’s “favorite hobby”). I have fond (if somewhat vague) memories from my childhood of Bill Kelley reading the comics on The Children’s Hour on Channel 5 — but I can say without hesitation that things on The Children’s Hour would have been a whole lot more interesting if he’d just had a cute little dog with him!
1940
1954
1939
***
Sources & Notes
Top photo from “WFAA, WBAP, KGKO Combined Family Album” (Dallas-Fort Worth, 1941).
Wes Wise and family campaigning for Mayor, April 1971
by Paula Bosse
Wes Wise, former 3-term Dallas mayor (1971-1976), has died. He was 94. Read his obituary in The Dallas Morning News, here. Also, a tribute to Wise from the Dallas Municipal Archives ishere.
In the piece linked above, the Dallas Municipal Archives mentions this: “Wise is noted for being the first mayor since the 1930s not endorsed by the Citizens Charter Association.” The CCA was a powerful political organization I’ve only become aware of recently. It wasn’t really until I began working in the WFAA-Channel 8 News archives that I saw Dallas political history up close, and it was full of all these powerful groups I had never heard of which, for decades, could make or break candidates simply by deeming them endorsable. If you were running for mayor or City Council, you really wanted the support of the Citizens Charter Association. And you absolutely wouldn’t have dared poke at them with sharp sticks. …Wes Wise poked at them with sharp sticks.
I’ve been going through old Channel 8 News footage, chronologically, for a while now. I am, at present, making my way through April 1971, when Wise and his opponent — the establishment-backed (i.e. CCA-backed) Avery Mays — were in the midst of a runoff for Dallas mayor. Mays, a businessman and civic leader, was the hand-picked candidate of the Citizens Charter Association and, as such, was expected to win. Wise, a City Councilman and former sportscaster, was the self-assured maverick who loudly proclaimed that he was an independent candidate who would not have accepted CCA backing had it been offered. He was young, good-looking, and — with a background in broadcasting — was comfortable and confident in the limelight.
There was a “debate” of sorts between the two on Channel 8, with each man given a minute to make a statement. It’s not on the level of Nixon and JFK, but there is a stark, generational contrast in the two men. I don’t see perspiration on Mays’ upper lip, but I’m getting a rattled, sweaty vibe from him. Wise, on the other hand, is all casual bravado.
Two clips of the candidates during this runoff campaign show the difference in styles of the two men: it’s Old Dallas vs. New Dallas.
Watch Avery Mays accuse his opponent Wise of being all talk and no action and being nothing more than a professional “TV and radio talker” (even though Wise had just finished serving a 2-year term on the City Council) — the clip is here.
Old Guard vs. New Blood. New Blood won, and Wes Wise led Dallas through the 1970s, a decade of huge change for the city.
***
Sources & Notes
Top image is a screenshot showing Wes Wise campaigning for mayor during the runoff race against Avery Mays on April 8, 1971. Wise is seen with his wife, Sally, and his son, Wyn. The clip is from the WFAA Newsfilm Collection, G. William Jones Collection, Southern Methodist University — it can be viewed on YouTube here (Wise is seen in the segments at 14:20 and 17:21).
An informative mini-biography on Wes Wise can be found here. (It’s interesting to see that, while in the army, Wise was an instructor in psychological warfare, the perfect training for both a broadcaster and a politician!)
Everyone’s favorite character actor, Stuart Margolin, has died. He grew up in Dallas (Preston Hollow) and went to Hillcrest High School — until he was sent to what sounds like a reform school in another state. A brief look through the Dallas Morning News archives shows that he appeared in local theater productions as a child — he trod the boards in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he was 10. As a teenager, he was active in the Courtyard Theater in Oak Lawn, a school and theater led by Robert Glenn, who had also mentored other young Dallas actors such as Jayne Mansfield, Brenda Vaccaro, Ann Wedgeworth, and… Candy Barr). When he wasn’t acting — and apparently causing enough mayhem to get sent to reform school — he was a very good, avid junior golfer who competed in many tournaments (he is shown in one very grainy photo as a 13-year-old member of the DAC Country Club team, wearing a jaunty golf cap). There is no further mention of the young Margolin after 1955, when, one assumes, the teenager was shipped off to someplace not as cushy as Preston Hollow. He starts popping up again in newspaper stories in 1967, in the early days of his long and successful career in Hollywood when he was making regular appearances on TV shows such as Love American Style.
His most-remembered role is Angel, sidekick to James Garner, in The Rockford Files. People loved this character. HE loved this character. He has said, with great affection, that he based Angel on streetwise guys he grew up with in Dallas.
In 1979, though an established working actor and director in Hollywood, he moved back to Dallas for a couple of years, working on writing projects and establishing the production company River Entertainment.
Feb. 1981 (Dallas Morning News)
He tried for several years to establish a theater in the city, saying, “I don’t think there’s a professional theater here that is of a quality that this city deserves, a city that likes to view itself as Dallas does” (“Margolin’s Life Has Many Stages” by Joe Leydon, DMN, Apr. 20, 1980). (He was not a huge fan of the Dallas Theater Center and was especially unhappy that, in 1980, the DTC hadn’t had an Actors Equity contract in 20 years.)
At this time he also recorded a country/blues album, And the Angel Sings, of which he said:
I’m from [Dallas], and my musical influences are from this area. When I grew up in Dallas, I listened to a lot of blues — Muddy Waters, B.B. King, This record was made for the kind of people I grew up with. (The Daily Oklahoman, Apr. 22, 1980)
I just watched him in an old episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show a couple of days ago and said to myself, “I love this guy.” I was always a fan of Stuart Margolin. RIP.
***
Sources & Notes
Top photo from the 1955 Hillcrest High School yearbook, The Panther.
The photo above shows Dallas theater legend Margo Jones accepting the keys to a new Ford truck in March 1955. Below, the caption that appeared in the April 1955 issue of Dallas magazine:
GIFT FOR THEATRE ’55: Margo Jones, director of Theatre ’55, is shown as she accepts the keys to a new 1955 panel truck from DeWitt T. Ray, Dallas banker and member of Dallas Theatre ’55 board of trustees. The truck, gift of a group of 18 Dallas businessmen and civic leaders, will be used for transporting set furniture, props and other necessities for the theatre’s productions.
She looks very, very happy!
***
Sources & Notes
Photo is from the April 1955 issue of Dallas, a periodical published by the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.
More on Margo Jones can be found in the following Flashback Dallas posts:
Claes Oldenburg at the DMCA, April, 1962 (WFAA Collection, SMU)
by Paula Bosse
Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born American sculptor, died this week at the age of 93. Among his connections to Texas are two of my favorite Oldenburg pieces: the fabulous “Monument to the Last Horse,” a permanent fixture of Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, which he created with his wife Coosje van Bruggen, and the much-missed “Stake Hitch,” a site-specific work commissioned by the Dallas Museum of Art (installed in the brand-new DMA in 1984, and, sadly, de-installed in 2002 after a nasty contretemps between Oldenburg and the museum).
Oldenburg’s first visit to Dallas was in April, 1962, at a time when he was known mainly to NYC art-world hipsters — well before he had achieved anything approaching his later international acclaim. He came to Dallas to present “The Store,” a pop art installation which was part of the group show “1961” at the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts (the DMCA was merged with/absorbed by what is now the Dallas Museum of Art in 1963). While Oldenburg was in Dallas exhibiting “The Store” (comprised of 45 individual works, the placement of which he re-created from the original December, 1961 show in Manhattan), he also presented “Injun,” the first-ever “happening” held outside New York or Los Angeles and the first such interactive event commissioned by a museum (Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Theater performance-art “happenings” were much talked about and had gained a cult following in New York, and having him in Dallas to present a “happening” was a definite “get” for the DMCA).
“The Store” and “Injun” — and Claes Oldenburg himself — were very un-Dallas. The reception Oldenburg received from Dallas’ followers of edgier contemporary art appears to have been positive, but his work was handily dismissed by Dallas Morning News art critic Rual Askew, who, invoking the “royal we,” wrote this rather laborious sentence:
Claes Oldenburg’s ‘The Store,’ a painted-plaster waste of time in our view, has interest as assembled pattern with carnival colors at a considerable distance perhaps, but displaces space out of all proportion to aesthetic experience. (DMN, April 15, 1962)
As I work with the WFAA Collection (held by the G. William Jones Collection at SMU’s Hamon Arts Library), I was pretty excited when film footage popped up showing Oldenburg and his first wife (and his collaborator), Patty Mucha, at the DMCA. I knew that the DMCA was somewhere in Oak Lawn (it was at 3415 Cedar Springs), but I had never seen an image of it until this footage. The Oldenburgs are seen walking into the DMCA, tinkering with the installation before the show opened, inspecting the store’s “foods” and other “merchandise,” and playfully “playing store” and exchanging imaginary cash at his “cash register.” Sadly, there is no sound for the one-minute-45-second film, but — being an art history major (that always sounds pretentious…) — I really, really love this. A young, happy Claes Oldenburg in a moth-eaten sweater, here in Dallas, in the early years of what would become an artistically important career is pretty cool to see.
I have been meaning to write this post since I first saw the WFAA footage two years ago. I’m sorry that it’s taken the death of the artist to finally get me to do it. RIP, Claes.
*
UPDATE: Morgan Gieringer, Head of UNT Special Collections, alerted me to a WBAP-Channel 5 news script they have in their collection which describes much the same sort of thing that is going on in the WFAA-Channel 8 film above. In the script, Oldenburg discusses some of the pieces — read the two pages here. (The Ch. 5 report was filmed on March 29, 1962, which could be the same date as the Ch. 8 footage.)
*
“The Store” at the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1962 — in vivid color:
Screenshots from the WFAA footage, showing Oldenburg and his wife, Patty (who worked alongside her husband and was a frequent participant in the “happenings”) preparing “The Store” for its opening at the DMCA.
***
Sources & Notes
Top image (and all other black-and-white images) are screenshots from the WFAA Newsfilm Collection, G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University; the footage was filmed in early April 1962 (or possibly late March 1962); the clip may be viewed on YouTube, here.
The color photograph of “The Store” and the poster for “Injun” are both from a publication of the Dallas Museum of Art, here.
Other Oldenburg-related sources:
The “1961” exhibition catalogue — this group-show featured heavy-hitting up-and-comers such as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, James Rosenquist, Joseph Albers, Morris Louis, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, and Richard Diebenkorn — can be viewed in a fully scanned Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts catalogue here, via the Dallas Museum of Art Exhibition Records, Portal to Texas History
Candid photos from the “Injun” performance can be seen here
See several great photos of Oldenburg taken during the installation of “Stake Hitch” in 1984, in a DMA Bulletin here, here, here, and here
Watch a short video about “The Store” when it was restaged at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013, with comments on the pieces by Oldenburg; see what the pieces shown in the 1962 black-and-white film made in Dallas looked like 51 years later, in color, in the MoMA video, here
The Boston Symphony Orchestra had Arthur Fiedler and its popular-music offshoot, The Boston Pops. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra had Anshel Brusilow and The Dallasound.
Brusilow, a Philadelphia native, came to Dallas in 1970 as the resident conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The DSO was in financial straits at the time, so in a bid to increase the orchestra’s demographic reach, Brusilow borrowed Fiedler’s idea and formed his own “pops” orchestra, which played jazzy arrangements of pop songs and light classical music. He named this sideline project “The Dallasound.” It was very popular, but it didn’t improve the financial problems of the DSO, and Brusilow was gone after only 3 years. He then went on to accept a teaching a position at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). After 9 years at UNT, he began teaching at SMU’s Meadow School of the Arts in 1983. Brusilow died in 2018 — he spent the last 48 years of his life in Dallas.
*
Here are the liner notes for the Dallasound album (1971):
THE DALLAS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
One of America’s oldest orchestras, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1900. Through the years, it has served its community and the entire North Texas area with the finest in music from the greatest composers the world has known. From a modest beginning — with 35 members giving a handful of concerts a season — the Dallas Symphony Orchestra currently has 85 members and performs more than 160 concerts each season. Its membership would comprise a “Who’s Who” of some of the finest artists in the world.
With its reputation for the classics well-established, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra now adds another brilliant facet to its already illustrious history — the DALLASOUND — a new sound and a new concept in music making. A big band sound incorporating the latest and most exciting modern-day pop sounds – special arrangements of tunes by the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Jim Webb and many others.
Featured as special guest artists on the first recording on the DALLASOUND Label are three outstanding jazz musicians from the Dallas area — Paul Guerrero on drums, Jack Petersen on guitar and Al “Little Al” Wesar on Fender bass. Arrangements are by one of the most gifted arrangers in the business — Wilfred Holcombe of Trenton, New Jersey. Not just stock orchestral arrangements, but the swingingest, rockingest big band arrangements around! Settle back and listen to some of the most exciting music you will ever hear made by a symphony orchestra!
ANSHEL BRUSILOW
Like many of the world’s great violinist/conductors, Anshel Brusilow laid aside his Stradivarius several years ago and took baton in hand in earnest. His extensive performing and conducting experience with three of the world’s greatest conductors — Eugene Ormandy, George Szell and Pierre Monteux — placed him in good stead on the podium. He came to Dallas after two extremely busy years and more than 300 concerts with the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia, including five recordings with RCA Victor.
With him he brought the DALLASOUND and a new era for Dallas’s symphony orchestra. Completely at home with the standard symphonic fare, he is equally proficient when ” swinging” with the DALLASOUND. Thousands of Dallasites have been converted to the new sound a symphony orchestra can make, a fact which substantiates Anshel Brusilow’s theory that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra belongs to allthe people of a community and must therefore serve them in as many ways as it can. Thanks to Anshel Brusilow, the Dallas Symphony embarks on a new direction in music — the DALLASOUND!
The album’s musical offerings included arrangements of George Harrison’s “Something” and “My Sweet Lord,” The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun,” The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual” and “Delilah,” and everyone’s favorite ubiquitous weird song from the late ’60s, “MacArthur Park.”
Anshel Brusilow
Titche’s ad, March, 1971
***
Sources & Notes
Images from the front and back cover of the DALLASOUND album were found on Amazon, here.
A really good interview with Anshel Brusilow can be found in the “High Profile” article by Marty Primeau (Dallas Morning News, July 17, 1983).
Dallas Morning News headline, May 4, 2022/photo: Tom Fox
by Paula Bosse
Great work by BeLynn Hollers of The Dallas Morning News for getting comments from Linda Coffee — the Dallas attorney who took her case, Roe v. Wade, to the U.S. Supreme Court (along with her co-counsel, Sarah Weddington) — on the leaked Supreme Court draft decision which appears to signal the overturning of her landmark court case. The story, “Roe v. Wade Lawyer Linda Coffee Laments Potential Supreme Court Ruling to Overturn Dallas Case” (Dallas Morning News, May 4, 2022) can be found here (paywall). Below is the video interview with Coffee, posted on YouTube, here.
The previous DMN interview of Linda Coffee by BeLynn Hollers — “Dallas Lawyer Linda Coffee Launched Landmark Roe vs. Wade Abortion Rights Case with a $15 Filing Fee” (Dallas Morning News, Dec. 16, 2021) — can be found here (paywall). The video interview from that article is posted on YouTubehere.
And, from 1970, what may be Linda Coffee’s first-ever television interview about the Dallas case (which was just beginning its long trek to the Supreme Court) has recently been found in the WFAA Newsfilm Collection at SMU (G. William Jones Film & Video Collection, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University). She was, incredibly, only 27 years old. It is posted on YouTube here. (Read the YouTube notes for background info on this interview.)
Here’s an interesting piece of Dallas entertainment history: a program for the 1961 Dallas Entertainment Awards, held in the Century Room, the swanky nightclub in the Adolphus Hotel. The awards were nicknamed “the Billy award,” or “the Billys.” Dresscode: “semi-formal.” Here are a few highlights.
*
BEST RADIO PERSONALITY
Nominees are: Nick Ramsey (KVIL), Ted Cassidy (“Profile of an Orchestra,” WFAA), Meg Healy (KIXL), Hugh Lampman (“Music ’til Dawn,” KRLD — the previous year’s winner), Irving Harrigan & Tom Murphy (“Murphy and Harrigan Show,” KLIF), Jim Lowe (WRR), and Chem Terry (KRLD).
So – Ted Cassidy? Yes, that is the same Ted Cassidy who later played “Lurch” on TV in The Addams Family (he also played “Thing”). He worked for WFAA radio for a few years and is a trivia answer in JFK-related quizzes regarding Dallas media coverage of the assassination.
*
BEST MALE VOCALIST
Nominees are: Mark Carroll, Marty Ross, Earl Humphreys (the previous year’s winner), Skip Fletcher, Charlie Applewhite, Ron Shipman, and Trini Lopez.
R. J. O’DONNELL MEMORIAL AWARD FOR SHOWMAN OF THE YEAR
Nominees are: Tom Hughes, Paul Baker, Raiberto Comini, Lanham Deal, Norma Young, Pearl Chappell, and Lawrence Kelly. (The previous year’s winner was Charles R. Meeker Jr.) A few names there which should be familiar to aficionados of Dallas live theater.
*
Producers of the event were Breck Wall and Joe Peterson, creators of the naughty “Bottoms Up” revue, which is probably still running somewhere. Some biographical information on the pair (click for larger image):
*
Master of Ceremonies was Tony Zoppi, who wrote a column about the local nightclub scene for The Dallas Morning News. Whenever I read his old columns, I think that he must have had the BEST job in town — writing about the Dallas nightlife scene when it was at its sophisticated and sometimes seedy Mad Men-era apex.
*
And — a bit of a change of pace — a little bio of real estate titan Leo Corrigan, who owned the Adolphus, where the show was being held — he was, unsurprisingly, receiving an “Appreciation Award.”
*
And a couple of drawings of Dallas entertainment notables: Pappy Dolson, owner of Pappy’s Showland and legendary agent of strippers, and Joe Reichman, the leader of the Century Room orchestra who was billed as “the Pagliacci of the piano.”
*
A few interesting ads include a little “howdy” from Jack Ruby (who was well known to several of the people mentioned above, some of whom testified to the Warren Commission about their relationships with him).
An ad for Villa Fontana, a gay club, formerly known as Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit (The Bull on the Roof), then managed by Bob Strange. Gay clubs were illegal at the time, so you didn’t see a lot of ads for them. (I wrote an article for Central Track about some of the gay clubs in Dallas in the early ’70s — with photos — here.)
And, the 24-hour greasy spoon known to generations of Dallasites, Oak Lawn’s Lucas B & B.
Here’s the photo enlarged. Unless something earth-shattering has happened that I don’t know about, that great sign is still standing on Oak Lawn near Lemmon, long after the restaurant closed.
*
See the rest of the 44-page program — lots more photos, lots more nominees — in a PDF from the DeGolyer Library at SMU, here.
***
Sources & Notes
All images are from “Dallas Entertainment Awards — 1961,” from the Diane Wisdom Papers, Archives of Women of the Southwest, DeGolyer Library, SMU Libraries; more information and a link to the fully-scanned program is here.
Linda Coffee, 27 years old, on her way to the Supreme Court to make history
by Paula Bosse
UPDATE 5/4/22: See a brand-new video interview with Linda Coffee — recorded yesterday in Lakewood — in which she responds to the leaked Supreme Court draft, here. Also, the companion Dallas Morning News article (paywall) is here.
**
The most important woman in the abortion rights fight is someone you’ve never heard of: LINDA COFFEE, the Dallas attorney who took the local case of Roe v. Wade from Dallas all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in a successful battle to have the ban on abortion in Texas declared unconstitutional. She began the case when she was only 26 years old and less than two years out of UT Law School.
Coffee was the driving force of this landmark legal case from the very beginning but preferred to leave the limelight to her co-counsel, Sarah Weddington, who joined the team a short time after the case was underway. (Weddington, an Austin lawyer, was *also* only in her 20s!)
The image above is a screenshot of a 1970 television interview with Coffee in news footage from the WFAA archive, a treasure trove of historical film clips housed at SMU as part of the Hamon Arts Library’s G. William Jones Film & Video Collection (the WFAA archive is viewable on YouTube here, with additions being made all the time).
This rare, recently unearthed Channel 8 interview from June, 1970 has Coffee discussing the ramifications of her first win in the long legal journey which would ultimately end in victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. It is almost certainly her first TV interview. (Read the notes of the YouTube clip for the full description.)
*
My mother was involved in all sorts of women’s political groups in Dallas in the 1970s (and beyond). Meetings of various progressive political organizations and committees were often held at the First Unitarian Church on Preston Road in University Park (yes, University Park was an unlikely hotbed of activism!), and my mother knew Linda Coffee through these women’s groups. I had heard Linda’s name over the years but didn’t really know much about her until I came across this short Channel 8 interview. I’ve been working in these archives for SMU and wasn’t able to identify this unidentified woman but felt sure my mother would know who she was. I was talking to my mother on the phone trying to describe her: “I’m not sure who she is. She appears to be a lawyer, but she just looks too young and too… disheveled to be a lawyer. A little scroungy.”“Oh!” my mother said instantly, “Linda Coffee.” And she was right! She hadn’t even seen the footage.
I immediately loved Linda from my introduction to her in this footage. She’s earnest, confident, smart, pixie-ish, and she looks a little like a “real-person” version of Linda Ronstadt. I wonder if she ever imagined she would be responsible for one of the most famous legal cases of the 20th century?
I decided to look into her background in Dallas, and I was pretty surprised to see that she grew up one street over from where I grew up (she lived in the 5700 block of Anita) and went to my East Dallas alma mater, Woodrow Wilson High School (she and musician Steve Miller were there at the same time, Class of 1961 — she was in the band, he was on the football team — wonder if they ever met?).
Linda Coffee, Woodrow band, 1961
Steve Miller, senior photo, 1961
While we’re at it, here a few more photos of Linda Coffee in high school.
Linda Coffee, Woodrow sophomore, 1959
Linda Coffee, Woodrow junior, 1960
Linda (dark robe) with the Latin club, attending “Ben Hur” screening downtown, 1960
Linda and other officers of the Woodrow Science Club, 1961
Linda pointing to New Zealand, 1961
Linda Coffee, Woodrow Wilson High School, senior photo, 1961
She apparently excelled at everything and had a wide range of interests.
After graduating from Woodrow, she went to RIce University where she majored in German, then went on to law school at the University of Texas where she passed the Texas bar exam with the second highest score in the class. After becoming a lawyer, she was a law clerk in Dallas for District Judge Sarah T. Hughes (she and another female clerk were profiled in a 1968 Dallas Morning News article which carried the unfortunate headline, “The Law Clerks Are Girls”). It wasn’t long after this that she began working on a case to challenge the constitutionality of a vague Texas law which banned abortions. In January, 1973, Linda Coffee and co-counsel Sarah Weddington won their case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Linda had just turned 30.
I would highly recommend (and I mean HIGHLY RECOMMEND) the Vanity Fair profile of Linda Coffee written by Joshua Prager titled “Roe v. Wade’s Secret Heroine Tells Her Story.” Reading this when I knew virtually nothing about Linda made me want to know more about her and made me want to share her story with as many people as possible. How is it that this lawyer who has had such a massively important impact on modern life (especially women’s lives) isn’t a household name? Prager’s article tells you why. Joshua Prager has expanded this article to a full book concerning the Roe case which will be published in a couple of weeks: The Family Roe, An American Story.With the current news of the newly implemented controversial legislation by the State of Texas, this book could not possibly be more timely.
*
Thank you, Linda. Thank you, Sarah.
**
UPDATE, Dec. 16, 2021: Watch the interview with Linda Coffee by The Dallas Morning News, conducted on Dec. 9, 2021 at Linda’s home in Mineola. Read the companion DMN article here (article may require a subscription to view).
Update, June 25, 2022: Another short snippet (silent) of Linda Coffee has popped up in the WFAA archives. She is seen walking through the Dallas County Courthouse on Jan. 20, 1972, talking to WFAA reporter Phil Reynolds (she was working as an attorney on a case unrelated to Roe v. Wade). A screenshot is below — the pertinent footage begins at 21:21 here.
Jan. 20, 1972
***
Sources & Notes
Top image is a screenshot of a June, 1970 interview of Linda Coffee conducted by Channel 8 reporter Phil Reynolds; this interview can be seen on YouTube here (from the WFAA archive, G. William Jones Film & Video Collection, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University). Bottom image is from a WFAA clip from December, 1971 here.
All high school-era photos of Linda Coffee are from various editions of The Crusader, the yearbook of Woodrow Wilson High School.
Little Man and Uncle Scooter…
Waco Tribune-Herald, Jan. 3, 1937
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 1940
FWST, Sept. 1940
FWST, March 1941
Bryan Eagle, Dec. 1940
1940
1954
1939
Claes Oldenburg at the DMCA, April, 1962 (WFAA Collection, SMU)
“1961” catalogue, via 
Anshel Brusilow
Dallas Morning News headline, May 4, 2022/photo: Tom Fox
Jan. 20, 1972
Flashback : Dallas 