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January 30, 2016

Antal Dorati, The Conductor Who Revived the Dallas Symphony Orchestra — 1945-1949

Antal Dorati, 1946 — on top of the world

by Paula Bosse

The news this week that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s musical director, Jaap van Zweden, was leaving town to pursue a glitzier gig was seen as an inevitable move to many of his disappointed fans. The DSO has been something of a springboard for conductors working their way up the conductor career ladder. Another celebrated conductor who spent a few years in Big D before rising to the heights of international acclaim was Hungarian-born Antal Dorati (1906-1988).

Dallas had classical music concerts in the 19th century, but the roots of what we now know as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra reach back to about 1900, under the direction of Hans Kreissig, who had settled in Dallas in 1887.

Dallas Morning News, Jan. 13, 1897

For various reasons (lack of community interest, lack of financial support, etc.), some of these early seasons were truncated or suspended — there was a gap of several years after Kreissig’s tenure, for instance, and there were no performances during most of 1936 and 1937 because of activities surrounding the Texas Centennial and renovations to the Music Hall (the DSO performed at the Music Hall in Fair Park). The most noteworthy suspension of performances was during World War II when the symphony was “temporarily dissolved”: not only was the financial state of the organization not good at this time, but the war itself had depleted the ranks of the performers — the DSO shut down completely in 1942 because conductor Jacques Singer and several of his musicians had enlisted or were drafted. John Rosenfield, the arts editor of The Dallas Morning News and an ardent classical music lover, wrote often during this time how the loss of the DSO was a crushing cultural blow to the city.

When the war ended, Dallas’ music-lovers (and musicians) clamored for the return of the DSO. A search began for a conductor who was not only a superior musical director but who would also be able to build an orchestra from scratch; they found that man in 39-year-old Antal Dorati, a former student of Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok who had made a name for himself as a musical director for ballet companies such as the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the Ballet Theater — his DSO appointment was announced in the fall of 1945.

Somehow, in only two months, Dorati managed to put an orchestra together, prepare the season’s schedule, rehearse the musicians, and present the first performance of the “reborn” Dallas Symphony Orchestra on December 9, 1945.

DMN, Dec. 5, 1945

The response to that first concert was rapturous:

The crowd was somewhat stunned by the excellence of the ensemble that will bear Dallas’ name. To many, grown realistic or cynical in the years’ cultural struggles, the new orchestra was an unbelievably precious gift. Nothing so fine was expected by even the optimists. And it belonged to them with the promise that it would stay for all the time they could foresee. (John Rosenfield review, “Capacity Audience Thrills To Reborn Dallas Symphony, DMN, Dec. 10, 1945)

During the intermission of this debut performance, Dorati was interviewed on the radio and had nice things to say about Dallas:

I fell in love with Dallas not last September when I was engaged but as far back as 1937. When I visited here year after year with the Ballet Theater. I said to myself that if I ever withdrew from the ballet and became a resident conductor for an American symphony, I would like it to be the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.” (DMN, Dec. 10, 1945)

One little thing the Maestro was unable to accomplish, though, was to find a place for his family to live. The severe lack of postwar housing affected even the wealthy cultural elite!

Dec. 13, 1945

And, with that, the DSO was back. It toured. A LOT. And made recordings. And appeared on national radio broadcasts. With Dorati at the helm, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was making a name for itself and garnering a very positive national reputation.

A typical article about the young, photogenic Dorati went something like the one below, in which Dorati was described as “the wonderboy of Southwest symphonic circles.”

Texas Week, Aug. 17, 1946

After a fairly short but incredibly productive time in Dallas, Antal Dorati accepted the position of conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in January 1949. His successor, Walter Hendl (a startlingly “honest” obituary of the controversial Hendl appeared in the London Telegraph here), was appointed a few short weeks later, and Dorati’s final concert was April 3, 1949.

April 3, 1949

John Rosenfield’s melancholy review/farewell appeared the next day in The Dallas Morning News, and one imagines it tooks weeks for his tears to dry.

The spectacularly successful musical director and conductor, whose 4-season regime ended with an emotion-laden farewell concert, modestly disclaimed the founder’s role in Dallas Symphony history. The 1945-49 period was one of high-intentioned and nobly-adventurous endeavor….” (John Rosenfield, DMN, April 4, 1949)

And with that, the Maestro headed to Minneapolis, having built the post-war Dallas Symphony Orchestra into a nationally respected organization.

Waco News Tribune, Dec. 6, 1946

Waco News Tribune, Dec. 13, 1946

***

Sources & Notes

Top photo and article from the Aug. 17, 1946 issue of Texas Week, the short-lived magazine that was sort of a Texas version of Life, via the Portal to Texas History, here. Text may have been written by Paul Crume.

Linksapalooza:

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra Wikipedia entry is here; the official DSO site is here; the Handbook of Texas entry is here.
The Antal Dorati Wikipedia entry is here; his official site is here.

Listen to pianist William Kapell perform Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26 with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Antal Dorati (recorded at the Fair Park Auditorium the same week he made his “Adios, Dallas!” announcement in Jan., 1949), here.

More on Dorati and his close friend Yehudi Menuhin in my post “Yehudi Menuhin and Antal Dorati: A Collaborative Friendship,” here.

And, yes, the correct spelling should be “Antal Doráti.”

5 Comments

January 12, 2016

The Blue House on Browder

The Rosenfield house, in about 2000 (photo courtesy Homeward Bound, Inc.)

by Paula Bosse

Perhaps you’ve been following the recent brouhaha over the plans to demolish one of the last remaining 19th-century residences in the Cedars area, south of downtown — Robert Wilonsky of The Dallas Morning News has been covering the story here and here and here. The house is in terrible disrepair, but it has the beautiful details of the period, and it’s obvious that it was once a lovely house in a well-to-do neighborhood. Preservation Dallas posted this in-better-days photo on their Facebook page:

I thought I’d see what I could find about the history of the house — mainly I wanted to see if I could find who built it and when.

The house currently has the address 1423 Griffin, but before highways were built and streets were moved around, its address was 1015 Browder. Dallas changed almost every address in 1911, so I checked Jim Wheat’s very helpful scan of that year’s directory which tells us both the new and the old addresses of houses and businesses and also shows what cross-streets those addresses are between.

browder-house_1911-directory 1911 directory, Browder Street

The original address of the Blue House was 285 Browder Street, between Corsicana and St. Louis. In 1911, P. F. Erb was living there.

Next, I checked the Sanborn maps. The earliest Sanborn map I could find which actually showed this part of Browder was the one from 1892. Here’s a detail showing the two-story frame house on the northwest corer of Browder and St. Louis, with Browder running horizontally along the top. The address is 285 Browder. (The house next to it is 169 St. Louis — more on that house later.)

When you look at the full-page map this detail comes from (here), you’ll see larger numbers in the middle of the blocks. The block I’m interested in is block 84. Then I hopped over to the Murphy & Bolanz block book to see what I could find there. (I haven’t actually used this block book much, mostly because my old computer would not work with the plug-in required to view the pages, and it takes a while to figure out what you’re looking at.) When I clicked on “Block 84” in the index, I found this (click for larger image):

Here’s the detail of the pertinent block:

The names and other assorted scrawls indicate title change (I think). This page was very helpful, because it told me that this block was originally part of Browder/Browder’s Addition, and it was originally classified as Block 13. The lot in question is Lot 5 (and probably Lot 6, because Erb’s name shows up under both. So now I had terms to search on.

And then it was just a tedious slog through the Dallas Herald archives (not to be confused with the Dallas Times Herald archives), the Dallas Morning News archives, and old city directories. Here’s what I found.

First mention of this particular parcel of land was in The Galveston News on March 24, 1883. P. S. Browder, a Browder family executor, transferred a lot of property — including the two lots I was interested in — to Mr. & Mrs. Nathan Godbold as part of a quitclaim deed (I’m probably not using the correct terminology here…). For one dollar.

1883-march_browder_galveston-news_032483_QUIT-CLAIM Galveston News, Mar. 24, 1883

A few inches of print over, the record shows that Godbold immediately sold Lots 5 and 6 to Dallas real estate czar Charles Bolanz (misspelled below). For $1,000.

1883-march_browder_galveston-news_032483_to-bolanz Galveston News, Mar. 24, 1883

A few months later, in July, it was reported that Bolanz had sold the adjoining two lots to T. S. Holden, a young man who worked as a salesman for a wholesale grocery firm but seemed to be engaged in land speculation on the side. (It’s a little odd that Bolanz sold it so quickly for a $200 loss, but I’m sure there was probably more to the story.)

1883-july_browder_galveston-news_070283_HOLDEN Galveston News, July 2, 1883

At some point, these two lots were sold to Max Rosenfield, another young man who was buying up land in the hopes that its value would increase. From Dallas Rediscovered by William L. McDonald:

“The year 1884 also saw the opening of a new housing subdivision by two Jewish real estate speculators, Gerson Meyer and Max Rosenfield. Their development, bounded by Akard, Corsicana, Browder, and St. Louis streets, was sold primarily to Jewish families who had begun to arrive as early as 1872 as part of the ‘Corsicana crowd’ — the terminal merchants who followed the construction of the H&TC.”

[I couldn’t find anything else about this block being a “sub-division,” but there definitely was a “Rosenfield & Meyer’s Addition” in East Dallas as early as 1886 — see the bottom of this post for more information on Gerson Meyer and the Murphy & Bolanz map of their East Dallas addition.]

In the 1886 city directory, Max Rosenfield is listed as residing at 1118 Browder, which may well have been an address that lasted for a very, very short time — Browder is a very short street, and I wonder if Rosenfield was renumbering addresses in his new development. It does appear to be Lot 5 of the block he and Meyer were developing, though. (Henrietta Rosenfield, widow of Jonas Rosenfield, was Max’s mother, and she lived with or near Max for several years.)

1886_rosenfield_1886-directory_1118-browder 1886 Dallas directory

In early 1887, a For Sale ad appeared in the Herald — real estate agents Ducker & Dudleigh were offering what appears to be Lots 5 and 6. By this time, houses had been built on both lots. (The numbers 101 and 102 are confusing here, but the property being offered is the lot at the northwest corner of Browder and St. Louis and the lot adjoining it.) The price for the two-story house on Lot 5 was $6,250, which the Inflation Calculator adjusts to being about $166,000 in today’s money, taking into account inflation (but not taking into account Dallas’ outrageous real estate prices!).

DMN, May 8, 1887 (click for larger image)

It doesn’t look like either property sold, because a few months later, the 1888 directory showed Max still living in the Lot 5 house facing Browder and mother Henrietta living in the Lot 6 house at 169 St. Louis.

1888_rosenfield_1888-directory 1888 Dallas directory

Rosenfield placed a For Rent ad in the paper in Feb. of 1889, offering his corner house on Browder.

1889_rosenfield_dmn_021389 DMN, Feb. 13, 1889

This appears to have been when businessman Milton Dargan moved in. He is listed as moving into the house at about this time in the addenda section of late changes for the 1889 directory (directories were usually compiled in the year before they were actually published).

1889_dargan_1889-addenda-listing 1889 Dallas directory

In that same directory, Rosenfield had moved in with his mother in the adjoining property.

1889_rosenfield_1889-directory 1889 Dallas directory

At some point Dargan bought the corner house. Henrietta continued to live in the St. Louis-facing house until about 1892, when she moved in with Max at his new home on Akard.

And, finally, the “285” address shows up in a directory, in 1891.

1891_dargan_1891-directory 1891 Dallas directory

Paul F. Erb bought the Browder house from Dargan in 1896 (he also bought the adjoining Lot 6 house facing St. Louis in 1910).

1897_erb_1897-directory 1897 Dallas directory

And we’re back to Paul Erb, seen in the 1911 directory listing old and new addresses at 1015/285 Browder.

browder-house_1911-directory 1911 Dallas directory

Yay!

That was a long way to go to establish a chain of ownership. (I’m sure it would have been faster and easier to have consulted city records.)

So. Without access to building permits, it looks as if Max Rosenfield (who, by the way, was the father of John Rosenfield — born Max John Rosenfield, Jr. — legendary arts critic for The Dallas Morning News) was the person who built the 130-year-old house now going through the process of probably being torn down soon. It appears to have been built in 1884 or 1885. In a 1935 Dallas Morning News article celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Max Rosenfield, the house is mentioned: “…their first home, a house built by Mr. Rosenfield and still standing on the northwest corner of Browder and St. Louis streets…” (see the article “Mr. and Mrs. M. J. Rosenfield To Observe 50th Anniversary,” DMN, Jan. 6, 1935).

Below is a photo of Max Rosenfield and his new bride, Jenny, probably taken the same year the house was built, 1885-ish, when Max was 26 years old.

Thank you for building such a pretty house, Mr. Rosenfield. Maybe some magnanimous person with deep pockets can have it moved to a new location and restore it to its former loveliness.

Mr. and Mrs. M. J. Rosenfield, on their 50th anniversary

Here’s a detail of an 1893 map of the area, with the house in question marked.

And here’s the lonely little house in its present hemmed-in location.

Bing Maps

***

Sources & Notes

Top photo, taken around 2000, from Homeward Bound, Inc., used with permission. Homeward Bound, Inc. took over the house in 1986 (and owned it until October, 2015) for use as Trinity Recovery Center, a substance abuse treatment center. The organization tried hard to save the house, but, according to Homeward Bound, Inc. Executive Director Douglas Denton, when they approached Dallas’ Landmark Commission in the 1990s, “they were not interested in the building.” Thanks to Mr. Denton for allowing me to use this photo, which shows the beauty of the old house better than any other photo of it that I’ve seen. He points to the photo below as an example of what this Cedars neighborhood once looked like. The caption for the photo in McDonald’s Dallas Rediscovered (p. 125): “Looking north toward downtown along Browder Street near the corner of Cadiz, 1895. These homes, built in the early 1890s, began to be razed in the late 1930s and early 1940s for parking space in the expanding business district.” (Photo: Dallas Public Libary)

This would have been about two blocks from the Rosenfield house. Imagine what that neighborhood once looked like!

Watch a news report on the outcry over the possible demolition of this house on the WFAA website, here.

The Dallas Morning News article on the 50th wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Max Rosenfield in which it is mentioned that Max built the house (“…their first home, a house built by Mr. Rosenfield and still standing on the northwest corner of Browder and St. Louis streets…”) is “Mr. and Mrs. M. J. Rosenfield To Observe 50th Anniversary” (DMN, Jan. 6, 1935).

Photo of the Rosenfields as a newly married couple found on Ancestry.com.

50th anniversary photo of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenfield is from the book John Rosenfield’s Dallas by Ronald L. Davis (Dallas: Three Forks Press, 2002).

All other sources as cited.

Max J. Rosenfield died in 1935 at the age of 76. His very interesting obituary (probably written by his son, John Rosenfield, amusements editor of The Dallas Morning News), can be found in the Dec. 2, 1935 edition of The News: “M. J. Rosenfield, Business Leader Many Years, Dies.”

It’s worth trying to figure out how to use the Murphy & Bolanz block books, courtesy of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division of the Dallas Public Library. Background on these very useful books can be found here.

If I’ve made any mistakes or have drawn any incorrect assumptions, please let me know!

UPDATE: Max Rosenfield developed a real estate partnership with Gerson Meyer, both of whom worked for Sanger Bros. department store. They bought and sold real estate (often to fellow Sanger’s employees), apparently as a lucrative side-business (Rosenfield even conducted his real estate transactions from his Sanger Bros. office). They apparently had acquired enough land by 1886 to have their own “addition” — “Rosenfield and Meyer’s Addition” in East Dallas. The earliest mention I found of it was this ad from May, 1886.

DMN, May 27, 1886

Their addition was in East Dallas. Below, the map from the Murphy & Bolanz block book (click for larger image):

Gerson Meyer (a Jewish German immigrant, just a couple of years older than Rosenfield), moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1897 and continued working for several years in men’s clothing.

If something looks too small, click it!

22 Comments

January 11, 2016

Protected: David Bowie, Dallas Convention Center — 1978

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January 9, 2016

Ramon Adams: Violinist, Candy Manufacturer, Old West Expert

Ramon F. Adams, 1946

by Paula Bosse

I’ve spent a fair amount of my adult life cataloging Texana books and ending descriptions with the bibliographic citations “Adams, HERD” or “Adams, SIX-GUNS.”* “Adams” was Ramon F. Adams, a respected and prolific writer and bibliographer specializing in the Old West and cowboy life. If you collect books on Texas and The West — or on cowboys and the cattle industry — you have Ramon Adams’ books on your shelves. And he lived in Dallas.

Ramon Adams was born in Moscow, Texas in 1889, near Houston, but left there as a young man to study and teach music. He was a professional violinist who played not only an occasional symphony gig, but after his years of teaching, he made a steady living playing in movie theater orchestras, accompanying silent films. While playing in the orchestra at the Rialto in Fort Worth, he even wore white tie and tails. When the Rialto musicians went on strike in 1923, he and his wife, Allie, moved to Dallas, and he played in the orchestras up and down theater row until the fateful day when he was cranking a stalled Model T Ford in an attempt to start it and broke his wrist. It never healed properly, and his days as a professional violinist came to an abrupt end.

I never knew about his first career as a musician, and I never knew about his second career as a candy merchant! The Candy Years began when he and his wife bought a little candy store on Elm Street between the Melba and the Majestic, and it did such good business that, a few years later, he went into manufacturing and wholesaling candy. The Adams Candy Co. began its successful life in the 1930s, known for its widely available candies such as “Texas Pecandy” and for its “Burnt Offering” (“burnt almonds in chewy caramel and rich chocolate”), which was made specially for Neiman-Marcus.

Sept. 1940

The runaway success of his candy business meant that when the Adamses sold the business in the mid-’50s (making, one assumes, a hefty profit) Ramon was able to devote his full attention to researching and writing about cowboy life and culture. He had been writing all along, in his spare time, but only in short bursts, usually at night, at the kitchen table. He had written several very long pieces for The Dallas Morning News in 1927 and 1928, but his first book, Cowboy Lingo, wasn’t published until 1936 — when he was 46 years old. And then the floodgates opened. When he died in 1976, his obituary noted that he had written 24 books — in addition to numerous articles for magazines and journals. He was the expert other experts consulted. And he lived in Dallas. And he made “Pecandy.”

I love this 1936 caricature of Adams. (He looks an awful lot like Dr. Smith of Lost In Space here….)

A pleasant little article on Adams, no doubt written by one of his many journalist friends, from 1946 (click for larger image):

Texas Week magazine, Sept. 7, 1946

And…

“Get a taste of Texas in your mouth!”

***

Sources & Notes

The Handbook of Texas entry on Ramon F. Adams is here.

A more comprehensive Biographical Note is on the page devoted to the Ramon Adams Collection, Texas/Dallas History & Archives, Dallas Public Library, here.

* “Adams, HERD” and “Adams, SIX-GUNS” is short-hand used by catalogers of books on Western Americana when noting that the book being cataloged is referenced in Ramon F. Adams’ book The Rampaging Herd: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on Men and Events in the Cattle Industry (Norman: Univ. Oklahoma, 1959) or his book Six-Guns and Saddle Leather, A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on Western Outlaws and Gunmen (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma, 1954).

1 Comment

January 8, 2016

The First Woman to Swim the Channel Helped Search the Trinity for Drowned Victims — 1927

swim-girl-swim_ha Gertrude Ederle (l) with co-star, Dallas native Bebe Daniels / via HA.com

by Paula Bosse

In 1926, Gertrude Ederle, a 19-year-old American, became the first woman to swim the English Channel — her time of 14 hours and 39 minutes was the fastest time ever. She became an instant international celebrity. When she returned to New York, she was given the very first ticker-tape parade, and over two million people turned out to see her.

After this momentous achievement, Ederle turned for a while to entertainment. She made a cameo appearance in a (now lost) silent film called Swim, Girl, Swim (which, incidentally, starred two Dallas natives, Bebe Daniels and James Hall), and she also toured for a while with a vaudeville company.

It was during one of these tours in April, 1927 that she arrived in Dallas, just as torrential rains began to fall. There was severe flooding along the West Fork of the Trinity, especially in the area of Record Crossing. The boat in which two young men were riding had capsized and they had been caught in the undertow and drowned. There had been an unsuccessful search for their bodies, and I’m not sure who came up with the idea of contacting Miss Ederle, but someone did. Why NOT call in the world’s most famous swimmer to see if she could lend a hand while authorities dragged the river? Miss Ederle did, in fact, join in the underwater search, but the bodies were not found. I bet she never forgot that Dallas stop!

The news was reported in Time magazine:

Time, April 18, 1927

While in town, Trudy also squeezed in a personal appearance at Sanger Bros., hawking what looks to be her own line of swimsuits.

Apr. 14, 1927

***

Sources & Notes

More on the Trinity River search can be found in The Dallas Morning News article “River Claims Two Victims; Gertrude Ederle Makes Vain Attempt to Recover Bodies” (DMN, April 5, 1927).

Newsreel footage of Gertrude Ederle can be seen here.

Photos of Ederle in action are here.

Ederle’s Wikipedia entry is here.

1 Comment

December 22, 2015

Spider-Man: Christmas in Dallas! (1983)

xmas_spider-man_cover_sm

by Paula Bosse

Remember when news photographer Peter Parker was covering a charity ball in Dallas? You know, the one attended exclusively by millionaires from around the country who were raising money for orphans?

(click for larger image) via Sense of Right Alliance blog

And then the Kingpin showed up dressed as Santa Claus and held the wealthy crowd for ransom, but Peter Parker managed to slip away and — whoa! — hey, Spider-Man appeared, and he and the Kingpin duked it out for awhile until an inventor of an anti-gravity device stepped in to aid the Webbed Wonder, and together they sent the Kingpin packing as he floated away, presumably into outer space. And, with Evil thwarted, Peter Parker was able to fly back home to spend Christmas morning with his beloved Aunt May. I’m sure you remember that! It was in all the (evening) papers.

This exciting adventure was told in a special give-away supplement included in a 1983 edition of The Dallas Times Herald. In the panels I’ve seen, there isn’t anything overtly Dallas-y, but that’s probably because the comic book aficionados who have scanned various pages are more interested in Spider-Man than in Dallas.

There are local ads, though. Like this one for Morgan Boots. (Is it too much to ask for them to have slipped a couple of special custom-designed sticky-soled boots onto Spider-Man’s Spidey-feet? Come on, Stan Lee!)

(click for larger image)

***

Sources & Notes

“Spider-Man: Christmas in Dallas!” (by Jim Salicrup, Alan Kupperburg, and Mike Esposito) was issued as an advertising supplement by The Dallas Times Herald in 1983. I haven’t found a scan of the full mini-comic book online, but several panels are here and here and here (the first two of these linked blogs have scans of several of the local ads).

Quite honestly, this looks like it could have been prepared for Anytown, USA (“Spider-Man: Christmas in [insert your city’s name here]”). I much preferred Captain Marvel’s visit to Dallas in the ’40s when there were Dallas-specific things EVERYWHERE: see my previous post “Captain Marvel Fights the Mole Men in Dallas — 1944” here.

Incidentally, tons of these are available on eBay right now — averaging about $5.00 each. Need one?

2 Comments

December 21, 2015

Merry Christmas From the Dallas Police Department’s Parking Enforcement Squad

Santa on Elm Street (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

I don’t know what the story is behind this photograph of Santa Claus riding on the back of a three-wheeled motorcycle (they were used by the Dallas Police Department to patrol downtown streets for parking violations). Maybe Santa’s sleigh has broken down and he’s thumbed a ride to get to a scheduled event at a department store. Let’s hope it wasn’t the result of said sleigh being parked in a No Parking zone and a rather too strenuous ticket dispute by Mr. Claus necessitating a visit to the station to discuss the situation further. (Look at the brick-paved street!)

***

I’m not sure of the original source of this photo, but I want to thank reader Chris Walker for sending this to me. Thank you, Chris!

4 Comments

December 6, 2015

HR Meeting at the Carousel Club

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

by Paula Bosse

Jack and the girls. …Before.

***

Sources & Notes

I think this is the Carousel Club. It might not be. The source of this photo is a bad, bad, bad, spammy site with loud commercials. They get no credit from me. “No soup for you!”

3 Comments

October 20, 2015

Waking Up Every Day To an Unimpeded View of Lake Cliff Park

The red-roofed Frank Rogers house, E. Fifth & N. Denver, Oak Cliff

by Paula Bosse

I saw this postcard of a row of houses on East Fifth Street in Oak Cliff and wondered if the house with the red roof and the low stone wall was still standing. Happily, it is. With a little digging, I discovered that the house at 320 E. Fifth Street was built in 1922 or very, very early 1923 for Frank Rogers, one of Dallas’ top photographers. A photographer would want to live with a beautiful view, and he certainly had it there — Lake Cliff Park was right across the street. (The artist Frank Reaugh also lived on East Fifth, a block or two to the west.) Frank Rogers (1878-1961) lived in the house he built at the corner of East Fifth and North Denver until his death at the age of 82.

It appears that Rogers bought the property in the survey area known as Robinson’s Park Place in December of 1920 for $8,000. The address does not exist until his house is built — it shows up for the first time in the 1923 city directory. The 1922 Sanborn map (see it here) shows the corner lot empty — as well as most of the rest of the lots along East Fifth between North Crawford and North Denver.

Here are a few bits and pieces of random information from a search on the address. In 1933, Rogers’ German Shepherd got loose. That park would have been an absolute paradise for a dog on the lam.

roger_dmn_090233 Sept. 2, 1933

And in 1936, for some reason Rogers was selling a “Nubian milch goat,” a friendly source of milk which was, presumably, kept on the property. Was it being sold at the behest of neighbors? The publication Milch Goat Dairy (1917) informs us that “no member of the goat family is more peaceful or gentle than the Nubian, and while the bucks of this breed have the same odor that all goat bucks have, the odor is far less in this breed.” Still. The other well-heeled neighbors might have had a few goat-related issues.

320_dmn_111736-goat Nov. 17, 1936

Nubian goat! (Wikipedia)

There was a room or small apartment at the rear of the house, and directories show that (at least through the ’20s) there was an ever-changing roster of lodgers who lived there — every year a different name was listed. They were most likely employees. In 1929, the occupant was J. W. McCrimon/McCrimmon, who may have been the same person who, as a minor in 1922, was accused of wounding another minor with a shotgun.

mccrimon_dmn_082922 Dallas Morning News, Aug. 29, 1922

Frank Rogers began his career as a newspaper photographer who later ran his own photography studio with his son, Norman. He preferred commercial jobs to bread-and-butter studio portraiture, though he did both. Whatever kind of job he was doing, he preferred to use flash powder when he could, a practice which caused several injuries (and even fires!) over the years.

A news article in 1945 described one such incident: during a commissioned job in which he was taking hundreds of employee photographs for a large company, his flash-powder gun exploded and he was “seriously burned on the hands and face. His spectacles, physicians told him, probably saved his eyesight” (DMN, Feb. 10, 1945).

And here he is in those spectacles:

Here’s another photo of the happy-looking photographer, posing with his camera and the potentially incendiary accoutrement.

rogers-frank_at-work_ca-1950s

But back to the house. Here it is today.

Google Street View

And another view, this time with the front of the house visible.

Bing StreetSide

If I had access to flash powder, I’d go out today and take an extremely well-lit photo of an old Dallas building (and hope I’d survive the experience) — as a nod to Frank Rogers, his cool house, and all the wonderful photos of Dallas he took in the first half of the 20th century. Thanks, Frank!

rogers-frank_ad_dallas-directory_1944-45
Frank Rogers and Son ad, 1944-45 Dallas directory

rogers-frank_1936-directory 1936 Dallas directory

***

Sources & Notes

Postcard is from eBay.

Frank Rogers was a busy man. If you’re interested in Dallas history (and I’m guessing you are if you’re reading a Dallas history blog), you’ve probably seen dozens and dozens (and dozens) of his photos without even knowing it. The Frank Rogers Collection is housed at the Dallas Public Library. I’ve used a few of his photos in previous posts — one of my favorites is his view of the Akard Street Canyon, here.

Another photo of the house can be seen in the 1980 photo below, from the Texas Historical Commission Historical Resources Survey, via the Portal to Texas History, here.

Take a tour of the Lake Cliff Park area via Google Street View, here.

And finally, here’s where Frank’s house is, marked in red.

Google Maps

18 Comments

September 9, 2015

Ebby Halliday, 1911-2015

Ebby in Big D, 1957… (photo: Ebby Halliday Realtors)

by Paula Bosse

(Feb. 2019: This post has been expanded since its original publication on Sept. 9, 2015.)

Ebby Halliday — the Dallas realtor known instantly by just her first name — died September 8, 2015 at the age of 104. Ebby was not only stunningly successful in the world of Dallas real estate, she was also something of a pioneer in paving the way for other women to establish and find great success in business. There are several obituaries that will present a more complete overview of her life (see links at the bottom of this post), so I’ll just post a few odds and ends that have caught my attention.

Vera Lucille Koch grew up in Kansas, and according to her 1929 Abilene High School yearbook, she was inordinately active in all sorts of clubs and sports. Here are a couple of photos from that yearbook (most images are larger when clicked); the first one shows her with the debate team.

And the second one shows her with her “Forensics” teammates (she excelled in reading competitions, although I’m not exactly sure what that means, as most “forensics” events involve debating). Rather amazingly, this scanned yearbook has her signature!

These two extra-curricular activities served her well in her later career — she obviously learned a lot about the effectiveness of persuasion at an early age.

After school, she spent several years working in department stores selling women’s fashions (including a stint in Omaha, where a vivacious young Vera can be seen in a fantastic photo posted by D Magazine here). Ultimately she arrived in glamorous Dallas around 1938, where she began life as a Dallasite managing the women’s hat department at the downtown department store W. A. Green. Most accounts have her entering the real estate business while still selling hats, soon after the war — almost by a fluke. Legend has it that one of her customers mentioned to her husband, famed oilman Clint Murchison, that he might want to utilize Ebby’s sense of style by having her decorate a few of his newly-built houses in Far North Dallas in order to increase sluggish sales; she was apparently so successful at this that she decided to pursue selling houses on her own and eventually established her own realty company.

I’ve always wondered about the name “Ebby” — what was it short for? Ebby Halliday is the only Ebby I’ve ever heard of. Turns out that she made the name up, sometime between graduating from high school in Kansas and coming to Dallas. In a 1983 Dallas Morning News interview, she explained how Vera Lucille Koch became “Ebby Halliday”:

“I was selling hats when one of the buyers who I admired a great deal told me I had to get rid of Vera Lucille. She said it was the silliest name she’d ever heard. I needed something more sophisticated. I thought about it and came up with the name Ebby. That sounded very, to me, like I had a lot of class.” (DMN, Sept. 25, 1983)

The paragraph ended with two sentences added by the writer of the article:

The name Halliday came from an early first marriage. That husband is now deceased.

The somewhat dismissive tone of those last two lines is interesting, because that husband, Claude W. Halliday — whom she appears to have married in 1947 (although an earlier marriage license for the couple had been issued in 1945 in New York) — is almost non-existent in newspaper searches. C. W. Halliday (1908-1965) was described in a 1957 article about Ebby as being “engaged in an investment and building corporation.” In his 1965 obituary, C. W. was described as “head of C. W. Halliday Realtors and a partner in Ebby Halliday Realtors.” When C. W. died in 1965 — several years he and Ebby had divorced (and the same year Ebby married Maurice Acers) — it was Ebby who acted as informant on his death certificate. Mr. Halliday’s real estate career began about 1946, a year or so before Ebby opened her own retail millinery business. Ebby and C. W.’s marriage lasted for over 12 years, but most traces of him seem to have vanished into the ether.

But back to the name “Ebby.” When the former Vera Lucille Koch arrived in Dallas around 1938 to work at the W. A. Green department store, she was listed in the city directory as “Mrs. Vera Eberhardt.” I’m not sure where the “Mrs.” came from (had she been married before she arrived in Dallas?), but it’s certainly easy to see that “Ebby” probably came from “Eberhardt,” a name which was either a husband’s surname or the name she described as having created for herself because it sounded sophisticated.

eberhardt_vera_ebby_1939-directory 1939 Dallas directory

In June, 1940, 29-year-old Ebby married KRLD broadcaster Royce H. Colon. Their marriage lasted only a few years, but it was during this time that the city directory shows her using the name “Ebby” professionally, while still working at Green’s.

Mrs. Royce Colon, 1940

colon_1941-directory
1941 Dallas directory

colon_1942-43-directory 1942-43 Dallas directory

In Mr. Colon’s 1975 obituary it was stated that he had begun his career in real estate (with Majors & Majors Realtors) at a time which would have coincided with the years he and Ebby were married. This is to take nothing away from Ebby’s incredible accomplishments, but if that were the case, it seems that she might have had some (at least rudimentary) background in real estate before Clint Murchison asked her to spiffy-up some new houses he was having trouble unloading. It’s possible she may have entered her new profession with more in her quiver than simply a flair for interior decoration. Ambition may have seemed unladylike and immodest for a “career gal” in the 1940s, even for someone as independent and focused as Ebby. I wonder if her “origin story” might have been softened a bit to play down her ambition? Whatever the case, it didn’t take Ebby long to make her mark on the world of Dallas real estate, and, in so doing, establishing for herself a national reputation as both a top realtor as well as a major inspiration and mentor for women in business.

Below is the type of article about Ebby Halliday’s accomplishments which ran constantly throughout her career. (Most images in this post are larger when clicked.)

The Tennessean, Nashville, TN, Sept. 7, 1958

But back to that hat shop.

The first mentions I found for the shop Ebby Millinery (one of several boutique shops which operated in the still-beautiful old home at 2603 Fairmount), were in August, 1947 — an article in The Dallas Morning News described the shop as having “opened recently.” Ebby (who had recently become Mrs. C. W. Halliday) opened the shop in partnership with Dallas hat designer Annabelle Derrieux Bradley.

Aug. 10, 1947

The shop’s bold decoration sounds … bold:

…Ebby Millinery’s French Room is decorated with bottle green walls and carpets and accented with striped drapes of deep shocking pink and chartreuse. The designing room has a touch of the Victorian with frilly white curtains and oversized wallpaper roses against a bottle-green background. (DMN, Aug. 20, 1947)

Oct. 26, 1947

When Ebby decided to pursue her new real estate business full-time, Derrieux and her husband took over the shop and eventually renamed it Derrieux Hats.

The first real estate ad I could find that featured Ebby’s name is this one, from 1948:

DMN, Aug. 5, 1948

And she was off like a rocket.

Below are a few photos of Ebby I’ve come across which I particularly like.

1956, Charm magazine (“the magazine for women who work”) (via Candy’s Dirt)

Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal, Sept. 22, 1957

Austin Statesman, Jan. 25, 1966

1966 (via Candy’s Dirt)

This photo is interesting because a version of it appears in the May 15, 1966 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald under the headline “The Texas Millionairess” with one slight difference: instead of posing above the Dallas skyline, she is shown posing above the Sydney skyline while on a trip to Australia.

And here she is in later days: the undisputed grand dame of Dallas real estate. RIP, Ebby.

ebby_wfaa

***

Sources & Notes

Top photo is one of three in this post which appeared in a Candy’s Dirt slideshow here (slideshow photos are from the archives of Ebby Halliday Realtors — there are tons of great photos there!).

Highschool photos of Vera Koch are from the 1929 yearbook of Abilene (Kansas) High School.

Ebby Halliday Acers died Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2015. A few of the online obituaries/tributes in the local media:

Dallas Morning News, here
Dallas Business Journal, here
D Magazine, here
Ebby Halliday Realtors website, here

A great article on a typical day at work for the 96-year-old Halliday (!) appeared in D Magazine in July, 2007; read Candace Carlisle’s article “Ebby Halliday: The Woman Who (Still) Sells Dallas,” here.

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