Flashback : Dallas

Feast your eyes…

by Paula Bosse

I’ve been dealing with a bunch of family issues recently, but I hope to be back to posting regularly soon. In the meantime, here’s a favorite photo, from the 2018 Flashback Dallas post “The Eccentric Medford Compound on the Old Eagle Ford Road: 1945-1950.” R. E. Medford — the man who… um… assembled the buildings seen above — was the patriarch of a prodigiously violent West Dallas family. Check it out.

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Copyright © 2023 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

On the Belmont line…

by Paula Bosse

Time for another installment of this ongoing “series” in which I add newly found (to me) photos to old Flashback Dallas posts, in order to keep stuff together.

Above, this 1954 color photo of a Belmont streetcar trundling down an East Dallas street has been added to the 2018 post “Ghost Rails of the Belmont Streetcar Line.” Anyone recognize where this was taken? (Source: eBay)

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Below, a photo of a fire truck and firemen taken outside the still-standing fire station on Cedar Springs has been added to the 2014 post “No. 4 Hook and Ladder Company, Oak Lawn — 1909.” (Source: eBay)

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This photo of SMU’s Ownby Stadium has been added to the 2017 post “Ownby Stadium, With Room to Breathe.” (Source: Park Cities Bank postcard series)

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Speaking of Ownby Stadium and sports, this cropped screenshot shows Dallas resident and sports legend Babe Didrikson, after she’d competed in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) track and field championships at SMU in July 1930 (and set two world records, including one in the javelin throw). I’m adding this photo of a teenaged Babe to the 2014 post “Babe Didrikson, Oak Cliff Typist.” (Image source: newsreel footage on the Critical Past website, where you can watch the minute-and-a-half clip here — it doesn’t look a lot like Ownby Stadium, but that’s where the meet happened.)

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Just across from the SMU campus is Snider Plaza — here is a photo from 1940 showing part of the marquee of the Varsity Theater and adjoining businesses — I’ve added it to the 2021 post “Snider Plaza & The Varsity Theater — 1920s.” (Source: University Park Brown Books)

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Another movie-house photo — this one of the Jefferson Theater — has been added to the 2019 post “Theaters at 1517 Elm: The Garden, The Jefferson, The Pantages, The Ritz, and The Mirror — 1912-1941.” What an unusual facade! I’m not sure how long that whimsical bit of design lasted (the Jefferson operated between 1915-1925). The marquee advertises appearances by Kasmir & Co. and vaudeville comedians Howard & Lewis. (Source: eBay)

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I’ve added this 1964 United Press International photo showing the proposed site of the JFK Memorial to the 2014 post “Where to Put That JFK Memorial? — 1964” (where it joins a similarly interesting Associated Press version). (Source: eBay)

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This Nov. 1955 aerial photo of the construction of South Central Expressway looking north toward downtown is joining a slightly earlier view looking toward the south in the 2016 post “South Central Expressway Under Construction — 1955.” (Source: Squire Haskins Photography, Inc. Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Special Collections — ID No. 10002950)

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This “key” to identify landmarks (Dr Pepper plant in orange, Meadows Building in blue, etc.) in another Squire Haskins aerial photo has been added to the 2017 post “The Wide Open Spaces Northeast of Central and Lovers — 1957,” mainly because I was driving around there this afternoon and remembered this great photo — it’s one of my favorites, showing the general area I grew up in before it exploded with development. (Source: UTA Special Collections — ID No. 10002957)

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I stumbled across a photo which was a bit better in quality that the one I had used previously, so I’ve added this photo to the 2022 post “19th-Century Sign-Painting and Real-Estating.” (Source: American Petroleum Institute Photograph and Film Collection, National Museum of American History, Archives Center, via the Smithsonian Institution Online Virtual Archives)

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Copyright © 2023 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

The Adolphus lunch counter awaits…

by Paula Bosse

I’ve been a bit too busy to write anything recently, so I’ve taken the lazy way out and posted links to old posts on my Facebook and Twitter feeds. This week I’ve shared links of Flashback Dallas posts on a theme: restaurants (and a bar…). I enjoyed reading them again — you might, too. Here are they are.

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“THE ADOLPHUS HOTEL’S ‘COFFEE ROOM’ — 1919” (from 2018)

Take a look at the Adolphus Lunch Room (and its cuspidor) in the photo above. This was at a time when the world was about to have to readjust to life during Prohibition — bars were out, coffee and tea rooms were in.

After sharing this photo on Facebook — a photo from 1919 — a reader commented that it pre-dated Prohibition (the national crackdown came in January 1920). But Dallas County had voted to go “dry” in October 1917, jumping the gun before most other places. But only Dallas County. In 1917, the surrounding counties were wide open, and bars just across the county line were more than eager to take gobs of money from the flood of Dallas’ beer- and whiskey-seekers, while prim and proper Dallas teetotalers (who apparently really knew how to get the vote out) sipped daintily on their tea and coffee. Before Prohibition went into effect in Dallas (Oct. 21, 1917) there were 183 bars listed in the city directory — the following year, there were none. I wrote about a poor guy who went into the bar business in Big D at exactly the wrong dang time.

“THE 101 BAR: PATRICK HANNON, PROP. — ca. 1917” (2016)

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“SCHOOL LUNCHES OF YESTERYEAR” (2015)

Lunch ladies, school menus, tongue salad. The school menu in the 1920s and ’30s was loaded with unusual and/or unappetizing “food.”

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“ROTH’S, FORT WORTH AVENUE” (2017)

Read about the long-lived Roth’s, which opened in Oak Cliff along Fort Worth Avenue around 1940 by a Hungarian immigrant who had a very, very interesting family.

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“ROSS GRAVES’ CAFE: 1800 JACKSON — 1947” (2021)

Cafe owner Ross Graves was a busy, busy man. Check out this post about his active and “swellegant” career.

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“‘CARHOPS’ — A SHORT DOCUMENTARY, ca. 1974” (2015)

You can’t have “Restaurant Week” without mentioning the fabulous drive-ins. I encourage everyone reading this to watch the short documentary linked in this post (it’s a mere 14 minutes long!). “Carhops” was filmed in the early 1970s and contains interviews with J. D. Sivils (Sivils), Jack Keller (Keller’s), and B. J. Kirby (owner of Kirby’s Steakhouse, and son of drive-in entrepreneur Jesse Kirby who founded what many consider the very first drive-in — with the very first carhops — the Pig Stand). Watching this wonderful piece of cultural history, I am reminded how much I continue to grieve the loss of the once-common, so-thick-it-hurts Dallas accent. RIP, twang.

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Sources & Notes

See each original post for image credits.

If you would like to follow me on social media, I am on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

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Copyright © 2023 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

Big D Kodachrome

by Paula Bosse

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so why not now? These are things I’ve collected over the past months which I am now adding to old posts in order to keep everything together.

The first is the color photo above, showing the super-fab Walgreens at the corner of Commerce and Akard (see my favorite photo of it in this post), with the view looking north on Akard. I’ve added it to the 2021 post “Downtown Dallas in Color — 1940s & 1950s.” (Source: eBay)

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I’ve added some text and a couple of photos about Ernest Oates, the Englishman who brought soccer to Dallas, to the 2014 post “The Dallas Athletics, Dallas’ First Soccer Team — 1908.” (Source, 1922 Dallas city directory)

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I’ve added this 1961 ad to the perhaps-too-exhaustingly-exhaustive post from 2018, “Sam Ventura’s Italian Village, Oak Lawn.” (Source: Diane Wisdom Papers, Archives of Women of the Southwest, DeGolyer Library, SMU, here)

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I try to avoid posting photos with watermarks, but I love this, so I’ve added it to one of my favorite posts, “Ghost Rails of the Belmont Streetcar Line” from 2018. It shows a Belmont car in front of the Palace Theatre at Elm and Ervay. The marquee shows that “New Moon” — starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy — is playing. “New Moon” opened at the Palace on July 4, 1940 and ran for a week. (Source: eBay)

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Do people still say “funeral parlor”? This ad from 1937 for the Weever Funeral Home has been added to the 2015 post “Not Dead Yet at McKinney & Routh.” The building at 2533 McKinney was built in 1927 and was a strikingly beautiful (and pricey) funeral home — it’s still standing and has been occupied in recent years by a string of Uptown restaurants. This ad proudly notes that “Weever advertises his prices” — he is completely transparent about the fact that the price of a silver-plated casket is gonna set you back $2,250 (the equivalent in today’s money of $45,000). Can’t say you weren’t warned. (Source: 1937 Dallas city directory)

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These two photos have to do with a concrete house built in University Park around 1914 (I was kind of obsessed with it a few years ago). They have been added to the 2018 post “Dallas in ‘The Western Architect,’ 1914: Park Cities Residences” (this is one in a ridiculously crammed-full-of-information 7-part series I wrote about buildings featured in an architectural journal — I  probably learned more about early-20th-century buildings in Dallas from researching and writing those posts than from anything else I’ve done). The first photo (the concrete house, looking a lot less dynamic than when it was brand new) was taken around 1931; the second photo (the Presley Apartments, which replaced the concrete house when it was demolished) is from about 1956. (Source: the “Brown Books” from the University Park Library, which I wrote about here — Dear University Park Library: I can no longer get this incredibly useful site to work!)

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Below, a charming ad for the skating rink at Fair Park. It has been added to the charming 2014 post “Skate Date!” (“charming” if you skim over the prostitution bits). (Source: eBay)

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I’ve added this photo of the construction of the Dallas Athletic Club — taken by Charles Erwin Arnold — to the 2015 post “The Dallas Athletic Club Building, 1925-1981.” Kinda low-res and watermarked, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before, and I really like it. The intersection is Elm and St. Paul, and the view is to the south. (Source: Arnold Photographic Collection, Dallas Historical Society. Want it high-res with no watermark? Hie thee to the DHS and ask for item A.68.28.17.)

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This Mohr Chevrolet ad from 1975 has been added to the 2021 post “Simms Super Service Station, Cedar Springs & Maple — 1930.” (Source: 1975 Dallas city directory)

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Lastly, I’ve added a few articles and images to the 2014 post “Roger Corman Does Dallas,” about a painfully groovy, super-low-budget, anti-establishment movie, a few scenes of which were filmed in downtown Dallas and on the SMU campus in 1969. The official movie title is complicated and irritatingly punctuated — let’s just call it “Gas” to make things easier. Here’s one of the things I’ve added to the original post, a 1970 ad from the SMU campus newspaper (click to see a larger image). (Source: SMU Daily Campus, Nov. 4, 1970, Student Newspapers collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)

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Until next time….

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Copyright © 2022 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

“Ding it!” (1924 ad)

by Paula Bosse

I have discovered that today — August 20 — is World Mosquito Day. Personally, I would save any mosquito-related celebrating until the entire species has been eradicated (…or at least eradicated from anywhere near ME), but, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, this day “marks the anniversary of the discovery that mosquitoes transmit the parasite that causes malaria. On this day in 1897, Sir Ronald Ross discovered the malaria parasite in the stomach tissue of an Anopheles mosquito. His work later confirmed that mosquitoes are the vector which carries this devastating parasite from human to human.”

So, thanks for that, Sir Ronald Ross.

In 2017 I wrote about Dallas’ early battles with mosquitoes — and I really enjoyed discovering how people dealt with them before window screens. Read that post here: “The Mosquito Bar.”

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Copyright © 2022 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

Newsboy racing down Ervay…

by Paula Bosse

The image above is a small detail from a photo of the Neiman-Marcus building at Main and Ervay — the streets and sidewalks around the store are crammed with people and traffic. This is one of my all-time personal favorite posts, originally posted all the way back in the first months of Flashback Dallas, in May 2014. Check out other wonderful “hidden” glimpses (as well as the equally wonderful original photograph from SMU’s DeGolyer Library) in the post “‘There Are Eight Million Stories in the Naked City…” — ca. 1920.”

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Copyright © 2022 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

by Paula Bosse

No new post this week, I’m afraid. But here’s a nice old one, plucked from the archives: “Beautiful South Ervay Street — ca. 1910.”

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Copyright © 2022 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

Ice…

by Paula Bosse

It wasn’t quite as hot today as it was when I wrote “Dallas Ice Factory” in 2018. But it was close. Stay cool, y’all. Close the blinds, draw the curtains. Wish for the quick arrival of September October November.

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Copyright © 2022 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

Ice-cold watermelon beckons….

by Paula Bosse

It’s hot. An ice-cold slice of watermelon sounds great. The above photo is one of my all-time favorites, from the 2016 Flashback Dallas post “‘Melons On Ice’ — 1890s.” Enjoy the flashback Flashback!

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Sources & Notes

This photo is from the Squire Haskins Photography, Inc. Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, here.

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Copyright © 2022 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.

The bright lights of Elm Street…

by Paula Bosse

In honor of tonight’s Oscars, I give you a whole bunch of posts about — and images of — old Dallas movie theaters in one handy link, here. Just keep scrolling!

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Copyright © 2022 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.