Flashback : Dallas

June 21, 2014

Commerce Street Looking West — 1900

by Paula Bosse

The companion photo from the one I posted yesterday. Both were taken by the same photographer (Jas. Wilkinson) and both appeared in The Bohemian magazine in 1900. It appears that both were probably taken from the top floor or roof of the Oriental Hotel at Commerce & Akard. The building about half-way up in this picture — the one on the right with the conical turret — is the Texas Land & Mortgage Company (seen here), located at Commerce and Field, placing the photographer at Commerce and Akard (the Oriental Hotel).

So it seems likely that the photo from yesterday (seen here) was from the Oriental looking north up Akard.

***

Photograph from The Bohemian magazine (1900) in the collection of the Fort Worth Public Library (which perforated the library’s name into the image).

Click photo for larger image.

6 Comments

June 20, 2014

The Remarkably Empty Streets of Downtown Dallas — 1900

by Paula Bosse

Jeff Britton’s drug store was at the southeast corner of Elm & Akard, so I think this is ~~Elm Street looking east, with the trolley crossing Elm on Akard.~~ I could be wrong! Suggestions welcome!

UPDATE: I WAS wrong! Reader Bob Taylor is correct when he commented that this is a view of Akard Street looking north, most likely taken from an upper floor or the roof of the Oriental Hotel at Akard & Commerce. The church at the top of this photo, in the middle, is First Baptist Church, located at about Patterson and Ervay (a map can be seen in a document I’ve posted here). (A companion photo to the one above shows Commerce looking west, again likely taken from atop the Oriental Hotel — it can be seen here.)

***

Sources & Notes

Photo from the pages of The Bohemian magazine in the Fort Worth Public Library (the library has perforated its name into the image).

9 Comments

June 19, 2014

Juneteenth at the Texas Centennial — 1936

hall-of-negro-life_centennial The Hall of Negro Life at the Texas Centennial Exposition, Fair Park

by Paula Bosse

Juneteenth, the anniversary of the date that African American Texans learned they were freed from slavery, was celebrated at the Texas Centennial Exposition with a day of entertainment and exhibits. It was also the day that the Hall of Negro Life — a federally funded exhibition hall acknowledging and honoring the history and accomplishments of African Americans in the United States — was officially dedicated.

One of the more interesting things I’ve stumbled across is a drawing of the proposed building (published in J. Mason Brewer’s The Negro In Texas History in 1935). I don’t believe I’ve seen this before. It’s interesting to note the changes from original proposal to finished product.

Among the large collection of art by black artists displayed in the Hall of Negro Life were four murals by the artist Aaron Douglas, depicting black history in Texas. Below are the two murals that survive, “Into Bondage” and “Aspiration.” These are incredible murals, and it must have been an emotional experience for those Juneteenth visitors in 1936 to be surrounded by all four powerful pieces in the lobby of a government-backed project that formally recognized the contributions of fellow African Americans.

aaron-douglas_into-bondage_1936_corcoran “Into Bondage” by Aaron Douglas, 1936 (Corcoran Gallery of Art)

aaron-douglas_aspiration_1936 “Aspiration” by Aaron Douglas, 1936 (Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco)

***

Sources & Notes

Black-and-white photograph of the Hall of Negro Life from the Private Collection of Mary Newton Maxwell, Portal to Texas History, here.

Photo of proposed Hall of Negro Life from An Historical and Pictorial Souvenir of the Negro In Texas History, written by J. Mason Brewer (Dallas: Mathis Publishing Co., 1935).

“Into Bondage” by Aaron Douglas (1936) is from the collection of The Corcoran Gallery of Art.

“Aspiration” by Aaron Douglas (1936) is from the collection of The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. (There is an amazing interactive look at this painting here.)

More on the Hall of Negro Life, from the Handbook of Texas, here.

More on the Hall of Negro Life from The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, in the July, 1936 article “Negroes and the Texas Centennial” by Jesse O. Thomas, here.

How was this important Juneteenth celebration at the Texas Centennial covered by The Dallas Morning News? Well, the paper actually devoted a lot of space to the day’s events in a fairly lengthy article which appeared on June 20, 1936. I think the DMN editorial board probably thought they were being magnanimous in the amount of coverage given, but, really, the article — though brimming with a certain amount of probably well-intentioned jubilation — is so unremittingly racist that it’s actually shocking to see this sort of thing in print in a major newspaper. I encourage you to check out the article published on June 20, 1936 which carries the laboriously headlined and sub-headlined “Negroes Stage Big Juneteenth at Centennial; Dallas Eats Cold Supper and Cotton Patches Emptied as Thousands Inspect Magic City; Hall Is Dedicated; Dusky Beauties Prance; Cab Calloway Does His Stuff For Truckers.”

4 Comments

June 19, 2014

Keep Oak Cliff Kinky — 1923

by Paula Bosse

I’m not sure what more I can offer, except to say that in today’s money — with inflation taken into account — that little $3 bondage device for a child’s thumb would run you a cool 40 bucks in 2014. (Updated: in 2024, make that $55!)

I picture Mrs. J. C. Thompson assembling the inventory herself, at the kitchen table in her little frame house on Melba Street in Oak Cliff, the Victrola playing in the other room, having a chirpy one-sided conversation with the imaginary “Dr. Thompson.” I wonder if she sold any?

To quote the Messrs. Python: “Guaranteed to break the ice at parties!”

***

Sources & Notes

Ad from The Dallas Morning News, Nov. 18, 1923. I’m not sure there was a follow-up.

Whither Mrs. J. C. Thompson, OC entrepreneur?

1 Comment

June 18, 2014

Protected: Parking Hogs, Meet Your Nemesis: The Parking Meter — 1935

Enter your password to view comments.

June 18, 2014

Dallas Medical College: 1900-1904

Photos from the UT Southwestern Library (click for larger image)

by Paula Bosse

Between 1900 and 1910, Dallas had ELEVEN medical schools, some of dubious distinction. One of the earliest and most successful was Dallas Medical College, an offshoot of Trinity University which was eventually merged with Baylor College of Medicine. It was located on Commerce St. near Akard, neighbors with a fire station and the City Hall (the Adolphus Hotel now occupies this site). Here are several photos from the Dallas Medical College archives, showing three typical medical students engaging in typical medical school hijinks.

dallas-medical-college_dmn_020301a Dallas Morning News, Feb. 3, 1901

The school’s first location on S. Ervay & Marilla (DMN, Feb. 3, 1901)

DMN, Sept. 27, 1903

dallas-med-coll_southern-merc_111004 Southern Mercury, Nov. 10, 1904

The official announcement of the merging, with details on how the two schools would function for the rest of the school year can be read here.

***

Sources & Notes

Photographs from the UT Southwestern Library, here and here.

More on early medical schools in Texas, with several paragraphs on Dallas, can be found in “Training the Healers” by Vernie A. Stembridge, M.D., an article from the May, 1999 issue of Heritage magazine (a publication of the Texas Historical Foundation) which can be read here.

1 Comment

June 17, 2014

Ads for Slaves Lost, Found, and For Sale in the Pages of The Dallas Herald

runaway_negro_dallas-herald-1856 Dallas Herald, June 7, 1856

by Paula Bosse

When one is browsing through Texas newspapers from the 1850s and 1860s, one shouldn’t be surprised to see things like this. But that doesn’t make them any less shocking. Black men and women were not regarded as people, but as property — in all of these “ads” you could easily substitute “horse” for “negro.” I think I always wanted to believe that slavery wasn’t much of an issue in Dallas — but it was. The name of one man, E. M. Stackpole, a successful shopkeeper, kept coming up a lot in these advertisements. In addition to the general merchandise of his store, he seemed to do a pretty brisk trade in buying, selling, hiring (more like leasing from other slave-owners), and hiring out slaves. One of his ads is below. (By the way, the word “likely” was a common adjective for slaves; it meant, basically, “worthy of purchase.”)

trade_for_negro_dallas-herald_1856 March 15, 1856

negro-auction_dallas-herald_091558 Sept. 15, 1858

negro-auction_dallas-herald_102058 Oct. 20, 1858

negro_for_sale_dallas-herald_1861 1861

***

Sources & Notes

All advertisements from The Dallas Herald, via UNT’s Portal to Texas History site.

My lack of knowledge about slavery in Texas is appalling. The Wikipedia entry provides a good overview; read it here.

3 Comments

June 16, 2014

Plow vs Skyscraper

(click for super-gigantic image)

by Paula Bosse

Here’s an unexpected view of the Dallas skyline, by legendary Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans. The photograph — titled “Lucius Washington and Two Mules Plow the Fields Before the Dallas Skyline” — is from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, with catalog description here. Though the Smithsonian lists this photo as being from 1939, it’s possible that it was taken a year earlier, as The Dallas Morning News reported on April 2, 1938 that Mydans was in town shooting the Dallas skyline. A major article on Texas appeared in Life magazine a year later, in the April 10, 1939 issue, featuring a different, very large photo of the Dallas skyline by Mydans, which can be seen here.

Below, an enlarged detail, lightened a bit.

***

More on Mydans from the Duke University collection here, with examples of his FSA, Life magazine, and WWII reportage here.

Wikipedia article on Mydans here.

Click photos for much larger images.

June 15, 2014

Give a 15-Year-Old 8,400 Pounds of Soap and He’ll Carve You a Radio Transmitter — 1930

Michael Owen, Jr., boy soap-carver 1930

by Paula Bosse

In 1930, 15-year-old sculptor Michael G. Owen, Jr. carved a replica of the WFAA transmitter building out of 8,400 pounds of Ivory soap. And why not? It was a big draw at that year’s State Fair of Texas.

Mike Owen, a student at well-to-do Highland Park High School (although Dallas artist Olin Travis, who had him as a pupil at about this time, described him as being “very poor”), had been sculpting all sorts of things, from the age of 3. He had begun winning awards when he was 13 or 14, one in an earlier “soap modeling” contest sponsored by Procter & Gamble. Not only did that soap-carving award result in young Mr. Owen being commissioned by Sanger Bros. to carve a model of the downtown skyline (I’m not sure this commission was ever actually completed), he was also asked to create an attraction for the State Fair: a replica-in-soap of the WFAA transmitter plant located on Northwest Highway near Grapevine (see a photo of the transmitter building and tower here). Owen worked from blueprints of the building and a bronze model supplied by the Belo Corporation (owner of WFAA), and Proctor & Gamble supplied the huge bars of Ivory soap (12 bars, each weighing 700 pounds). The finished piece was an “exact replica” of the 50,000-watt transmitter plant and was touted by Procter & Gamble as being the largest soap sculpture ever executed. It was a big hit at the 1930 State Fair of Texas.

Michael Owen went on to become a professional artist, with early enthusiastic support from Jerry Bywaters. He was associated with the Dallas Nine (and was, by far, the youngest member affiliated with that somewhat amorphous group), and I will address his more serious non-soap forays into the art world in a later post. But, first, back to soap!

The photo below shows Mike Owen’s finished product, which took him 12 days to complete.

Belo Collection, DeGolyer Library, SMU

It’s difficult to tell what the size of the finished work was from this photo, but it was described as being five feet high and seven feet wide. So… big. When it was displayed at the fair it was, for some reason, bathed in blue light. After the 12 days it took Owen to complete this sculpture, I bet that kid was squeaky-clean and positively reeked of Ivory soap.

owen-michael_soap_1930b

owen-michael_soap_1930

***

Sources & Notes

Photo of Owen’s soap carving of the WFAA transmitter plant is from the Belo Records collection, DeGolyer Library. Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University; more information on this photo can be found on the SMU website here.

Other Flashback Dallas posts on artist and sculptor Michael G. Owen, Jr.:

For a look at Owen’s professional career as a sculptor, see my post “Michael G. Owen, Jr., Dallas Sculptor of Lead Belly” here.
To read about the Peruna monument SMU commissioned him to produce in 1937 (when he had just turned 22), see my post here.

UPDATE: Read about a recently discovered large painting by Owen up for auction in Dallas in 2019 here.

3 Comments

June 15, 2014

WFAA & WBAP’s Unusual Broadcasting Alliance

by Paula Bosse

wfaa-wbap_transmitter_1941

I looked at this photograph and thought, “That’s odd. Two competing radio stations from two competing newspapers from two competing cities used the same radio transmitter. How did that happen?” And then I read about the extremely unusual time-sharing arrangement that WFAA (which was owned by The Dallas Morning News) and WBAP (which was owned by The Fort Worth Star-Telegram) maintained for 41 years.

I’ll link to a story that fully explains this extraordinary arrangement, but, briefly, WFAA and WBAP both broadcast on two frequencies, trading off throughout the day. A typical schedule looked like this:

wfaa-wbap_schedule

The two frequencies were 570 and 800 (later 820) kilohertz on the AM band. When WFAA was broadcasting on 570, WBAP was broadcasting on 820. On the agreed-upon time, the stations would switch over to the other frequency. Back and forth. Over and over and over. All day long. They were independent stations with independent programming, network affiliations, on-air talent, and advertising departments. And this went on for FORTY-ONE YEARS! Until 1970! How had I never heard of this?

Apparently it wasn’t all that big a deal to the stations or the listeners. Things were getting a little strained by 1969, though, when WBAP went whole-hog into playing country music (and eventually became one of the most successful country stations in the United States). It was time to go their own ways. The split was amicable, and both stations felt that the unusual partnership had worked well for all concerned.

So why did this happen in the first place? Because of the 820 frequency. 820 was a clear channel frequency, which meant that the station that owned it could broadcast at an incredible 50,000 watts — enough to be heard all over the Western hemisphere; 570 boasted a measly 5,000 watts, and, as someone said, “people might hear you in Sherman … but maybe not.” Neither WFAA or WBAP wanted to give up the clear channel powerhouse, which is why their piggy-backing partnership lasted as long as it did. But, ultimately, WBAP got 820 and was a major broadcasting force to be reckoned with. WFAA radio got the short end of the stick and sputtered along at 570 on the AM dial for a few lackluster years but never recovered from losing its half-share of 820 AM. In the WFAA-WBAP showdown: Fort Worth 1, Dallas 0.

Look at this crazy billboard from 1963 — it flashed which frequency WFAA was currently broadcasting on.

Broadcasting, April 22, 1963

***

Sources & Notes

Photo of the transmitter building from WFAA, WBAP, KGKO Combined Family Album (Dallas-Fort Worth, 1941). Yes, there was actually a THIRD station involved in all of this for a while — KGKO out of Wichita Falls! Here’s an ad from the 1941-42 Texas Almanac, via the Portal to Texas History (click to see a larger image):

Sample schedule is from the definitive article on this bizarre broadcasting alliance: “You Have Half a Station, We Have Half a Station” — How WFAA in Dallas and WBAP in Fort Worth Shared Radio Frequencies for Four Decades by John Mark Dempsey, from the Spring, 1999 issue of Legacies magazine, which can and SHOULD be read, here.

For another photo of this transmitter building, see a previous post here.

5 Comments

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this:

Sources & Notes

Share this: