West Jefferson Blvd, 1932. All that’s missing from this photo is Edward G. Robinson and an arsenal of tommy-guns. This is the only theater in the world whose marquee showing the 1963 double feature of “Cry of Battle”/”War Is Hell” has become a part of history (the Texas Theatre, is of course, where Lee Harvey Oswald was captured on the afternoon of November 22, 1963). When the movie theater opened in 1931 — in the time of Prohibition and running boards — it was a much more elegant-looking picture palace. Had he not been in the Big House at the time, John Dillinger might have seen this very same Gable and Harlow movie at the Biograph (or what I call “Chicago’s Texas Theatre”). He probably wouldn’t have been sitting through something called “Kiddie Frolics,” featuring Oak Cliff’s own Virginia Self, a teenage dancer … frolicking.
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After several changes in ownership and a few awkward renovations, the Texas Theatre seems to be back on track these days. The history page of their website is here (with interesting factoids such as: it opened on San Jacinto Day, it was the first theater in Dallas with air-conditioning, and it was briefly owned by Howard Hughes).
For photos of the theater’s interior, published in 1932 in the trade journal Motion Picture Herald, see my post “The Texas Theatre and Its Venetian-Inspired Decor,” here.
This is a wonderful (and very uncharacteristic) work by Frank Reaugh, the pastelist who is known for his depictions of cattle and longhorns. Reaugh (1860-1945) lived and taught in Oak Cliff, and his small, delicate, impressionistic works in pastel are not only highly collectible, but are also a glimpse of the waning days of the open, unfenced Western Plains. The word “iconic” is thrown away too much these days, but below is an example of the iconic work of Frank Reaguh.
“Gray Hill and Rain” by Frank Reaugh (click for larger image.)
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Sources & Notes
Both “Meteor” and “Gray Hill and Rain” are undated works from The Frank Reaugh Art Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Both works are pastel on paper. (And for those wondering, “Reaugh” is pronounced “Ray.”)
There’s a lot going on here (click for larger image) / Photo: SMU
by Paula Bosse
When I see photos like this I always want to zoom in as far as I can, to see the tiny details and everyday moments that might have been captured unwittingly by the photographer. Luckily, this photo has been scanned at such a high resolution (thank you, DeGolyer Library!) that it’s easy to zoom in and wander around it. (Click all of these pictures for much larger images.)
This particular photograph, from the DeGolyer Library at SMU, is attributed to Charles A. McAfee. The DeGolyer caption reads: “Downtown Dallas looking northwest at Santa Fe building complex (center left); Weyenberg Shoe Company at 1300-1302 Jackson; Waldorf Hotel, 1302 Commerce, and the Southland Hotel.” The Britling Cafeteria was at 1316 Commerce — its rear entrance on Jackson is visible in the photo. Here are a few more of the businesses in that 1300 block of Jackson Street, bounded by S. Field and S. Akard (from the 1923 city directory):
And it ALSO shows lots of signs and ads painted on the sides of buildings (some of which might still exist), two men standing on a roof surveying the skyline, a couple of guys talking on the sidewalk, a cafe next door to something that might be a crude garage, cars in a lot where it costs 25 cents to park, and a cool water tower on top of a shoe company. All of which add up to make this a much more interesting and lively photograph than originally presumed.
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Photograph of downtown Dallas attributed to Charles A. McAfee; from the DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University; access it here. I’ve corrected the color.
Trying to pin a date down (SMU has it as “circa 1920”), I’m guessing the photograph might have been taken around 1923, as the Britling Cafeteria opened for business on November 28, 1922. (I was so interested in that cafeteria that I wrote about it: read the Flashback Dallas post “The Britling Cafeteria Serves Those Who Serve Themselves,” here.)
For other photos I’ve zoomed in on to see the details, see here.
Trini Lopez has sold millions of records. MILLIONS. He was born in Dallas in 1937 and grew up in the Little Mexico area of town. He started his career when he was a teenager at Crozier Tech High School, singing and playing guitar in a popular combo. He played at dozens of school dances and parties, and, with a steady and faithful following, he was much in demand at countless venues around town, including a regular 2:30-6:30 p.m. Sunday matinee spot at Club Vegas (Oak Lawn & Lemmon), one of the many clubs in the city run by Jack Ruby.
Jack Ruby — the personable Latin from Manhattan, reports surprising success with his Sunday night Fiestas at Club Vegas….
“There is a wide demand for Latin music in Dallas,” said the Oak Lawn impresario…. He is opening at 2:30 p.m. Sundays for matinee dances featuring Trini Lopez and his orchestra. The versatile Lopez combo offers an occasional Yanqui tune in addition to the likes of the “Jack Ruby Mambo.” (Tony Zoppi’s column in The Dallas Morning News, Dec. 19, 1956)
(I really want to hear that “Jack Ruby Mambo”!)
Speaking of the “Latin from Manhattan” (?!):
Ha! (From Gary James’ really great interview w/ Trini — see link at end.)
He also appeared on local TV, including Channel 8 shows hosted by a pre-Peppermint Jerry Haynes: “Jukebox” and “Top Ten Dancing Party.”
1958 publicity photo
Trini’s first single was “The Right to Rock” — the first song he ever wrote — recorded in 1958 on a small Dallas label called Volk (did anyone else ever record for this label?).
Billboard, June 23, 1958
It’s a great little rockabilly number, but it didn’t really make any waves outside of Dallas (although it’s since found new life in the cult-y world of vintage rockabilly reissues).
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Trini then recorded a few singles for King, but those went nowhere as well, and Trini and his combo continued to play small clubs in and around DFW, wondering when the big break was going to come.
Jan., 1959
After a gig in Wichita Falls, Trini met fellow-Texan Buddy Holly who had been impressed by the young singer’s performance and encouraged him to contact his producer, Norman Petty, about recording some tracks at Petty’s studio in New Mexico. Trini jumped at the chance, but, unfortunately, the time in the studio at Clovis turned out to be a career low-point (see below for a link to the Gary James interview in which Trini gives a bitter and scathing account of that whole experience). Trini returned to Dallas and immediately fired his band and started a new one, determined that he would succeed, despite the prevailing (spoken and unspoken) racism he was continuing to run up against in the music business.
A few months after Buddy Holly’s death, the Crickets contacted Trini and asked him to travel to Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of becoming their new lead singer. Trini, seeing this as the big break he’d been waiting for, disbanded the combo and set out to the West Coast alone. The “audition” never really materialized, and Trini was stuck in California with no money and no prospects. He played a few small clubs and then settled into PJ’s for an extended and very successful engagement. It was there, in 1963, that the “big break” finally happened: he was discovered by producer Don Costa, who recommended that Frank Sinatra sign him to Reprise Records. Next thing you know, Trini had recorded his debut album, “Trini Lopez at PJ’s,” and the first single, “If I Had a Hammer,” was a huge smash hit, selling millions of copies and reaching #1 in 38 countries. Trini Lopez became an international star.
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At the beginning of 1964, he was booked for a series of shows in Paris where he shared the bill with The Beatles, just as they were about to hit big in the US (their Ed Sullivan appearance was less than a month away). Beatlemania was in full force in Europe, but Trini was also getting his share of attention.
And, the rest, as they say, is history.
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A couple of interesting things, Dallas-wise. My Trini Lopez knowledge is fairly scant, but having read a lot about him over the past couple of days, the one thing that keeps coming back when he talks about the Little Mexico section of town (invariably referred to by him as a “ghetto”) is how violent a place it was. He also recounts the deep and dehumanizing racial prejudice he and other Mexican-Americans experienced living in Dallas. When he left for Los Angeles in 1959/1960, he left for good. He came back regularly to visit his family (I remember having him pointed out to me by my parents in a restaurant once), but I’m not sure he would have ever wanted to live here again.
From an interview by Robert Wilonsky (Dallas Observer, May 29, 2006)
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Below are a few random interviews and tidbits.
Trini developed his own beat, a Tex-Mex style of rock and roll now popularly known as “the Trini beat” and which Trini describes as “American music with a Mexican feeing.” (DMN, July 12, 1964)
And from the same article:
“People in Dallas told me I had the talent but suggested I change my name. I said ‘No.’ I told them Italians had made it as Italians, Jews as Jews, and Negroes as Negroes. I wanted to make it as a Mexican. No one of Mexican-American heritage had made it before in the entertainment world. I wanted to be the first.” (DMN, July 12, 1964)
(According to Trini, the person who suggested he change he name was John F. Sheffield who owned Volk Records. Sheffield was okay with “Trini,” but he insisted the “Lopez” had to go. He suggested “Roper.” Trini refused and threatened to walk. Sheffield relented.)
(Click for larger image – continues below.)
Earl Wilson’s syndicated column (July 1965)
In 1969, Trini Lopez became a restaurateur and opened “Trini’s” at 5412 East Mockingbird, across from the old Dr Pepper plant (click for larger image):
UPDATE: Sadly, Trini Lopez died on April 11, 2020 from complications of COVID-19. He was 83. Read his obituary in Varietyhere.
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Sources & Notes
Full Dallas Observer interview by Robert Wilonsky is here.
There are a lot of garbled accounts of Trini Lopez’s career scattered across the internet. One that seems mostly right is here.
The essential interview with Trini by Gary James I’ve mentioned a couple of times above, is here. I think the interview is from 2002. His memories of growing up in Dallas are interesting, unvarnished, and well worth reading. He also talks about the racial prejudice he met with when attempting to record with Norman Petty and the resulting mutiny of his band in Clovis which led to their being fired by Trini immediately upon their return to Dallas.
Read Trini’s tribute to his parents — an essay he wrote in the early 1980s — here.
Discovering Trini and his music has been surprisingly fun! Thanks, Trini! Check out this great, infectiously joyful performance of “La Bamba” with Jose Feliciano at a music festival in San Antonio in 1974. (Trini was performing “La Bamba” when he was still in Dallas, before Ritchie Valens had a hit with it — when Valens’ version hit the airwaves, Trini was crushed that someone had beaten him to recording it. He may not have recorded it first, but he had the bigger hit with it a few years later.)
Look familiar? The building above would later become the Texas School Book Depository. But prior to that, the building housed Sexton Foods, a Chicago-based wholesale grocer which occupied the building for twenty years (1941-1961). The building was known commonly in town as “the Sexton building,” even after it was leased to the Texas School Book Depository in 1963, which explains why some people — citizens and police officers alike — were still referring to it by that name on the day of the Kennedy assassination (and this has apparently caused confusion amongst those wading deep into the “assassination literature”). The photo above is cropped from an ad I came across in The Dude Wrangler, a dude ranch quarterly (!), published in Bandera. The ad (which is reproduced in full down the page a bit) is from 1953, but the photo of the building appears to have been taken earlier.
The leasing of the building by D. Harold Byrd to the John Sexton Wholesale Grocery Company of Chicago (initially for only five years) was announced in The Dallas Morning News on Nov. 28, 1940 (“Wholesale Grocery Leases Building at Houston and Elm”). The Sexton Co. was scheduled to move in on Dec. 8 “following a general remodeling which will include installation of elevators, rearranging of partitions and painting.” They remained in the building until 1961.
1951
1953
In 1953 (before anyone from Hertz was planning on putting a billboard up there), the Ford people erected a giant neon sign on top of the building to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Ford Motor Company. In fact, it was so big that it had half a mile of neon tubing in it and was touted as being the largest animated neon sign in the Southwest. Now there’s a sign that probably caused a few car accidents!
1953
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Before the Sexton company moved in, the building housed the Perfection-Aire air-conditioning company. Newspaper articles announced the renovation of the building for the A/C people — the company went into receivership a couple of years later.
1937
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Before that, it was the site of the Southern Rock Island Plow Co., which was the original owner of the property (1894) and which built the building in 1903 after the first building was destroyed in a fire after it was hit by lightning on May 4, 1901.
circa 1910
Above, the Southern Rock Island Plow Co. Building which still stands, famous as the “Texas School Book Depository”; below, the building originally built by the plow company which was destroyed by fire in May, 1901.
1901, Dallas city directory
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Sources & Notes
Sexton Co. ad from a 1953 issue of The Dude Wrangler ; the top image is a detail from that ad.
More on the history of the building as it pertains to the Rock Island Plow Co. is here.
This fantastic photo — taken between about 1912 and 1915 — shows a horse-trading day, taking place around S. Houston and Jackson streets.
Chenoweth’s Feed Store and wagon yard at Houston and Commerce was the scene of monthly trades days or First Mondays from the 1880s into the twentieth century. The crowd spilled over into the streets, blocking passage but no one complained. The old red courthouse survived.
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Photo from the UT Southwestern Library.
Caption by A. C. Greene from his book Dallas, The Deciding Years (Austin: Encino Press, 1973).
Even though it seems very late to see horses in downtown Dallas, this photo appears to have been taken between 1912 and 1915 when Charles B. Tatum owned a saloon at the corner of Commerce and S. Houston (his sign can be seen painted on the wall facing Houston Street at the left). The MKT Building can be seen at the top right of the photo, indicating that this photo was taken west of S. Houston, almost to Jackson (the old county jail would have been behind the photographer. The same view today can be seen here.
The wagon yard Greene mentions can be seen in the 1905 Sanborn map, here.
I started watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show on Channel 11 when I was a kid. I still love the show, and I’ve seen every episode countless times. Which is kind of an odd jumping-off point for a post on a Dallas clothing manufacturer, but there you are. The company was Nardis of Dallas, a successful manufacturer of women’s apparel, owned by the Russian-born Bernard “Ben” Gold who arrived here in 1938 from New York City where he had operated a taxi company for many years.
Gold moved to Dallas at the request of his brother who, along with a man named Joe Sidran (“Sidran” spelled backwards is “Nardis”) was an owner in a near-bankrupt dress company. Ben Gold became a part-owner (and later the sole owner) and quickly turned the business around. When he brought in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, other Dallas garment manufacturers were shocked (Time magazine used the word “horrified”). He also shook things up by employing African-American workers, the first such company in town to do so. The company eventually grew to become the largest clothing manufacturer in Dallas, with clients around the country and around the world. Nardis was one of the first Dallas clothing companies to have an apparel collection made in a foreign country: his upscale “House of Gold” boutique line specialized in silk, beaded, and sequined dresses and gowns, hand-made in Hong Kong.
Nardis of Dallas was originally located at 409 Browder, with factories at 211 North Austin, the 400 block of S. Poydras (at Wood Street), and, finally, at 1300 Corinth (at Gould St.), where they built their 75,000-square-foot “million-dollar plant” in 1964 (a quick check of Google Maps shows the building still there, but it appears to be vacant). Below are two photos of their S. Poydras location.
Above, Wood Street at the left (Andrew’s Cafe is listed at 1008 Wood St. in the 1960 Dallas directory); below, Nardis garment workers.
So how does this all connect to The Dick Van Dyke Show? If you’re a fan of the show and a faithful reader of closing credits like I am, you’ve probably seen the “Fashions by Nardis of Dallas” credit at the end of some episodes, right under the Botany 500 credit. And, like me, you might have wondered, “How did THAT happen?” How does an apparel-maker from Dallas network itself into a primo gig supplying fashions to a top Hollywood television show? I have no idea how the initial contact was made, but I DO know that Dick Van Dyke Show star Rose Marie and Nardis owner Ben Gold became very good friends while she was appearing in a production of Bye, Bye Birdie at the Dallas Summer Musicals in 1965. She mentions Gold several times in her autobiography.
Excerpt from “Hold the Roses” by Rose Marie
She spent much of her off-stage time in Dallas with Gold and his wife, and, in fact, when Gold was fatally injured in a traffic accident that summer, Rose Marie (then recently widowed herself) stayed with his wife Tina for several days at Tina’s request.
So, no big Dick Van Dyke Show story, but, as is no doubt known to the hyper-vigilant members of the JFK-assassination community, Nardis of Dallas DOES have an interesting connection to that. In 1941, Abraham Zapruder, who had worked in the garment industry in New York, moved to Dallas and began working for Ben Gold as a Nardis pattern-cutter. His name even appears in a couple of classified ads in The Dallas Morning News.
June 1945
Jan. 1948
While at Nardis — before he left to start his own clothing company — Zapruder worked with a woman named Jeanne LeGon (later Jeanne De Mohrenschildt) who, with her husband George (suspected by some of being a CIA operative), was friends with Lee Harvey Oswald in the early ’60s. Yep. That’s an interesting, head-spinning coincidence.
And I owe all this trivial Nardis-related knowledge to wondering for years about a single card seen in the closing credits of the unquestionably stylish and fashion-forward Dick Van Dyke Show.
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Sources & Notes
Fashion photographs from MyVintageVogue.com (1952, 1955, and 1956, respectively). Other Nardis fashion photos from My Vintage Vogue can be found here. (If you’re interested in vintage fashion, fashion photography, and vintage advertising, this is a great website.)
Photos of the Nardis plant at S. Poydras and Wood are by Squire Haskins, from the Squire Haskins Photography Inc. Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Special Collections — more info on the exterior shot ishere; more on the interior shothere.
Passage about Gold from Rose Marie’s autobiography, Hold the Roses (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), p. 192.
Dick Van Dyke Show closing credits card from a 1965 episode.
Nardis of Dallas logo from a clothing tag, found on eBay.
Additional background information on Gold from Time magazine, June 12, 1950.
See another Flashback Dallas post on Nardis — “Nardis Sign-Painters: ‘Everything in Sportswear’ — 1948” — here.
The “Texas”
1951
1953
1937
circa 1910
Excerpt from “Hold the Roses” by Rose Marie
June 1945
Flashback : Dallas 