by Paula Bosse
The Smith brothers knew how to diversify! They ran a Dallas undertaking firm and a cab service. More on this newfangled “gurney cab service” in the 2014 post “The Smith Brothers Can Set You Up With a Hearse … Or a Cab — 1888,” here.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Dallas’ largest department store, ca. 1955…
by Paula Bosse
This photo of the Titche-Goettinger department store (Main and St. Paul) was taken soon after the store’s expansion which increased its size from 250,000 square feet to a whopping 504,000 square feet. When the greatly enlarged store introduced itself to the Dallas public at an open house in March 1955, one of the most notable things about it (for me, anyway) was the fact that 93-year-old Max Goettinger — founder of the department store in 1902, along with Edward Titche — attended the festivities.
The beautiful original building — designed by George Dahl — was built in the late 1920s and was a commanding presence at only half its later size. (Click pictures to see larger images.)
The postcard view above has handily erased most of the other buildings in that block which one would have seen in a photograph, including the Pollock Trunk Co. and the old Hilton Hotel (later the White Plaza, currently the Indigo). A 1942 view of the block, looking west from Harwood, looked like this:
When construction of the new part of the store was completed in 1955, this new 12-acre “Texas Size” Titche’s was the largest store in Dallas, a head-spinning prospect for a city that loves to shop.
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If you want a much more comprehensive overview of the Titche’s building — and want to see wonderful photos of the building, inside and out — I highly recommend Noah Jeppson’s Unvisited Dallas post, “Titche-Goettinger Building,” here. My favorite part? Its innovative system of pneumatic tubes!
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Top photo by Squire Haskins, from the Squire Haskins Photography, Inc. Collection, UTA Libraries, Special Collections — more info here) (click on the thumbnail image on the page to see this photo BIG).
Read more on the expansion at the Dallas Morning News archives:
This wonderful building is still standing, modified to accommodate its current owners, the University of North Texas. Here’s how the building looks these days, via Google Street View, here.
More on the Titche-Goettinger Building on Wikipedia, here.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Preston Sturges playing dress-up, Camp Dick, Dallas, 1918
by Paula Bosse
While researching my Veteran’s Day post on Camp Dick cadets, I came across a 1941 Dallas Morning News article about Hollywood screenwriter and director Preston Sturges, whose latest movie The Lady Eve was about to open at the Palace. The article mentioned that Sturges had been stationed at Camp Dick, the WWI aviation boot camp for the U.S. Signal Corps, located in the old racetrack at Fair Park. Preston Sturges — a master of the screwball comedy — is one of my favorite writer-directors (in addition to The Lady Eve, everyone should watch Sullivan’s Travels), so I was interested to find out more about his time in Dallas. I didn’t think I’d find anything but a passing mention of it anywhere, but, surprisingly, it turns out Sturges himself wrote about his Camp Dick days — in a book I actually own and had started but had never finished!
Sturges was sent to Dallas in March, 1918. He was 19 years old. Born in Chicago, he had spent much of his childhood in France, tagging along with his eccentric four-times married bohemian mother who seems to have known every intellectual and artiste of the day (not only was she a close friend of dancer Isadora Duncan and Marcel Duchamp, she had also been romantically involved with Aleister Crowley — you can’t get much more bohemian than that!).
Sturges’ account of his time at Camp Dick (which appeared in Chapter 28 of the posthumously-published Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges) is amusing, describing such things as the heat (“the midday temperature of a Texas summer wasn’t really intended for human beings”), the latrines, and the food. He also remembered the nightmare of the Spanish Influenza pandemic, which was particularly deadly in the close quarters of military camps. (You can read the entirety of Sturges’ memories of his days at Camp Dick here.)
The heat was a real problem for the cadets. One of my favorite images conjured by Sturges’ chapter on the camp is this one:
Out on the parade ground, boys fell over from [the intense heat] all the time and had to be revived with cold water and a sponge. Nights we would climb up the shaky apex of the large roller coaster in the corner of the fairgrounds to try to find a breeze.
One of his memories stumped me a bit, though. He wrote the following about the buildings that stood around Fair Park:
In Dallas, we were sent to a place called Camp Dick, then known as a concentration camp. In a later war, such a facility was called a boot camp. Camp Dick was actually the Dallas fairgrounds with a fence thrown around them. Most of the buildings on the fairgrounds were huge reproductions of the products for sale within them in the prewar days when the fair was open. There was a building in the shape of a gigantic Mazola bottle; another like a huge Gulden’s mustard pot; an enormous Log Cabin Syrup edifice; a massive chili bowl; buildings representing almost anything edible or potable that one could think of….
My last memory of Camp Dick is of standing retreat against the hot sunset, the cadets at attention against the silhouetted background of the massively enlarged Sanka coffee pot, Bromo Quinine bottle and Coca-Cola bottle buildings, and in front of us Lieutenant Pennypacker, more or less at ease on the back of the fiery steed presented to him by the grateful citizens of Dallas.
I’ve never heard of any Fair Park buildings shaped like these things. (There was that giant cash register at the Texas Centennial….) Perhaps Mr. Sturges misremembered? Or indulged in a little fanciful poetic license? Or maybe these buildings DID exist? (And if they did, I’d love some corroboration, ’cause that would be cool.)
Sturges was at Camp Dick only a few months. From there he was sent to the School of Military Aeronautics in Austin and then to Park Field in Millington, Tennessee. He was in the middle of flight training there when, anti-climactically, the war ended. After several years of working in a family business, he became a successful Broadway playwright and was soon whisked off to Hollywood, where, in 1940, he won the first Oscar ever awarded for screenwriting (The Great McGinty). He was considered then — and is considered now — to be one of Hollywood’s greatest comedic screenwriters.
If you’d like to read Preston Sturges’ memories of training at Camp Dick, mosey on over here. Among other tidbits, you’ll read the amusing story behind the be-goggled photo of Cadet Sturges at the top of this post.
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The romanticized photo at the top (the one Sturges wrote about in the book) was taken at Camp Dick in 1918. The quoted passage is also from the book, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges, His Life In His Own Words, adapted and edited by Sandy Sturges (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1991). I highly recommend getting this book if you’re a fan of classic Hollywood. You can browse through it on Google Books, here, and purchase it here.
More on Sturges at Wikipedia, here.
Dive deeper: another photo of Sturges taken in Dallas in 1918 appeared in The Dallas Morning News on March 27, 1941, titled “At Camp Dick” — it shows a smiling Sturges sitting in a “dummy pilot seat.” If the photo was taken at Camp Dick, the unnamed photographer must have taken “action shots” as well as portraits of the camp’s cadets which Sturges wrote about in his autobiography. (Sturges writes in his amusing story that none of the cadets had ever been near a plane at that point, but they all wanted to be seen as dashing goggle-and-scarf-wearing flying aces.)
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Cadets from Camp Dick march down Elm… (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
Today is Veteran’s Day, a national day of observance which originally began as Armistice Day in 1919 to mark the end of hostilities in World War I. I was thinking of posting something non-WWI-related, but I stumbled across this wonderful photo showing a WWI-era parade down Elm Street and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share it. The parade was comprised almost entirely of children who had contributed to the war effort through the Junior Red Cross. The parade was described as “the first parade of children war workers ever held in Dallas.” The number of children (said to represent every school in Dallas) was estimated at up to 8,000 marchers, from kindergarteners to high school seniors.
The parade — which took place on February 22, 1918 — also featured 1,000 or so men based at Camp John Dick, the Air Service training camp at Fair Park. Seeing this parade must have been quite a novelty for Dallasites, as cadets had begun to arrive at Camp Dick only 16 days previously (airmen had been stationed at Love Field a little longer, but only by a couple of months).
Below, I’ve taken the photo from the top and broken it into two halves and then magnified them. The parade was heading west on Elm Street and can be seen here passing Cullum & Boren (1509-1511 Elm), a downtown sporting goods mainstay just a few doors east of Akard. (See a similar view of Elm Street from later that year — in September — from a Dallas Times Herald photo, here.)
And the children.
Dallas Morning News, Feb. 23, 1918
DMN, Feb. 22, 1918
DMN, Feb. 23, 1918, photo and article
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Top photo titled “Cadets From Camp Dick in Red Cross Parade, Feb. 22nd, Dallas, Texas” found on the site War Untold, The Collection of Andrew Pouncey, here (click “continue reading” at bottom of post).
More on the Camp John Dick Aviation Concentration Camp from The Atlantic in the article “What America Looked Like: Bayonet Practice During WWI” (with a great photo), here.
Other Flashback Dallas WWI-related posts here:
Armistice Day Wikipedia page is here.
All pictures and clippings are larger when clicked.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
All calm in Fair Park along the Centennial Midway (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
Above, a nighttime shot of an almost empty Midway during the Texas Centennial. All this scene needs in order to boost the moody atmosphere is a little fog. Go a little further and add some zither music, Joseph Cotten, and Orson Welles running past the Texaco Building and you’d have a pretty cool setting for a Texas version of The Third Man.
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Photo titled “Dallas Midway, Night Illumination, Centennial Exposition, State Fair of Texas” (taken by an unknown photographer on Oct. 16, 1936) is from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University; more info here.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Lever-pulling behind the curtain, 1965 (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
It’s here, y’all. Get out and get it done.
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Top photo from 1965 by Marion Butts, from the Dallas Public Library’s Marion Butts Collection: “Young woman demonstrates the use of a voting machine” — more here (you may have to be logged into to your Dallas Public Library account to reach this page).
Second photo is undated and has no photographer info: “Early voter, Mrs. Gene Savage, looking at long Democratic party ballot,” from UTA Libraries, Special Collections — more info here.
Third photo is from 1972: “Students voting in Fall Elections, University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), 1972,” from UTA Libraries, Special Collections — more info here.
More on Dallas elections can be found in the Flashback Dallas post “How Dallas Used to Get Election Returns,” here.
Click photos to see larger images.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
A Dallas crowd waits for returns, in the middle of Elm Street…
by Paula Bosse
I think there’s some sort of political thing going on? Like most every other human being in the United States (…and beyond), I’m pretty sick of hearing about politics and politicians. Like nauseous sick. So why not write about elections! Below are some fun facts about how Dallasites used to get their election returns — share them with your fellow voters while standing in line at the polling station. They will think you are either very interesting or very annoying.
Forget the issues and the personalities, let’s look at election results: how were they passed along to the public in the days before radio and television? Other than newspapers (the primary source of all things informational), there was a time when results were “bulletined” by throwing images onto stretched canvases or even onto the sides of buildings by a powerful stereopticon or “magic lantern.” These results were continuously updated as manual counts in local races were tabulated; farther-flung races were updated via tallies received by telegraph or telephone. Crowds gathered in front of buildings — usually newspaper offices — to watch the returns. Some accounts have this form of information dissemination beginning in the 1860s (see an illustration from 1872 here), with the practice becoming more widespread by the 1880s and more technologically advanced by the 1890s.
Below, an illustration showing jubilant crowds watching congressional returns in Columbus, Ohio in 1884.
Columbus, Ohio, 1884
Things had been refined by 1896, as this illustration from the Atlanta Constitution shows. The caption: “Flashing out the returns in front of the Constitution office. Thousands of people gathered in front of the Constitution Building last night and watched the returns come in.” In the rain! That’s dedication.
Atlanta, Georgia, 1896
Also in 1896 — things got crazy in New York, with a ridiculously large “screen” hung from a very tall building.
NYC, 1896
from “Film and the American Presidency”
The first mention I found in The Dallas Morning News about projecting election results before a large crowd was in 1891. Not only did the newspaper have a large bulletin board (maybe like a large chalk board?), they also used the stereopticon. (The full article about the results of the 1891 election can be read here.) (All pictures and clippings are larger when clicked.)
Dallas Morning News, April 8, 1891
The magic lantern was called back into service the next year (read an entertaining DMN article about an 1892 election here in which the crowd huddled in front of the screen watching the returns despite rain and open saloons) — in fact, this “electric bulletin board” was so popular it was used for at least 40 more years.
In 1896, interest was really intense — an unbelievable 94% of Dallas’ registered voters had turned out to cast ballots. (It took four days to tally the votes!) A huge crowd gathered around the News building at Commerce and Lamar to watch the bulletins which were “flashed by means of a powerful stereopticon on a large canvas screen stretched across the street” (“Republicans Doubled Votes in ’96” by Sam Acheson, DMN, Jan. 1, 1968).
By 1900 this stereopticon thing was getting to be standard operating procedure.
DMN, Nov. 6, 1900
DMN, May 2, 1908
By 1911, “25,000 or 30,000 persons” were showing up to watch the returns.
DMN, July 23, 1911
I guess people used to just phone the papers after elections to ask about the results. The News would rather you didn’t, thanks.
DMN, July 21, 1916
1918 was an interesting year for a few reasons: (1) WWI was underway, (2) the polls opened — for some reason — at 9:27 AM and closed at 8:27 PM (?), and … (3) it was the first election in Dallas in which women were allowed to vote. There was suddenly a huge number of registered voters to have to deal with. Newspaper reports showed registration of women outnumbering men in several precincts. The large number of new voters meant that votes began to be counted “one hour after the polls are opened and will continue until the work is concluded” (DMN, July 19, 1918). Which seems odd. Also, women were encouraged to vote early in the day so as to avoid long lines and men were instructed to watch their behavior if there were women present.
DMN, July 26, 1918
It’s surprising that the use of projectors to display election returns was used as late as 1930, well after the advent of radio. Apparently the Texas Election Bureau and Press Association had rules forbidding radio stations from announcing election results over the air until they had been printed in the newspaper — they were, however, allowed to give “relative standings” to their audiences at fifteen-minute intervals (DMN, July 27, 1930).
Seems like the newspapers held all the power (probably not a huge problem for radio stations since most of them were owned by the newspapers, and, of course, no problem at all for the papers who printed oodles of “extra” editions). By 1930, though, crowds had gotten so large downtown that they were diverting people to Fair Park where they could sit and enjoy the cool breezes as they listened to see if their candidates had won or lost. (“Sitting” seems to be the operative word here.) But soon radio would wrest the “instant news bulletin” power away from the newspapers, and these quaint magic lantern watching-parties would be unnecessary. Eventually people wouldn’t know they’d ever even existed.
Fast-forward to today. I can’t even imagine trekking downtown to watch election results come in at a snail’s pace, magic lantern or not. It’s the 21st century, man, and I’ll be plopped in front of my TV, channel-hopping, stress-eating and stress-drinking, and wondering what friendly country I might consider “visiting” for a while.
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Top photo shows crowds of Dallasites watching election returns. This Frank Rogers photo — a Dallas Public Library photo reproduced in A. C. Greene’s book Dallas, The Deciding Years — shows a crowd (which seems to be devoid of women) watching election returns in the 1300 block of Elm Street. Below is another Rogers photo from the DPL, undated, but probably taken in 1922:
It’s convenient that Rogers was able to include his studio in the background! The photograph is undated, but Frank Rogers and the Adam Schaaf Piano Store shared a building at 1303 Elm only between 1922 and 1923 (the top photo is dated 1928 by the DPL, but neither Rogers nor the piano store were in that location after about 1925). The building to the right is the Dallas Times Herald Building (with the pillars, at 1305 Elm), and it would make sense that the crowd was looking toward the other side of the street as results were being updated and projected from the Times Herald. In fact, this may have been the night that the KKK famously marched through downtown, past the large crowds gathered in front of both the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Morning News offices, to celebrate that their candidates had won … and had won big.
DMN, Aug. 27, 1922
The illustration showing Ohio returns in Columbus being projected on the night of Oct. 14, 1884 is from Frank Leslie’s Weekly (this illustration was featured in the book Politicking and Emergent Media: U.S. Presidential Elections of the 1890s by Charles Musser).
The 1896 illustration is from the Atlanta Constitution, found on Twitter.
The 1896 photograph of the World Building in New York is from the trade journal The Electrical Engineer, Nov. 11, 1896. The paragraph below it is from the book Film and the American Presidency by Jeff Menne and Christian B. Long.
Further reading from the archives of The Dallas Morning News (regarding the July 26, 1930 election):
Click pictures and clippings to see larger images.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
Time once again to add photos I’ve recently come across to previous posts. Stuff’s starting to pile up!
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Above, a postcard photo of the old Union Depot which once stood on the edge of Deep Ellum, at Pacific and Central. I’m adding it to “The Old Union Depot in East Dallas: 1897-1935.” (Source: Flickr, here.)
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This 1936 photo of the new aquarium at the Texas Centennial has been added to a post I really enjoyed writing, “The Dallas Aquarium: The Building Emblazoned With Seahorses — 1936.” (Source: Ryerson & Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago, here.)
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Another Centennial photo is this one, showing the second Alamo replica which stood in Fair Park from 1936 to 1951 (the first one lasted longer, from 1909 to 1935). Personally, I never knew about either replica until I wrote the post “Remember the Alamo! … In Fair Park?” (Source: Ryerson & Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago, here.)
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This great postcard of the Washington Theater (“at night”) has been added to “The Washington Theater — Dallas’ First Movie Palace.” (Source: eBay.)
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This undated photo of the St. Joseph orphanage in Oak Cliff has been added to “The St. Joseph Orphanage — 1891.” (Source: Catholic Diocese of Dallas.)
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This photo of the Cass County Boys (featuring the ever-fetching Jerry Scoggins on the right) has been added to “Jerry Scoggins, From WFAA Staff Musician to Pop Culture Icon.” Scoggins is the man who sang the Beverly Hillbillies theme song (which might now be stuck in your head for the rest of the day…). (Source: eBay.)
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I saw this postcard for the Jones Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital and Clinic the other day. The only reason this jumped out at me was because I had researched the building a bit when I wrote about gay clubs in the ’70s for CentralTrack.com (“Hidden in Plain Sight: A Photo History of Dallas’ Gay Bars of the 1970s”). This non-descript, institutional-looking building started out life in 1928 as a fancy clinic at Live Oak and Hall, then became a gay bathhouse and bar (Bachelors Quarters and Entre Nuit), and it is now home to a CPA firm. (If those walls could talk….) I can’t update the Central Track post, so I thought I’d update it here. (Source: top image from the always amazing “Coltera” on Flickr; bottom photos from a 1975 issue of the gay travel magazine Ciao! More of these photos can be seen at the bottom of the Central Track article linked above.)
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And, lastly, not a photo update, but I’ve expanded the “All About Me, Me, Me” page, here. I’ve added more words. And a link to me talking with Justin Martin of KERA radio last year.
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Those pictures are big. Click ’em!
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Elm Street neighbors, March, 1926…. (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
Above, the Palace Theater, one of Dallas’ great moviehouses. It opened in June, 1921, near the northwest corner of Elm and Ervay; this photograph is from March of 1926, three months before the theater’s fifth birthday. It was still a whippersnapper.
Below, a detail from the photo: by zooming in and tweaking the contrast, the box office is revealed, as are two women chatting in the shadows (all pictures and clippings are larger when clicked).
As interesting as old movie theaters are, I was more intrigued by the three people to the right of the theater (who all look like characters from a period melodrama) and by the business next door. I’ll never know who those men were or who that woman was waiting for, but finding out what business was selling baby chicks (…next door to the Palace?) was pretty easy.
The store was Lone Star Seed & Floral (1627 Elm). They sold seeds and flowers, potted plants, canaries, goldfish, and pet and livestock supplies. They could also help you with all your poultry needs: feed, incubators, medicine, and live chickens. …Right next door to one of the plushest and most luxurious entertainment destinations in Dallas.
Lone Star Seed & Floral appears to have once been Texas Seed & Floral and had been around since at least 1892. They set up shop at 1627 Elm in 1902 and remained there quite a while until they moved in January, 1927, just a few months after the top photo was taken. Here is a postcard of its earlier incarnation, with photos of the Pacific Avenue location at the left, and the Elm Street location at the lower right (the view is looking north on Ervay; the Palace would later be built immediately west of this building, to the left of the lower postcard image, just out of frame).
The store looks very clean and extremely well organized. My inexplicable love of things stored in card-catalog-file-like cabinets and fold-out bins tells me I’d probably be stopping in fairly regularly after having seen the latest Buster Keaton film next door.
Photo and article from, yes, The Seed World, Aug. 20, 1920
Feb., 1922
But back to the Palace. The banner is publicizing the imminent arrival of John Murray Anderson’s “The Melting Pot,” a stage production which opened at the Palace on March 14, 1926. The Palace Theater, owned by the Publix chain, was about to embark on “a new and surprisingly different type of entertainment,” which consisted of musical revue roadshows staged in New York under the direction of producer John Murray Anderson. Each production — its performers, costumes, and sets — would be sent into the hinterlands, playing a circuit which included Dallas, the only stop in Texas. There was a new show every week. And if you missed it, you really had no excuse: there were four shows daily (five on Sunday). (Anderson was later asked by Billy Rose to help with producing Fort Worth’s Centennial celebration.) (John Rosenfield’s tepidly positive Dallas Morning News review, “‘Melting Pot’ Is Presented at Palace, Introducing New Style Film Theater Feature,” ran on March 15, 1926.)
Palace ad, March 13, 1926
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Top photo from the Billy Burke Photograph Collection, UTA Libraries, Special Collections; more info here.
See the same view today via Google Street View here.
The Texas Seed & Floral Co. postcard is from the collection of Dallas Heritage Village, via the Portal to Texas History, here.
The beloved Palace — once an honest-to-God “movie palace” was unceremoniously demolished in 1971. It had stood at Elm and Ervay for 50 years. The north side of that block is now occupied by Thanksgiving Tower. The theater and the seed store were just west of Ervay — Lone Star Seed & Floral was just to the left of where the 7-Eleven is, on the ground floor of 211 N. Ervay, the blue building seen here (the view is northwesterly from the Wilson Building across the street).
See a great photo of Elm Street in the ’20s in the post “Dazzling Neon, Theater Row — 1929” here.
Click pictures and clipping to see larger images.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
“The Katy Serves the Southwest…” (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
A couple of days ago I posted a photo of an M-K-T train leaving Dallas and, today, coincidentally, I came across a photo of the Katy Building, the railroad’s headquarters, at Commerce and Market. This photo shows Commerce looking west toward the Old Red Courthouse from Austin Street. An interurban car is heading east.
See the same view today, via Google Street View, here.
A photo I really love — which shows a view from about the same time looking east on Commerce — can be seen in a previous post, “Commerce & Record Streets — 1946,” here.
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Photo from Flickr, here.
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Copyright © 2016 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 