In the fall of 1945 I enrolled at J. L. Long Junior High School; looking back now, I realize how immature I was at that time. School held little interest for me and the neighborhood was still my main interest. We played some rather childish war games that illustrate an observation of the time and the neighborhood. The Peace treaty on the battleship Missouri that ended the war no doubt caused us to end a war game with our own treaty. We had no battleship for the signing so we chose the barber shop that Roy Bandy operated in the foyer of Miller Cleaners. It seems the little building held a position of importance to us. In about six years it was to play a part in my life and that of my friend, Rudi Landrum. Probably more people met there than any other location in Munger Place. At that time one would have their hair cut every two weeks and the wait could take some time. We followed the war there reading the weekly Life Magazine and kept up with the neighborhood gossip. Probably no other place offered so much community than Roy’s little space.

At the war’s end , we began to keep up the house more. In the fall the leaves from the many trees were a problem. In the picture to the right, raking the leaves are Bill on the left, Joe on the right and Roy Bandy’s son in the middle. We cleaned out the fish pond and cut away some of the excessive growth that was always a problem. Enough was left to offer many hiding places for our games with the neighborhood kids. Mr. Shipp raised the rent ten dollars since the war price ceilings ended. He did not do any repairs however.

There was some discussion to use Nita’s room as the dining room as it was intended and give Nita the east front room. I would move to the upstairs small west bedroom.

More and more we were playing on the esplanade on Munger Boulevard by the wraparound porch at the Michell house. Basketball was introduced to us at junior high and Joe had a goal in his back yard. The thick shrubbery around my house was a favorite place to play games. This was the beginning of a closeness growing with the neighborhood kids around us that were reaching our teen years.

Joe’s backyard had one of the few basketball goals at that time.

Years later (2009) we discovered that Hugh Farrell had a goal much earlier. Hugh, Steven Fulda, Paul Parker and Doug Stocks were playing in Hugh’s back yard at 4807 Tremont much before we were.

The yard at 5003 Tremont was circled by shrubbery making it possible to crawl around
the house under the bushes without being seen.

The shrubbery in the backyard provided almost eight feet of undercover to hide or crawl through. Some of the shrubs have grown into trees today that are as tall as the house. The shrubbery opened to Mr. Haeber’s yard to the east and sometimes that was added to space for our games.

Sam Junior must have come home sometime in the fall and we had a big meal that was followed by strawberry short cake. He brought a friend with him, Joe Ord, who was a butcher. Cousins Dale and Vernice returned but did not live with us as before. Vernice was married and Dale stayed with his parents, Rufe and Emily, since they now lived in the city. However, Dale met Elsie who now lived in his old room on the west side upstairs and they began dating. Plans were made for Dale to go into the grocery business with his dad, Rufe; Pop, my brother Sam and Joe Ord would buy a store.

They bought a nice store on McKinney at Fairmount in 1946. It had plate glass windows with Fairway Grocery printed on the glass. It was successful for a short time, maybe a year, but the large chain stores were growing in numbers and size pushing the smaller stores out of business. Joe Ord went home to Georgia and by the summer of 1947, Sam, Virginia, Skip and Betty moved to Little Rock. Virginia was pregnant with Peggy who was born in December of that year.

To me the three years following the war were great. I worked at the store some and Joe and I went to the Dallas minor league baseball team games often. Baseball was becoming important to us and we were still trying to organize a ball team. We had been trying to do this since our great failure in 1943.

After the war Nita and her friends were together again and their Sunday school class at Scofield church was made a co-ed class. Nita said that was long overdue. Of the males in the class, the ones she knew the most were Merwin Seay and Ted Lincoln. They were cousins who grew up together and the best of friends. Merwin gave everyone a nickname including ‘Sailor’ for Ted. There are various legends on why Merwin called him Sailor. Merwin had been an inspector for the Navy Department and Ted was a major in the Army Air Force. Once Merwin told Nita to ask Sailor Lincoln about something and she had no idea who that was. Later, at a Saturday morning football game that was often played on the grounds of the Dallas Theological Seminary, I noticed everyone calling Ted, ‘Sailor’. I knew he had been a major in the Air Force and wondered what it took to gain a little respect.

Dating was slow at Scofield Church but the class had a party in the backyard of a house on Belmont Street. There were no dates but Merwin and Ted, in Merwin’s car, brought Nita, Mary and Amonette Bailey to the party. Amonette sat in the front with Merwin and Ted was in the back with Nita and Mary. Merwin teased Ted for having his arms full.

The church class had other similar parties, one at Lucas B&B Café that was a most popular place for years.

Nita had a party for the group at our house from which I was barred. They played ‘Sardines’ in which people hid in the dark, crowding together until the last one finds the rest. Nita said this upset Mom. The guys continued to take the girls home after parties but they must have been slow to date them. Ted began taking Nita home last after the parties then later they would go for ice cream at Little Sammy’s on Greenville Avenue as well. Their first date was to an Adamson – Woodrow Wilson football game. (Probably fall 1946) Nita graduated from Adamson and Ted from Woodrow.

At 13 I was most impressed with Ted. He drove a brand new 1946 Oldsmobile two door fastback with a new maroon color that was hardly seen at that time. He named the car Pluta Belle; for years I thought that was the name painted on the side of the B-24 Liberator he flew in the war in Europe. Some thirty years later I mentioned the name, Pluta Belle in reference to the plane he flew, in a conversation with him and he laughed and told me he did not have a plane of his own. As commander of the squadron he piloted a different plane on each mission. Ted replied, ‘Pluta Belle” was a name in a ‘Goofy’ comic book of that time that he gave to his car. Just what the character was I don’t remember. Some say it was a cow, a dog or a jalopy.

 

In the summer of 1947, Joe and I moved a step closer to organizing the baseball team we always were trying to form. We managed to pull in about nine players from our summer group at Camp El-Har. Among the players were David Roper, Danny Mayfield, Phillip Cash, Eddie Stevens and John Kersey. No one could get the ball over the plate so we had no pitcher. Ted’s younger brother, Jim, who was about 20 years old told us if we could find a pitcher he would coach the team. We admired Jim who was an aggressive player and a great person we looked up to. Jim was a younger brother that before the war watched his older brothers, Jack and Ted, play sports. Included in the pre-war teams were his very close cousins, Frank, Merwin and Bill Seay. Now that the war was over, he was helping pull them together again as a team as well as playing with them.

 

Joe found us a pitcher in Ken Dowd; Jim put us through several tough workouts in the summer heat at the new baseball field at Buckner Park. We learned a lot of baseball but that was it. We could not find another team to play. Were we ever going to have a team?

In 1947 Ted and Nita were dating and Ted often came to dinner. This first time he visited we were still dining in the small kitchen but soon we bought dining room furniture and Nita moved to the east front study that we used as a bedroom. I moved into the small west upstairs bedroom.

Elsie and my cousin Dale who had been dating were married so her room was open to me. Elsie was now Elsie Densmore with her name almost the same as a popular series of books, by Martha Finley, that had been around since the turn of the century. She said in school kids often called her Elsie Dinsmore but she never thought that would be her name.

With the dining room furnished and in use, things were much better and the house was probably at its best of the time that we lived there. The heavy shrubbery was trimmed. The remaining fish pond in the back was cleaned and Skip fell in it. The servant building was no longer habitable and the sun was taking its toll on the west side of the wraparound porch.

This was the summer that Sam, Virginia, Skip and Betty moved to Little Rock. There were still several people in the house with crowded dinners that I enjoyed and was used to. I really had known nothing else other than having many people around but this was the beginning of the change. That’s the way change comes, a little at a time, until you suddenly realize nothing is the same. This was the peak of the post war boom of heavy entertainment for the ex G.I.’s. Dallas had a great number of movie theaters, restaurants were crowded and sporting events were recording record attendance.

But the GI generation was marrying in great numbers. Their dream in the war, while they were in miserable foxholes, was to survive and win the war, marry the girl next door and live in a little cottage in a little town on Main Street. After depression and war, they might party a while then be comfortable in a quiet little cottage. Their dreams had no way of knowing the future would have television and air conditioning but all of these things together would change our world.

After the war there were many war surplus vehicles sold. Joe was able to find a three wheeled Cushman scooter for sale. It probably was a mail carrier or a carrier to move small packages or luggage. It was originally olive drab but Joe painted it red. We went everywhere in it. I would sit in the box. When Joe worked at the Rita Theater, he picked up the movies on Young Street for the owner, Mr. Carver. We often would walk around the neighborhood with Kay, Carole and Patricia and take them for rides as well.

Carole and her friends organized a sunrise breakfast at White Rock Lake. The girls spent the night a Janet McGee’s house that was just behind the Lakewood Theater on Paulus St. Joe took everyone to the lake in his scooter. He could only carry two or three in the box so it took well past sunrise to transport the fifteen or twenty to the lake. We then realized the girls could not cook. I recall Raymond suggesting to some one to put more than one strip of bacon on the skillet at a time.

Joe had the scooter until 1949 when he bought a Model A Ford. By that time we had a large group of friends in the neighborhood that was organized into a strong social group. Joe continued to transport people wherever we went in our element of friends. This seemed to be a part of Joe’s nature throughout his life. To this day he often come from Houston to Dallas for monthly meeting with many of the same friends he took care of and led in Munger Place some sixty years ago.

As we grew up we remained unaware of the racial segregation that was so blatant in Munger Place. Sometime in the summer of 1947, James, an African American kid that must have lived in one of the servant houses in a nearby alley, began to play baseball with us. We had no team at that time but played ‘make up’ games both on the boulevard and Munger Park. Once, on Munger Park, a police officer stopped and told James he could not play. We challenged the officer why. The reply was he had his own parks to play on. Of course that would be miles away. Unfortunately we were not defending James’ rights; we were not that aware, we just didn’t want to lose our third baseman. James said nothing and walked slowly and quietly away toward Henderson Ave. I stood and watched him walk away but did nothing but I have never forgotten the scene. Why I did not go with him has stayed with me ever since. It was years before a little maturity and empathy set in. I suppose we blindly accepted life as it was

At some time around May or June, Ted and Nita went to a Dallas minor league ball game. At some time on that date Ted accidentally dropped a sack out of his pocket. Nita later said she immediately knew what was in it but said nothing as Ted awkwardly replaced it in his pocket. Later on our porch swing, he gave her the ring. They then came in and told Mom and Pop. Ted then called his mother, Abie, (a name from her missionary days in Central America-short for grandmother), and asked her to get Poppy up, that they were coming by. Abie said she knew pretty much what it would be about because one didn’t get Poppy up for anything minor.

Ted had left the University of Texas to join the Army Air Force before the war so he enrolled at SMU to finish his last year. He wanted to fly for an airline as he had a great resume including training many pilots when the war began and commander of a squadron that completed fifty missions over Europe. Unfortunately, there were so many pilots applying for jobs they raised many requirements. One was a height requirement and he was a half inch too short.

Another ironic situation he had to endure had to do with his driver’s license that had expired when he was overseas. The driver’s test was at Fair Park. In the driving test, he put his arm on window; many people did this in the era before air conditioning. Because of this and other minor foibles, former Major Lincoln, Commander of a B-24 Squadron, failed a driver’s test. Ted just smiled and retook the examination.

Although I did not realize it, this was the last year that we had many people in the house. It was a good year, Pop had bought a ‘38 LaSalle that was a big car; Aunt Eunice named it the Barracuda after a big pirate ship we saw in a movie. We were walking home from the Rita Theater following the show where the sailors often yelled “There’s the Barracuda” when the big pirate ship would appear over the horizon. As we approached the house, the big LaSalle was under the streetlight and Eunice said “There’s the Barracuda.”