Mystery Photos, courtesy of Don Pyeatt, Part 2

This photograph is fascinating for both the questions it raises and a possible connection with the photo you saw in my previous post. The four children in the photo appear to be the same four children seen in the first photo, but about two years or so older. From a time frame standpoint, it fits rather neatly because the car parked at the curb behind them is most likely a 1927 Dodge Brothers Sedan. The wood spoked wheels are the same, as well as the suicide doors.


When you crop portions of the photo that focuses on the car windows, you find that the business across the street carries the name ‘Edwards Drug Co.’









Also, to the left of Edwards Drug Co. is an A & P market. In case you are saying you can’t find it, look across the street, just to the left of the back of the car and just to the right of the man on the walk. You see a more or less pyramidal structure which is, in actual fact, a grocery product display stack. Just a little ways above it and indistinct without enlarging the photo considerably, are the letters A&P.

That’s essentially all the information you can get from the photo. Now we’re back to questions about the mysteries raised:

1. Are the children really the same ones in the Touring Car photo?

2. Who are they?

3. What’s the location of the photo?

4. Who was the photographer?

5. Who owned the vehicle and what was their economic status? You have to remember that anyone who owned a car selling for nearly $1,000 in that time period was quite well off.

6. Finally, since Black Friday and the start of the Great Depression was no more than two years away, you have to wonder what effect it had on this group of residents.

As so often happens when dealing with old, unidentified photos, a simple question leads to another...and another...and another....and.......

Mystery Photos, courtesy of Don Pyeatt

Old photos that surface unexpectedly tend to be both fascinating and mysterious. Fascinating because they help to shed light on days gone by. But mysterious at the same time since so much of the information in the photos cannot be positively identified. This problem applies to all aspects of the photos....locations, vehicles and people. All you can do is make your best guess based on careful analysis of the photos, a guess that may be completely wrong. Once you’ve gone as far as you can, your only remaining option is to publish the photos and ask for help from those who see it.

Don Pyeatt acquired these photos from an estate sale here in Ft. Worth. Absolutely nothing is known about them beyond what can be discerned from an analysis of the photos themselves. So, I’m going to be posting these photos one or two at a time, along with the information that was gleaned from them. And I’m going to ask your help in obtaining as much additional information as possible. Anything you can provide will be most welcome. Do you recognize the location? The type of vehicle? How about identifying the individuals? Time period? Any information, even an educated guess, can be valuable.

With that said, the first photo for your consideration is a four-door convertible (they were called touring cars in the 1920s) with three adults and four children that were obviously posing for the photo. This photo raises more than a few questions, starting with the type of car. Due to the wood wheel spokes, removable all-weather top and the suicide doors (The front and rear doors latch at the center post. If the rear door is opened and encounters an obstacle such as a telephone pole, fence post or another car, the door will be ripped of it’s hinges.), it’s obviously a touring car, circa the 1920s.

An enlarged view of the wheel hub reveals a very fuzzy but legible pair of letters, DB, intertwined like a pair of chain links. Since Dodge was doing business as Dodge Brothers in the 1920s and 1930s, the inescapable conclusion is that the vehicle is a 1925 Dodge Brothers Touring Car. Fairly expensive for it’s day, old ads show it as selling for somewhere between $800 and $1,000.

It’s one thing to identify the car, but all remaining questions concerning the photo are unknown. The questions that need answering are:

1. Where was the photo taken? Obviously in the country, but that raises another question because of the fact that the car is sitting on a paved road. In the 1925 – 1930 time period, paved roads weren’t that common, particularly in the country. Is it possible that the road is Highway 80? That has to be considered since the pavement is definitely poured concrete instead of macadam.

2. Who are the people? There’s absolutely nothing to aid in their identification.

3. Since there are two women, one man and four children (with all the children very close in age) who belongs to whom? And what is the relationship of the man to the women? He isn’t wearing a wedding ring, so could he be a brother? Uncle? Friend?

4. Who was the photographer? One of the women's husbands?

As you can see, a single old photograph can produce multiple mysteries.

When It Was Safe To Walk

There was a time in Ft. Worth when it was safe to walk just about anywhere. Today there are places where you can walk with safety, but it’s not like it used to be. Just in case you’re about to disagree with me, let’s see what it was like in the 1960s on the East Side.

Now just so you can put this into perspective the East Side, in that time period, basically ran from I-30 on the north to the T&P railroad tracks on the south. East and west boundaries were the Riverside/E. Lancaster intersection and Handley Drive/E. Lancaster. White Lake Hills was just starting to be developed and there was nothing east of White Lake Hills and north of I-30 but ranch land. No Woodhaven, no River Bend, etc. As for Eastchase, that was nothing but wooded, rolling terrain.

South of the railroad tracks was Rosedale and Vickery. At that time, a nice area that was quite safe. There was a Buddies Supermarket on the corner of Ayers and Rosedale and just to the west was a Safeway. Small businesses were plentiful.

I came back here in 1961. My parents and I moved into a house on Chicago Street and, since we didn’t have a car, we did what so many other people did. Walked or took the bus. The idea that we might be in danger from disreputable people or pestered by vagrants never crossed our minds. We walked everywhere. Down Panola to Ayers where Temple Baptist Church was located, up and down E. Lancaster to grocery stores, drugstores, True Value hardware, office suppies, Gateway Theater, hobby shops and on and on. Didn’t matter whether it was daylight or dark.

My father and I walked plenty of places at night, my mother got off the bus at night and walked a half block home by herself and so on. This was a normal way of life. People were friendly, helpful and considerate. If you were walking home with heavy bags of groceries, you just might have a stranger stop their car to give you a ride rather than see you carry those groceries the rest of the way in the heat or rain. There were even times my mother put the dog on a leash and walked a mile or so down E. Lancaster to the old Meadowbrook Bowling Lanes....by herself, in the dark, after ten o’clock at night. There was also a Brunswick Bowling Alley at about the 5400 block of E. Lancaster. That was two miles from the house and my parents walked up there late at night one time.

Those were good times and safe times. But, as happens so often, things change. When it actually started, I can’t say, but over a period of time it became a little less safe. By the mid-80s, things were definitely on a downhill slide. Old businesses that had been in the area forever began to leave, in large part because the people who had supported them were getting older and moving. Antique shops that gave a second life to single family homes and used be all up and down E. Lancaster began to disappear. Along the way, the East side developed a reputation as an undesirable, high crime area.

But the pendulum continues to swing. While it still retains the perception of a high crime area, that’s no longer true....except in some people’s minds. In fact, the crime rate is substantially less than some of the ‘desirable’ parts of Ft. Worth. There have been improvements and you can now get out and walk again without any real concern for your safety. Like many areas of Ft. Worth, there’s a lot of work left to be done, but progress is being made.

Will it ever get back to the way it was in the 1960s? I don’t know. Society changes and people change. So do the demographics of an area. All you can do is to work to make it as good as you can. But there’s darn sure nothing wrong with using the 1960s version of the East Side as the template for what you’d like it to be again.

The Hanging Tree, Drinking Fountains, Restrooms and the Poll Tax

Segregation was as entrenched in Ft. Worth as anywhere else in the South, but by the early 1960s it was in the process of dying a natural death. At least as far as overt practices were concerned. But it wasn’t always that way.

This was way before my time, but a little research on the internet will quickly reveal that the Klan was extremely active in the early 1920s, going so far as to have control (thru legal elections) of the Ft. Worth city government as well as several other major cities in Texas. I’ve also heard that the Klan had a hanging tree that was located on North Main near the Ellis Pecan Building.

When I came back here in 1961, there were still three extremely visible signs of segregation. Granted, there were many more, but these were so obvious that you had to be deaf, dumb and blind to miss them. Inside Monnig’s Department Store, on the block bounded by Fourth, Fifth, Houston and Throckmorton, on the south side of the elevators, was a pair of black enamel drinking fountains. If you wondered why two fountains, all you had to do was look above them. The signs identified one for ‘White’ and the other for ‘Colored’. By that time, no one paid any attention, but it was stark evidence of the segregated past. Not too much later, the signs were removed, but the fountains remained until the store was demolished.

Following the same pattern were the restrooms in the basement of Leonard’s Department Store. Located just past the sporting goods area (where a whetstone was available for everyone to sharpen their pocket knives) were two men’s restrooms. As with the water fountains at Monnig’s, one was for ‘Whites’ and the other for ‘Colored’. Eventually, I believe either one restroom was eliminated or the two were combined.

What’s interesting is that no one seemed to make any kind of fuss over either the fountains or restrooms. They just kind of faded into the background over a period of time.

The third thing took a legislative change and that was the Poll Tax. It still existed as late as 1964 because the Presidential Election in November 1964 was the first one I was elgible to vote in. To do so, I had to pay a 50 cent Poll Tax. For those who don’t know, the Poll Tax was basically created to prevent poor people (primarily blacks and hispanics) from voting. Considering that the original price was $1.75 per person per year, it did it’s job admirably. Of course, it had become a shadow of it’s former self by 1964 when the price had dropped to 50 cents. It was finally abolished in Federal Elections by the passage of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in 1964 and two years later ruled unconstitutional in state and local elections by the Supreme Court.

Ft. Worth has a lot to be proud of...but also a lot that it’d probably just as soon forget. But the danger with forgetting is that a very famous phrase will jump up and bite you in the hinder part. That phrase? “He who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it.” Incidentally, the correct phrase is “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” And the author is George Santayana.

Have we learned from our past? Sometime I wonder.

Remember Window Shopping?

Back in olden times (the late 1940s thru the 1950s and even into the 1960s), a major form of entertainment was window shopping. In other words, you strolled thru downtown (shopping centers were just getting started in the early 1960s) looking at goods displayed in the storefront windows. Not only did it matter if the stores were open, it was actually more fun when they weren’t. Sundays were popular because everyone was closed.

What? Closed on Sunday? That’s right. Not only were Blue Laws in force, the general belief was that Sunday was the day you went to church. Also, most stores, even the big department stores, closed at 5:00 or 5:30 p.m. every day.

Window shopping was both an art and entertainment. You strolled slowly past the windows of various stores, lingering in front of those that caught your eye. While standing there, you imagined owning a particular outfit or jacket, shoes, toys, bicycles, etc. that you’d love to have but were way too expensive for you to afford. The flip side of the coin would be to find reasonably priced items that you either needed or wanted, then return when the store was open to purchase them.

Many’s the time you did neither. Instead, you just looked with no purpose in mind other than an outing with your family. Eventually you hopped a bus or took a cab and headed home.

Until stores started migrating to the suburbs and those new-fangled shopping centers, (Enclosed malls didn’t come along until quite a bit later. Sometime in the 1970s, I believe.), just about everything you wanted was in downtown Ft. Worth. All the big department stores, of course. Leonard’s, Everybody’s (An early version of a discount department store and owned by Leonard’s.), Monnig’s, Stripling’s (I worked in the toy department there in 1963), Cox’s and The Fair. Then there was Meacham’s, F.W. Woolworth, Cromer’s Ace (Bicycles were in their window.), Western Union, The Camera Shop, several greeting card stores, newsstands, banks (no branches), drug stores, restaurants, cafeterias, coffee shops, churches, jewelry stores, western shops and even a couple of automobile dealerships (Pontiac and Chevrolet, I believe.).

Of course you had City Hall where you could pay your water bill, Lone Star Gas Co., Texas Electric and a healthy collection of office buildings. And let’s not forget the Worth, Hollywood and Palace Theaters, along with the late, lamented Ft. Worth Public Library building that sat on that pie shaped piece of land at the intersection of Ninth and Throckmorton and was eventually demolished despite the protestations of a substantial number of residents when the new library was built. Just up the street on the corner of Eighth and Throckmorton was Barber’s Bookstore. For those who couldn’t afford the price of a new book or didn’t want to part with that much cash, there was Thompson’s Bookstore. Located on Throckmorton only a block or so south of Leonard’s, it was hole-in-the-wall offering used books and magazines. I spent a lot of time in there...and a fair amount of money.

As I said, there was just about any kind of business you could want and quite a few you didn’t, such as high interest small loan companies (Yep, they’ve been around since the beginning of time.). From Ninth Street south to Lancaster, the area was known as Lower Main. It was, with the exception of the Telephone Company (AT&T) and the Catholic Church, basically a collection of more or less disreputable flop houses, walk up hotels, bar & grilles and liquor stores, with the occasional antique shop thrown in for good measure. The Cellar (where Secret Service agents went the night before JFK was assassinated) was below ground level at Tenth and Commerce, I think. Union Gospel Mission was located on Throckmorton, about two blocks north of Lancaster, until everything was razed for the current Convention Center and the Mission wound up out on E. Lancaster.

How do I know about that particular part of Ft. Worth, since you darn sure didn’t do any window shopping in the area? Mainly by riding buses home. Their route took them straight down Houston to Lancaster or over to Calhoun and then south to Lancaster before heading east. Believe me, you saw some very interesting things while looking out the bus windows. Beyond that, one of my uncles died in 1957 while sitting on a barstool in Richelieu Grill waiting for his breakfast. Massive coronary. He was 65 and had received his first Social Security check only a week or two before.

I went with a couple of cousins to obtain his belongings from his hotel room (A walk-up flophouse with screen doors on the rooms.). By the time we got there, someone had popped the screen and taken everything he had.

Yep, downtown Ft. Worth in that time period was a very interesting mix of the good, the bad and the ugly, but they were good times overall. I still miss it.

The Starlite Club & The Telephone Pioneers

While the Rocket Club was arguably the best known nightclub on the Jacksboro Highway, there were plenty of others. One was the Starlite Club. Located on the west side of the highway and several blocks south of the Rocket Club, my knowledge of it is due to exactly one thing. Stashed in some of the photos and documents that my parents saved is a photo folder that is virtually identical to the ones used by the Rocket Club. It only differed in color, cover design and the club name on the front. The folder serves to perpetuate the memory (good or bad) of the Starlite Club, but it’s what I found inside that’s interesting.

My mother, Ruby Claudine Wacaster Marmo, started working for the telephone company in 1922 when she was sixteen years old, having just moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Remember, this was when the phone company was AT&T with no competition.


At any rate, my mother spent 31 years with the phone company before retiring and spending another 33 years on various PBX boards with hospitals, newspapers and department stores. When she retired from AT&T, she was a Life Member of the Telephone Pioneers of America. But, as I’m sure you know, to become a Life Member of anything, first you have to be just a member. I never knew when that occurred...until I found the Starlite Club folder.



Inside was a certificate printed on heavyweight stock Certifying that Ruby C. Marmo was a Member of the Telephone Pioneers of America. The date is December 25, 1949. This much is fact. From this point on, it’s an educated guess, but I think I’m correct. If anyone has information to the contrary, I’d appreciate hearing from them.

Since my parents appeared in a photo taken at the Rocket Club sometime in 1949, and the Telephone Pioneers certificate was found in a Starlite Club folder where it’s been since 1949, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to reach a particular conclusion.

What I believe is that the presentation of the certificate was held at a party in the Starlite Club, sometime in late December, 1949. Could it have been a few months later, making it early 1950? Sure could, since I can’t nail the date down to the specific day,

This is just a microcosm of the kinds of things that went on during the late 1940s here in Ft. Worth. No earthshattering event was connected with this presentation nor did it make the newspaper. It was just another moment in the day-to-day life in Cowtown.