Homes, Entertainment & Gas Stations

As I said in a previous post, around 1947 we had bought a house at 4928 Morris Street, purchased from a woman by the name of Mrs. Godwin. She lived in a large two-story brick home on Oakland Blvd., just north of and on the same side as the present Oakland Corners strip shopping center. If you drive north on Oakland from E. Lancaster and look to the left (to the west if you prefer compass directions), you'll see a vacant lot right next to another large two-story brick home. That lot is where Mrs. Godwin's house was. By the 1960s, she had turned it into a boarding house. After she passed away a few years later, the house was torn down.

During the late 40s and early 50s, the East Side was almost entirely residential, including most of E. Lancaster, though interspersed with a few small businesses. For example, a washateria was located on the west side of Rand Street, about a block south of East Lancaster on property that is now a parking lot for Sagamore Hill Baptist Church. Incidentally, Sagamore Hill Baptist Church has sold their property to Charity Church and begun building a new sanctuary on Green Oaks in far east Ft. Worth.

At least one church was located directly on E. Lancaster and gas stations were beginning to occupy more than a few corners. Incidentally, the building on the northwest corner of Rand and Virginia Lane (which housed the Choice Pregnancy Center) was originally the Texas Department of Public Safety building. That's where I went in 1964 to take my driving test.

There was, I believe, a gas station on the corner of E. Lancaster and Rand, occupying a small portion of the area now taken by Auto Zone. Just behind the station was a large two story house, complete with tall front columns in the antebellum style

The Gateway Theatre (the neighborhood source of entertainment) sat where McDonald's is now on the northeast corner of Sargeant and E. Lancaster and a brick structure across the street on the northwest corner of Sargeant and E. Lancaster (what we would now describe as a small strip center) was home to numerous small businesses. Although I can’t document it yet, I’ve heard that the building held a doctor’s office and possibly a drugstore. Oh, yeah, in those days doctors still made house calls. The practice wasn't unusual either and if you had an emergency in the middle of the night, you called the doctor and he came out (carrying the familiar little black bag). There was none of this calling the funeral home ambulance or finding your own way to the emergency room. Your home was the emergency room and the doctor came to you.