About This Blog

This blog features: neighborhood restaurants, nearby restaurants, downtown restaurants, Casa View Shopping Center, nearby shopping, Downtown shops.

I will first list places and my connections with them. For the spirit of completeness, I will then list other places, known to me but not visited. I choose not to list the unknown.

I like the section entitled Places I Wish I Had Visited.

My focus is places and locations which existed from 1953, when I moved to Dallas, until 1965, when I graduated from high school. This list will continue with my college years, until I turned 21. I left Dallas in 1969 and, as I did not return except to visit my parents until 1973, my memory of East Dallas ends at that time.

Some categories were easy to separate – restaurants and shopping. Some experiences are not so easy to categorize, but are still meaningful. They may be all lumped in together, and then teased out as other connections are made.

Music wise, we may have thought we were born of the “wrong generation.” I always thought the older generation (i.e. 3 to 4 years older than me) had a richer and deeper experience.

But we, the beginning of the Baby Boomer generation, had it best – stable family life, rising expectations for the middle class and parents who wanted to give so much to their children, which most did not have in their childhood. We were left to play and roam outdoors to make our own fun. We had the best toys and the best music.

And yet we lived in tumultuous times – the Cold War, Civil Rights, Integration and the Kennedy Assassination through the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Hopefully we came out as loving, caring, sharing adults whose experiences made us better people and gave us the ability to show appreciation and gratitude for the neighborhood and experiences which enriched us and our loved ones.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Clothing - What We Wore and Where We Bought It

We shopped at J.C. Penneys for my clothes.

Bought my first suit at the Varsity Shop.  Also had a scout uniform shop in the back.  Female sales clerk took care of me through my freshman year in college, Minnie Minion.

My grandmother sent me pajamas every year through my freshman year, even though I stopped wearing them after 11.  She would address all my cards as “Master Robert Reitz.”

You wore blue jeans and tennis shoes through the 6th grade.

From Junior High on, you wore leather shoes and chino pants.

We derisively called those from  Mesquite as “pearl button,” for the predominantly Western shirts they wore.

Our fashion guru in High School was Dobie Gillis.

Most of our shirts were button down with a pleat in the back, with a small cloth loop.  The shirt equivalent of a wedgie was coming up in the back of someone and pulling off your loop.

Madras became quite popular.
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