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.

Monday, December 31, 2012

Icky Twerp - By The Man Who Knew Him

Bob Allen has been in the radio business since he was a kid in Oklahoma City.  He owns and operates Texoma's KJIM-AM.  With a notable career in radio and advertising from one coast to the other, Allen always wanted to own his own radio station.  He got when he moved to Sherman in 1994, bought KJIM, a religious station, and gave it a new life with a lineup of nostalgia music and old radio shows.

Well and good, but even Allen's impressive credentials and long experience in broadcasting pale to his real claim to fame.  Bob Allen knew Icky Twerp.
"I worked at KFJZ in Fort Worth.  KTVT, Channel 11 was in the same building" said Allen.  "Icky Twerp worked for KTVT and I saw him every day."

Icky Twerp was Bill Canfield, who graduated from TCU in 1955 and went to work for a Fort Worth department store.  When a friend suggested he might get some work in television, Canfield gave it a whirl.  The television whirl lasted more than 30 years.

He started by creating commercials for advertisers.  It took a special sort of wackiness to come up with a character called Mortimer Moneybags to promote a local bank, and the station executives knew talent when they saw it, so they turned Canfield loose to come up with other characters to host their local shows.

In those days, stations carried a lot of original programming, and this was especially true at KTVT.  There were four stations in Dallas and Fort Worth, and KTVT was the only one without a network affiliation.  With a line up of old movies and kid shows, they were scrambling to fill the broadcast day, and Canfield, with his amazing imagination, quickly became the man to call when the station needed something to put on the air.

He began as Captain Swabbie, the host of a cartoon show.  Then came Ickabod Twerpwhistle and later, Icky Twerp.
Icky wore a wrinkled black suit, black glasses and a tiny cowboy hat that perched atop a mound of frizzy hair.  Late at night, Icky Twerp became Gorgon, the spooky host of Nightmare, introducing old horror movies.

If you were a kid living within range of Channel 11 in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you watched "Slam Bang Theater" with Icky Twerp every day.
It was Icky, the apes, cartoons and the Three Stooges.  Icky Twerp became so associated with the Stooges that they put him in their 1965 movie, The Outlaws Is Coming.

"The camera guys were the guys who wore the gorilla masks," recalled Allen.  "In fact all of the characters on the show came from the crew."
Canfield took a job in Denver in the 1970s, and Icky Twerp said farewell, announcing to is loyal fans that he had inherited the Lost Twerp Mine from Uncle Ickabod.  With a shovel on his shoulder he walked across the station parking lot and in to the sunset, while "You'll Never Walk Alone," played in the background.  Bill Canfield died in Fort Worth in 1991.
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