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

John Birch Society - Part of Dallas' Dark Side

Growing up in Dallas and fairly oblivious to much that was going on around me, I was aware of dark clouds on the horizon.  On the radio were shows like the Dan Smoot Report and Life Line sponsored by ultra-conservative oil multi-millionaire, H.L. Hunt.

Dallas was the home of General Edwin A. Walker, who passed out conservative political materials to his troops and was asked to leave the military.  Even businessman Clint Murchison, who also owned the Dallas Cowboys, gave money for ?

Bruce Alger, our U.S. Congressman, organized groups of women he called "Alger's Girls" to protect the visits of Senator Adlai Stevenson and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson in downtown Dallas.  Ultra conservative activists didn't shoot the President, but created dark and troubling scenes when all eyes shone on Dallas after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

The most organized of them all was the John Birch Society organized by Robert Welco who received millions as partial owner of the Welch Candy Company.  The organization was named after the first American military man killed in the Korean War conflict.

Welch is a dedicated dictator.  He writes in the "bible" of Birchiam, the Blue Book: "The John Birch Society is a monolithic body.  It will operate under completely authoritative control at all levels ... cut through the red tape and roadblocks of confused purpose with direct authority at every turn."

According to Dallas writer A.C. Greene, "the Birch Society operates through hints, half-truths and whispers rather than by direct public opposition.  Because the society itself is based on a theory of conspiracy - everything and everybody that opposes it is in the International Communist Conspiracy - it must work on the same basis, so members act as if their membership were a guilty secret they dare not disclose."

They were behind all those billboards which said "Impeach Earl Warren" and "Get Us Out of the United Nations."  They operated the American Opinion Book Store at 2711 McKinney Avenue TA-7-7822.
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