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

Starting College

There was never a time when I didn't think I was not going to college.  For our group, the only question was "where" you were going.
 
Judy Sharp, the most beautiful older girl I ever knew, was going to East Texas State University in Commerce, an hour east of Dallas.  She drove back and forth.  One day I drove out with her and spent the day on campus while she went to her summer school classes.  It looked pretty bleak.

Austin College had a program where high school students could come up and spend the weekend at school, tour the campus, eat in the cafeteria and talk with actual students.  It looked pretty bleak also.

I did visit Trinity University in San Antonio.  I got a good scholarship from them and I thought this is where I'm going.
 
In the spring of 1965 right before I graduated, I went to a UIL (University Interscholastic League) Journalism conference on the grounds of the University of Texas in Austin.

I fell in love with the school - Battle Library, the Tower, the strength of the Journalism program.  From Shoal Creek to Waller Creek, I liked it all.  I immediately applied and was accepted.
 
I received a Bird-Faulkner college scholarship from the Boy Scouts through Circle Ten Council.  I had applied and was interviewed at the Council Headquarters at 100 Thomas Building in downtown.  My buddy, Lee Smith, who served with me on Camp staff at Camp Wisdom in 1963, received the other scholarship - he went to Harvard.  We're still close friends and see each other often.

I can remember signing up for classes in the fall - my total tuition, fees and "entertainment" package came to $112.
 
I actually started school in the summer of 1965.  Outside of my clothes, I brought 4 items with me:  an AM/FM clock radio, a fluorescent desk lamp, a small portable iron (these were the days before permanent press) and an umbrella.  The  umbrella was a graduation gift which I thought was pretty dumb.  It came in very handy.

Flash forward thirty years and my wife and I are driving daughter Rachel up to school at Austin College.  It took two pickup truck loads of stuff she was bringing to her dorm room, plus my wife had to make a third trip to bring up the stuff we forgot.  Who knew you needed color-coordinated towels, bath mat, toilet seat cover and dirty clothes hamper to go to college?  Who knew, well, I do now.  And she did graduate.
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