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

Vacation Memories - My Sister and I Have Plenty

Drove to Los Angeles to visit Aunt Iola and Uncle Charlie, the only members of the family not in the New York City area.

Every morning he would let me go out and pick an orange off their tree in the backyard.  For dinner one night we had short ribs on the grill.  Uncle Charlie taught me how to play Pinochle.  Went to Knotts Berry Farm and Disneyland.

Bought a Davy Crockett tee shirt, flint lock rifle and coonskin cap.  At the magic store on Main Street, I bought a few magic tricks along with a white rabbit.

On our way to California, we stopped at Carlsbad Caverns, Petrified Forest, Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon.

Mom voted “no” on seeing the Meteor Center in Arizona.  “We’re not going to drive 7 miles on a dirt road just to see a hole in the ground.”

On leaving Los Angeles and arriving at Needler on the California-Nevada line, the temperature was still over 100 degrees.

Horn and Haradrt Automat – Opened in New York City in 1912.  Employed vending machines with glass doors where a customer could insert a coin in a slot and retrieve a single dish of their choice.  My grandmother took us once.

Trips back to New York City – Great Smokey Mountains – bought a colored tomahawk and a carved coconut face which I called “Gorgeous George MacGillacuddie.”

Niagra Falls – Went on the Maid of the Mist cruise shop to the base of the falls, and then donned rain gear to walk on a series of wooden stairs to be close to the falls.

Trips to San Antonia – Saw the Alamo and visited Wonder Cave and Aquarena Springs in San Marcus.

Las Vegas – We ended up sting at a brand new casino.  The colors of the room were all shades of purple.  In the hotel lobby there were slot machines in the restrooms.

Beside the pool, they also had a Miniature Golf Course and a Go-Kart track.

While Mom and Dad gambled, they sat us at the edge of the bar where my sisters and I drank Shirley Temples and Roy Rogers.  Nobody cared if I flipped through the adult magazines at the hotel newsstand, eye-opening!  

Best of all was the all-you-can-eat buffet.  Never had I seen so much food.  For the first time ever I was allowed to have three desserts.


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