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, February 14, 2013

Book Stores in Dallas circa 1963



As a young boy visiting downtown, I remember going into Cokesbury, Doubleday and the Commerce Street Newsstand.  In high school I bought required paperbacks at the Varsity Book Store over by SMU.

A trip to downtown included visiting Harper's Used Book Store in Deep Ellum.  Harper's will be treated as a separate article.

Aldridge Book Store 2800 McKinney TA-3-2447
Rare and find old books, antiquarian books

Cokesbury Book Store 1910 Main Street RI-8-8711

Doubleday Book Shop 1411 Commerce RI-8-2291

Harper's Book Shop 2590 Elm RI-7-0144
Try Harper's First.  The Second Hand Book Shop.
The Harpers were very nice to let me have the run of the store - from Scout books to adult paperbacks.

Newsland Bookstore 1629 Elm RI-7-2774

Commerce Street Newsstand 1610 Commerce RI-1-0062
You can buy the daily Racing Forms, out-of-state newspapers, adult section in the back separated by a thin curtain.

Varsity Book Store 6413 Hillcrest LA-8-9266

Wilcox Book Store 313 N. Akard RI-2-0131

The Red Barn 3718 McKinney Avenue LA-1-2250

Wilson Book Shop 3005 Fairmount 214-747-5804, Robert DYP79
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