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

Car Stories - Like Jack Kerouac, I Was Mostly a Passenger...



All the car stories escape me, with the exception of stories involving Dan Lewis and his 1963 Ford Falcon convertible with red and white upholstery which we used to cruise around Dallas.

We chipped in fifty cents each to buy gas at a cheap station right below the spillway.

We even took his car to Galveston for a weekend.

I went from poor high school student, poor college student, poor Navy enlisted man, back to poor college student and finally just a poor person.  I never had the money to buy a car until I was employed by Ray Geophysical at age 26.

A sidebar ... I bought a 1955 Ford Station Wagon while I was a senior at UT in 1970.  It was advertised at a laundromat at a reasonable offer.  I couldn't drive it so I ended up selling it for the same price I paid for it.

My father helped me purchase a car for my first legitimate job - a 1963 Volvo sedan.  I loved that car and it lasted years until I wrecked it in West Virginia.  I nurtured the car to Cambridge and Boston for the summer, St. Augustine and Miami Beach, back to Austin, then finally to Dallas in 1973.
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