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

Douglas Magic Land



Any of my trips to downtown as a boy always included a trip to Douglas Magic Land on North Ervay across the street from the downtown Post Office and near Shanghai Jimmie's chili rice restaurant.

Douglas Magic Land was started by two brothers, Lyle and Delbert Douglas, in 1921 on Commerce Street in downtown.  In 1927 it moved to 409 N. Ervay where it stayed for 53 years until 1980 when it moved to Midway Road in North Dallas where it ultimately closed.

According to a July 5, 1983 Dallas Morning News article, "the musty prop-filled shop was a mandatory stopping-off point for thousands of magicians working their way west in Vaudeville shows."

"The store's catalog still includes many of the same tricks offered in 1923.  It is printed in the original, old-fashioned typeface, and to accommodate for inflation, there is an attached, updated price list."

On the walls were magic tricks, the more expensive tricks were along the back.  In the corner was the demonstration table.  I never felt good enough even to watch the demonstrations.

The center of the store was filled with gag gifts like a Johnson Smith catalog come to life.  Here you could get your whoopee cushions, rubber vomit, a fly embedded in an ice cube, hand buzzers, itching powder, soap which turned your hands black.  Even some adult gag gifts which you checked out in quick furtive glances.

Mystery and tawdriness - what better place for a young boy?
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