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

Magic - My Early Years Were Filled with Hocus-Pocus



What can conjure up anymore excitement than the words "Abracadabra" and "Hocus Pocus" and the mysterious world of magic?

I probably saw my first magician on the Ed Sullivan TV variety show, and my first "live" magician was Dallas'-own Mark Wilson.  At Bryan Adams, Mike Spears was an accomplished magician with large size stage illusions.

I practiced tricks in my bedroom and at one time had a "performance" in the back yard.  A small faded black and white photograph showing a magician's table and Chinese lantern hanging from the limbs.  A sign attached to the tree trunk reads: Ching Ling Foo and Wan.  My assistant, Wan, was none other than my sister, Dorothy.

I took my name from one of the greatest Chinese magicians, Chung Ling Soo.  Chung was really an American named William Robinson, who was killed performing the sensational bullet catching trick in 1918.

His life was captured in the 2005 book by Jim Steinmyer "The Glorious Deception - The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the Marvelous Chinese Conjurer."

Mark Wilson was a child magician prodigy growing up here in Dallas.  He began performing for money as a teenager and part-time job demonstrating magic at Douglas Magic Land in downtown Dallas.  (Douglas Magic Land is treated in a separate heading).

I visited Douglas Magic Land as a boy, only buying the least expensive tricks.  I couldn't wait to visit the magic store on Main Street in Disneyland where I bought a magician's wand, a white rabbit with real fur, a six-shot production vase and a set of Chinese linking rings.

Other tricks I had included a Chinese finger chopper, a ball vase, dropping rings, the silken tube trick, magic pyramid, cups and balls, magic coin box, three shell game, Imp's enchanted bottle and wonder blocks.

My cousin Skip and I figured out how the electric pack card deck was strung together.  We made a crude device which had three holes at the top of the card and three at the bottom and then strung them together with thread so you could fan and flip the cards together with an artistic flourish.

Three books on magic which I bought as a boy and still have include:

An Introduction to Magic - 141 Professional Tricks You Can Do - Sherman Ripley, 1955.  Sentinel Books

Magic Handbook.  Science and Mechanics, 1962

500 Tricks.  Douglas Magic Land.  Dallas, Texas 1955
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