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.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Magazines – Adult Magazines Before and After Playboy


Men’s magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s were broken up into street categories.  First you had the outdoor sports magazines – Field and Stream and Outdoor Life, which catered to the weekend hunter, fisherman and outdoor enthusiast.

Then you had magazines like True, which featured a little more wide-ranging subject matter.  Then you had the men’s adventure magazines with covers marketed to veterans of World War II, such as Cavalcade, 

Men’s True Action and Men’s illustrated.

The era of the “bachelor” magazines started in 1953 with editor and publisher Hugh Hefner describing his new magazine Playboy as “an entertainment magazine for the indoor man.  A pleasure primer for the sophisticated, city-bred male.”  They were less concerned with hunting, fishing, and combing mountains than good food, proper dress and the pleasure of female company.

I was not a hunter or a fisherman and about as far away from sophistication as you can get, but I was curious, intrigued and completely lost as to why the female form clouded my everyday thoughts – I read all the magazines.

Prominent “bachelor” magazines in the late 1950s and early 1960s:

Escapade – Jack Kerouac wrote a regular column The Last Word, between 1959 and 1961.
Rogue – Lenny Bruce wrote a monthly column during 1959 and 1961.
Swank – Had a regular column in the early 1960s called Modern Scene, that featured writing of beat writers, including Seymour Krim, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs and LeRoy Jones.
Playboy – Started in December 1953, featuring a nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe.  Unsure of his magazine’s success, Hugh Hefner did not date his first issue.
Others – Gent. High, Hi-Life, Dude, Jem, Bachelor, Ace, Adam, Cavalcade, Climax and Nugget.

Sources – The History of Pinup Magazines.  Diane Harrison.  Multi-Volumes. Tauschen.

All Man!  Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines and the Masculine Persona.  Davin M. Earle.  Kent State University Press.  Kent, 2009.
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