Why Dallas? [December 1973]
A search in photographs and old records for the sources of our state's most controversial city. How did it get like it is, and why?
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Like the stagecoach, the interurban was a romantic, memorable way to travel. At the height of its popularity in Dallas, special luxury trains of parlor cars and, at one time, a diner, were used. The most important men of the region could be seen in the smoker, puffing on Havana cigars (rolled in Dallas), and talking loftily from their swivel leather seats with fellow grandees, while traveling at speeds of sixty miles-per-hour.
Many a country boy, on the other hand, stood at the back pasture where the line ran through his father's farm, and deep in the night waited for the headlight of the Waco local to come swaying down the track, for the car to stop with a hiss of air brakes, and carry him off forever to Dallas—or the wider world beyond.
Special amusement parks were established along the lines for riders, the two most memorable being Kingsland Park between Dallas and Richardson (just north of where the present-day Presbyterian Hospital stands), and Lake Erie at Handley, near Fort Worth. A good many romances, leading to betrothal and marriage, were begun or fostered on the excursion cars to these spots. Despite the parlor cars and high-speed specials, the interurbans were essentially the mode of transportation of the common people, the people who would have had to stay home otherwise. Like the streetcar, their doom was pronounced by the ever-increasing availability of the private automobile.
For some time Henry Exall had had a horse farm out on Preston Road and had created a lake on Turtle Creek which became a popular picnic and rowboating site. There was even a rail spur leading to it at the turn of the century.
In 1907 J. S. Armstrong, the same man who had broken his partnership with Tom Marsalis over the way Marsalis was handling the sale of lots for Oak Cliff, bought Henry Exall's farm and quite a bit of additional acreage and turned it over to his sons-in-law, Edgar Flippen and Hugh Prather. They began development of a raw, barren set of fields they named Highland Park—although along both sides of Exall's lake the topography was inspiring enough to create palatial manors and estates which survive today.
This was, and remains, the most restricted, most desirable (to some) place to live in Dallas County. Because it was so far from Dallas, Highland Park became an independent city—and so would remain despite passionate efforts through the years to bring it into Dallas. But it has resisted, offering the same advantages it offered at its creation: investment security (land and houses in Highland park almost never decrease in value); tight control of city hall, the schools, and municipal services; an almost small town atmosphere; lower taxes than surrounding Dallas but with all Dallas' services, and (to many but not all residents) lack of non-white citizens and school pupils. (The latter could change at any time.)
When Southern Methodist University was established to the north and east of Highland Park, adjoining it, another "island city" was created: University Park. Streetcar service from Dallas was run there from the first. Although both are a thorn in the side of Dallas because of the conflicting school systems, street numbering, traffic passage, and tax structures, no one seriously believes the Park Cities ever will come into the grasp of Mother Dallas. For one thing, many of the men who run Dallas at the practical level live in the Park Cities and do not want to be a part of the city where they have their offices and businesses.
But probably the main reason the Park Cities will not voluntarily join Dallas is quite visible: the Highland Park concept has worked well for those who want it. It is a remarkably serene and handsome area which has protected itself from the inside as well as from the outside.
A country boy, who later admitted with pride that all the schooling he had had past grade six was "the university of cotton, men, and mules" had come to Dallas in the year 1910 and, strictly as a business venture, had gotten into book selling. When the state began supplying free textbooks, this country boy—whose name was Robert Lee Thornton—got out and, being convinced that finance was one place where shrewdness could get you farther than a college degree, joined a small banking firm. By 1916 it was Stiles, Thornton and Lund, with offices on Main, between Jefferson and Market. That was the beginning of the Mercantile National Bank which, by the 1930's, was one of the "Big Three" of downtown banking.
Thornton grew more and more influential (a banker has an advantage that way, one must admit) in civic affairs "for the good of Dallas" and in 1935 was one of the key men in securing the Texas Centennial Exposition (with millions of money) for Dallas. After this, in 1937, not wanting to see the team disbanded, he was key man in chartering the Citizens Council, the shadow government of Dallas which for the next 30 years would dominate, or strongly channel, virtually any municipal and civic decision, whether it was the long range attraction of new industries or racial integration of local businesses.
Thornton (called Uncle Bob in his later days) was also mayor of Dallas for many years, or until he grew tired of the post. The last of the highly individualistic, self-deciding leaders, he usually could (and did) meet any kind of city crisis with half a dozen phone calls.
He had a kind of charm. Once, describing the sort of people who ran things, he stumbled over the word "dynamic" and called them "the dydamic men of Dallas"—probably deliberately playing on his "rural" vocabulary. This became not just a catch phrase but a gut description of Dallas control in the 1940's and '50's.
Although the Citizens Council way of running a city excluded the public (only "yes-and-no" executives: bankers, the newspaper publishers, utilities presidents, owners of big payroll industries—but no professional men, or university leaders, educators, ministers, or artists) and made rubber stamp groups of City Council and administrative officials, Bob Thornton's honesty kept it from becoming a corrupt machine. Seldom did the leadership act selfishly, except in a collective manner, and there was no scandal apparent in the operation of the city government. The balance of power among the self-appointed control group kept any single member or smaller collusion from splintering the cabal.
It was not democratic, but it was not tyrannical. In another age it might have been accepted with resignation or even gratitude. But it was a concept of control, an opportunity, out of more feudal times, and as Dallas and the nation advanced into the era of social welfare and concern, the Citizens Council found itself more and more baffled, and less and less directly in control of things. The death of Bob Thornton in 1964, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (and its attendant flare of publicity—much of it bad—about the Dallas oligarchy), the single-member redistricting decisions (Dallas county and city had voted as one unit, which enabled a dominant control group like the Citizens Council to write its own legislative slate as well as name the City Council and the school board), began to bring it down. Uncle Bob was the last of the roughshod frontier leaders. There was no one to take over the reins with his cunning and his force.
Although the Great Depression was already on the nation, Dallas felt optimistic in 1930 with a population of 260,397. It had four newspapers (the Journal and Dispatch competed with the Times Herald in the afternoon while the News had the mornings alone) and a new federal building which opened at St. Paul and Bryan. That fall the Cotton Bowl, with a capacity of 46,000 replaced the old steel race track grandstand at Fair Park.
Dallas was becoming the center of a web of paved highways, the Bankhead Highway, the major east-west artery, having come through in 1928, and by 1932 the last major outlet, the Northwest Highway to Wichita Falls was opened—the name soon used for a long ribbon of road which had nothing to do with Wichita Falls or the north-westerly direction.
Sometime within that year—maybe a few months before—Dallas had looked in the mirror and seen an adult. It was a grown up city.
The years that brought it to maturity were ended.
It was now a big city in the way all big cities are alike—keeping some unique identity, certainly, but never again to be "our town" or a home place where one life can cover all its facets.
Still to come were events and celebrations, disasters and shocks, notoriety, successes, stature. Bonnie and Clyde would, another irony, become among Dallas' most famous offspring—outlaws. At their death in 1934, 20,000 would attend the funeral and airplanes would drop flowers.
Football: Bobby Wilson and his SMU Mustang teammates drawing national attention for the first time in 1935; followed by Doak Walker and the teams of the 1940's . . . and the professional successes of the Dallas Cowboys of the 1960's and '70's.
Still to come: the great Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 and the Pan American of 1937, drawing the eyes of the world to Dallas—and Dallas a city which, shrewdly, would not release them.
And: the East Texas oil boom which would discover a generation of fabulous creatures called "Rich Dallas Oilmen" and bring names like Neiman-Marcus into national use as a phrase for ultimate luxury and self-indulgence. After the Centennial and East Texas oil the cowboy as symbol of Texas would be gone: replaced by the rags-to-riches wildcatter like Dad Joiner, and the unbelievably wealthy petroleum princes such as H. L. Hunt, Algur Meadows, and the Murchinson family—going all over the globe after wealth and taking Dallas with them. For better . . . or worse.
Still to come: landmarks now held common; Central Expressway, the Turnpike, the Tollway, and Stemmons . . . the downtown towers of the Mercantile, Republic, and First National Banks . . . Big Tex at the State Fair, NorthPark, One Main Place, the plastic degradation of Lemmon Avenue.
Names: like H. Ross Perot, Linda Darnell, Stanley Marcus, E. DeGolyer, Bob Hayes, Earl Cabell, Lon Tinkle, Don Meredith, Erik Jonsson . . . and Lee Harvey Oswald.
And: sometime in the 1970's when the population of Dallas passed the one million mark.
But all that is another story—another city.
It is not just a different chapter: it is a different book.
There is no end.
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