Oilmen, Policemen and Nightclub Owners in the Suburbs

One aspect of growing up is making sense of your place in the world based on what your parents do for a living. In the suburban neighborhood where I grew up in the fifties, my daddy was a businessman who went to a downtown office building every day. He often worked late into the night and through the weekend. By late teens, I had categorized him as a computerdooter—he managed the accounting and tax records for bigtime oil men like Clint Murchison and Jake L. Hamon.

IBM programmer and machine operator with IBM motto circa 1950s

Many southwest daddies made their livings connected somehow to the oil industry. On the street where I grew up, we had two other types of daddies who seemed strange and alien to me. Two families had daddies who were policemen and one family had a dad who owned a bar with pool tables down on East Grand.

In the last week or so I’ve found much info on the web about the lives of Dallas oilmen, policemen and nightclub owners in 1963. Why? Because the President was assassinated here. Not only have numerous governmental agencies investigated the city, but thousands of conspiracy theorists and even Hollywood continue to spend much time obsessed with this time in U.S. history.

I was too young to have had a chance to visit Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, but here’s a clip of a Hollywood rendition of what went on. The dancer is a fantasy combination of Candy Barr, Judith Campbell Exner, and Marilyn Monroe. In the last scene, Ruby defends working gals and the American Guild of Variety Artists.

Click below for photos from Carousel:

http://s194.photobucket.com/albums/z214/diocynic/Carousel/

Here's more on Candy Barr:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/celebrity/candy_barr/1_index.html

By 1966 or so, I was old enough to go from Dallas to Ft. Worth with a carload of high school friends to visit the Cellar. The dancers removed their bottoms as well as tops. They had lights and buzzers to warn if a police raid was occurring.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/TT/xdt1.html

If you misbehaved bad enough, the bouncers would throw you down the stairs just like Jack Ruby had done at the Carousel. [Here’s a link to descriptions of Ruby’s abilities as a bouncer of drunks from his club:

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ruby5.htm

] Supposedly the Cellar didn’t have a liquor license at the time I visited, so you could buy whiskey-flavored drinks for $4 each. By 1 am or so, I was becoming a bit sleepy from the drinks and endless naked bodies. Sitting Indian-style of the floor , I laid back on a cushion. One of the barmaids kicked me in the head—they were much rougher that Reinhardt teachers—notifying me that I had better sit up and behave.

In the early 70s, I had a friend who took me to the Busy Bee on South Industrial and the Fare on Greenville. Busy Bee was a traditional burlesque joint. The dancers were older and obviously skilled dancers who could do amazing things with their breasts. The Fare had skinny, young go-go dancers.

At this link, Joe Bob describes some of the later history of exotic dancing in Dallas:

http://www.joebobbriggs.com/misccolumns/newpuritanism.asp

Several years ago, the Dallas CVB suffered scandal in part because bed tax funds were used to take convention planners to Dallas strip clubs.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~clj5/Ethics/articles/Isbell31.pdf

A criteria for many meeting planners is if their conventioneers will find a good selection of strip clubs in the city where they hold their convention—same as in Jack Ruby’s days. And I’m sure there are some Dallas policemen who have complex relationships with the nightclub owners. The national association of gentlemen's club owners recognizes Dallas's important role in this trade group. http://www.acenational.org/default.aspx

Big oilmen in Dallas continue to run many things, just like H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison used their power in Dallas 1963. Arkansas oilman Jerry Jones follows Bum Bright and Clint Murchison (both of whom helped pay for the DMN Kennedy Questions ad the morning of the assassination) and Lamar Hunt, son of H.L. Hunt, in their hobbies of prime time sports glamour. Check out conspiracy theorists' stories about Murchison, Hunt and Bright at

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmurchison.htm

And what LBJ’s "girlfriend" had to say about Dallas oilmen at

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2006/300806jfk.htm

John Birchers and Bridge Ladies in the Suburbs and Phyllis Schafly Fighting ERA

In previous blogs about my experiences growing up in the suburban East Dallas in the fifties and sixties, I’ve examined blue collar workers, white collar workers, organization men, creeps, and bridge ladies in the suburbs.

I have not addressed another category—John Birchers in the suburbs—and a political connection that is old news to many but interesting to a straight white, oblivious boy like me.

Flyer anonymously printed and distributed in Dallas just before Kennedy's visit

We all remember Kennedy’s assassination and the worldwide incrimination of Dallas as a “city of hate” that somehow fostered the killing. When Kennedy began his morning at a Fort Worth hotel, he considered the hostile Dallas political environment, as shown in a Dallas Morning News advertisement published that morning.

In the aftermath, the Warren Commission found that both the DMN ad and the flyer were irrelevant; the ad was created and funded by Birchers and wealthy Dallas businessmen, including Bum Bright. The John Birch Society, which had a strong following in the fifties and sixties in the wealthy, white Dallas suburbs, claimed the assassination bolstered their conviction that a communist conspiracy existed in the U.S. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/birch.htm

I’ve never had much interest in JFK assassination theories or the history of the Equal Rights Amendment, but reading Barbara Ehrenbach's The Hearts of Men [which though published in 1983, stands credible and current today] has drawn for me a connection between the conservative businessmen and their bridge-playing, stay-at-home wives, on the one hand, and the defeat of the ERA in the early eighties.

. . . Phyllis Schafly was not one of those housewives who, as Betty Friedan observed, let homemaking “expand to fill the time available” and crowd out all youthful ambitions. Sheltered by Fred Schlafly’s more than ample income and assisted by a part-time housekeeper, she developed a new career as a one-woman propagandist for far-right concerns, publishing (and in some cases self-publishing) eight books on the twin menace of the Soviet Union and its domestic dupes. Politically, she kept one foot in the right-wing of the Republican Party and the other in the nether world of paranoid, evangelical organizations which made up what was then known complacently as the “lunatic fringe” of American conservatism. She ran for Congress as a Republican and wrote a best-selling book (A Choice Not an Echo) endorsing Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate in 1964. At the same time, she believed that the party had been taken over by a “small group of secret kingmakers using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques” to advance the interests of the “Red Empire.” If this sounds like a highly imaginative view of the Republican Party, it was by no means unique to Phyllis Schlafly. The John Birch Society, a semi-secret, right-wing organization that gained a sizable rural and suburban middle-class following the early 1960s, had consistently warned that the United States was already “50%-70% Communist-controlled.” Like Schlafly [a St. Louis, not a Dallas housewife], the Birch Society saw evidence of Red manipulation in any statesman or politician whose military aspirations fell short of nuclear Armageddon. In 1960, for example, the society’s founder and director, Robert Welch, made the surprising announcement that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was himself a Communist operative.

. . .
In 1972, both the Birch Society and Schlafly’s newsletter flagged the ERA—which at the time was solidly backed by the Republican Party—as a major new political target, and within a few months, Phyllis Schlafly emerged as the leader of a national campaign to stop the ERA. The most obvious reason for this sudden surge of right-wing interest in a feminist issue was that, by the early seventies, the old issues were not selling as well as they once had. Charges of communism in high places sounded quaint in an America that had had its own highly visible and hardly conspiratorial New Left. Détente was in progress, anticommunism was on the decline, and sheer opportunism would have impelled the right to exploit the new issues arising from social changes of the sixties—school busing, affirmative action, abortion and equal rights for women. For Schlafly, in addition, as her chronicler Lisa Wohl suggests, the ERA presented an opportunity to “enter the mainstream,” that is, to gain national attention around an issue that had no apparent connection to the tired themes of far-right paranoia. Others on the pro-ERA side made the same assessment of the right-wingers who were beginning to appear reborn as antifeminists. Pointing to the connection between anti-ERA activism and the far-right American Independent Party (which ran George Wallace for President in 1968 and Birch-affiliated John Schmitz in 1972), Congresswoman Martha Griffiths charged that the anti-ERA effort was really “a means of building a right-wing political organization among women.” But if this was opportunism, it was hardly unprincipled: The major themes of the right-wing assault on feminism were latent in far-right anti-communist ideology before feminism became a force in America.

www.phyllisschlafly.com/
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter071802.asp

These guilts by association--John Birch Society related to Phyllis Schaffly related to anti-ERA politics--have exact parallels in attacks against Betty Friedan, that in her early 20s in the late forties, she was a socialist. Both women had need to dissemble about their previous political associations as their new political careers developed. As we near the 2008 Presidential elections, one cannot ignore the vicious political divisions in our country--and as Hillary said this week, that politics and the nation may be on the edge of "spinning out of control." But in some ways, this is old news when one considers the hostile political environment I grew up in during the cold war fifties and early sixties. Let's elect a President who will work to put the ERA back on the table and/or encourage social programs for our distressed citizenship--hardly a frightful possibility compared to rocketing multimegaton nuclear warheads into North Korean or Russian cities.



YouTube has a couple of videos that focus on Dallas news footage of Birchers from the early sixties, including the exploits of Edwin A Walker:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwalker.htm

Once I had a driver's license, in the late 1960s, I remember driving by the John Birch Society's headquarters, which I believe was at the intersection of Blackburn and Oak Lawn. Jack Ruby supposedly frequented Phil's Delicatessen down the street. After he was arrested, he was certain the Birchers were out to get him.
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Issues_and_evidence/Jack_Ruby/Timeline_of_Ruby.html

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/ruby_j1.htm

More sixties Dallas trivia--about connections among right wingers, organized crime, and strippers such as Candy Barr and Chris Colt and her 45s can be found at

http://www.lotuseaters.net/jfkdad.shtml

http://www.jfklancerforum.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=3&topic_id=19378&mesg_id=19378&listing_type=

Hefner and Kerouac

As I’ve worked on my blog over the last seven months or so, I have had in the back of my mind that I must take another look at Hugh Hefner. Boys like me who grew up in the fifties and sixties cut their teeth (and some beat their meat) on his magazine.

My dad, a very modest and conscientious man, had a subscription to Playboy through the sixties. With two teenage sons, he did not work too hard to hide the incoming, brown-paper-wrapped magazines, and my brother—five years older than me—and I had such wonderful, monthly opportunities to spend several hours poring over the latest issue.

Playboy in the sixties had among the highest subscription bases in the USA. It peaked in about 1971. As a proof of its mainstream-ness, consider this ad in a 1968 Christmas edition from Sears & Roebuck.

And consider the literary quality of contributors listed on its cover.
[Click on the picture to make it larger]

Hugh Hefner and the Playboy phenomenon is a complex topic that deserves many book-length studies. Not that Hefner intellectually was and is a very complex man. Rather, he rose to celebrity status and became wealthy at a particular point in American cultural history. By the late sixties, his only work duty was to edit incoming cartoons—of incredible adolescent and misogynist acceptability—and 18-year-old tits. His early authority figure was that celebrated and possibly clinically perverted, scientific expert Alfred Kinsey http://www.leaderu.com/jhs/reisman.html, and as a post-WWII GI early on Hefner entered into a failed marriage with a woman who cheated on him. He was an angry man, and most commentators agree that his magazine was not so much erotic as a sophisticated marketing medium that promoted a bachelor, hedonist lifestyle—not the True magazine image of the man on the hunt in the woods--but the cultivator (consumer) of the bachelor pad, jazz high-fi, culinary arts, European sports car, businessman but not organization man, lover of slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, with complexion color-corrected, young, next-door-innocent females, and with a big payoff from Madison Avenue.

As is my habit, when studying a new subject, I write relatively few words and study the smartest researchers, present and past, two of whom are

Entertainment for Men: Playboy, Masculinity, and Postwar American Culture, by Elizabeth Fraterrigo, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, April, 2004

and

The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich: Anchor Books, 1983.

Ehrenreich draws this interesting connection between the influences of Hugh Hefner and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s:

Playboy’s assault on the Beats was complicated by an ill-concealed sense of rivalry. Hefner grudgingly acknowledged the Beats as fellow rebels against conformity. He implied, however, that they were faint-hearted allies: “. . . modern-day nihilists for whom it was enough, apparently, to flout and deny.” While the beats dropped wearily from the line of the march, the playboys had gone tearing ahead. The difference, he argued, was that the playboys were ambitious; they wanted clothes, cars, fancy girls and they had the energy to find them. . . .

The Beats, whether celebrating [the working class and disenfranchised] like Kerouac or demanding an “affirmation of the barbarian” in all of us, as the briefly Beat Norman Mailer did, were an unwanted reminder of the invisible class outside and the repressed masculine self within. If they had been political in a conventional sense, offering themselves as champions of the proletariat, they would have been less, not more, subversive in an America that knew how to label, file and dismiss its pinko’s and Communists.

I'm Feeling the Christmas Spirit

And the retailers are drawing me to the buy-hole.

Consider Christmas Giving—though it can hardly be called giving in any traditional sense of the word—is the essence of this secularized festival of consumption. What is given is usually of low utility. In fact, economists call such objects deadweight gifts. “Deadweight” is short for “deadweight loss,” which is the difference between what a gift giver has spent and the value the recipient places on it. Joel Waldfogel, a Yale economist, has estimated that up to a third of the gifts given during Christmas are in this category. Billions of dollars are “wasted” each Christmas as Uncle Louie receives an unwearable Countess Mara necktie from his niece to whom he has sent an unusable Fendi purse. Both parties would be better off giving cash. But they don’t and that is what makes the transaction so interesting to economists and students of luxury.

Living It Up : America's Love Affair with Luxury
by James B. Twitchell

North Dallas Special

In 1952, my parents bought the home I grew up in for about $12,500. As a WWII veteran, my dad was eligible for a no-down-payment, low-interest, fixed-rate loan, and buying the Fox & Jacob's "cookie cutter" suburban house was just as cheap as renting. It had 945 sq. ft., three bedrooms, one bath, a one-car garage, and no air conditioning.

In 1953, my dad bought his first new car, a 1953 Mercury sedan. We were a one-car family, and he joined a carpool with other downtown workers in the neighborhood so that my stay-at-home mom could have a car for her activities during several days of the week.

Today, young parents of comparable economic footing to my parents would shop for a "North Dallas Special." Cynical homebuilders and realtors know they only have 20 minutes to establish curb appeal and other warm status fuzzies to potential buyers. Gaudy McMansion architecture, with complex, ornamental roof structures, "grand" entrances, and cheapness hidden in sides, rear, and general home engineering are what will make the sale to the three-SUV families.
$207,990, 3,277 sq. ft. Fox & Jacob (Centex) home in Rowlett, TX.

Available with no-down-payment, no principal payment, adjustable, Wall Street "guaranteed" mortgage

The crosses indicate a family moved by the Holy Spirit lives in this home

North Dallas Special
A type of house laden with the architectural symbology of upper class inhabitation, displayed in grossly exaggerated form for the purposes of marketing. The term refers to the particular concentration of this mutation in the suburbs north of Dallas, although the phenomenon is by no means confined to this region. The manifestation consists of a very complex roof form, a great deal of articulation in the plan ("breaking the box"), the use of a great variety of window shapes with arches in abundance; a double height portico ("entry feature"), a more expensive material on the front facade (brick, stone) with cheaper cladding (vinyl) to the sides and rear, and a thin veil of classicism (coins, entablatures, pediments, columns) following no known canon. Certain compositional flaws are the consequence of the attempt to incorporate the variety of a large mansion into a house of middling size. The marketing is referenced as "Curb Appeal" which thrives on first impressions projected onto the approach of the customer. The negative consequences of curb appeal are first, that the spatial enclosure is dissolved by the excessive articulation of the facade, and second, that the construction budget is exhausted by the semantics with scarce resources remaining for articulation at the rear yard where it might create some privacy by deploying a back building.

http://parole.aporee.org/work/print.php?words_id=515
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=North+Dallas+special

The North Dallas Special: a single home attempts to create the skyline of an entire village. It is meant to stand alone.

Homebuilders at the upper end of the market appear to be equally misguided in their approach to building design. Pictured here is what has come to be known as the “North Dallas Special,” or, less affectionately, as a “house on steroids.” Despite all its cartoonish qualities—its variety of window types, it overwrought trim—this house represents the industry standard for luxury. The design technique is straightforward: concentrate the budget on extra corners and exaggerated historical references, all in the name of “curb appeal.” Never mind that one practically needs a Ph.D. in physics to assemble this roof; this technique is what developers learn at homebuilding conventions, and what realtors have come to call the “twenty-minute house,” . . . refers to the fact that a house has only twenty minutes to win the affection of a potential buyer, since that is the average length of a realtor visit. The building industry is at its best for the first twenty minutes that one is in it. Specifically, the house is usually organized around a tall “great room” from which, immediately upon entering, the potential buyer is astounded by partial views of almost every room in the house. The disadvantage of this organization is that there is no acoustical privacy for the individual rooms, something that is not discovered until after moving day. Similarly, because so much of the budget is spent on the front of the house (much to the detriment of the street space), the back of the house ends up being a few sliding glass doors in a dead-flat wall, such that the backyard offers no privacy either. You exit the rear door to find yourself completely exposed in a windswept lot, directly visible to the occupants of the five other houses identical to your own.
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck

Through the fifties and sixties, white flight to the suburbs laid waste to our inner urban centers, creating a "white noose." Dallas has fared better than many due to Texas laws allowing municipalities to aggressively annex outlying suburbs.

Anybody who travels back and forth across the Atlantic has to be impressed with the differences between European cities and ours, which make it appear as if World War Two actually took place in Detroit and Washington rather than Berlin and Rotterdam
James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere (1996)

Why I Am a Drug Addict

I need relief from headache, tension. depression, irratibility, neuralgia and/or neuritis, without stomach distress, like I get from taking peyote.

Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency claims credit for this series,

which increased sales from $18 million to $54 million in just 18 weeks, so he bragged to The New Yorker that just the spot with the skull bangers "made more money for the producers of Anacin in seven years than Gone with the Wind did for David O. Selznick and MGM in a quarter of a century." Twenty Ads That Shook the World, James B. Twitchell

Maybe I should just take a Bufferin and go to Starbucks.

I’m Trying To Decide What Parts To Botox

Wow, some of these are issues that Botox won’t fix. I might have to go directly to a surgical face lift for those dropped jowls and neck bands. I’ve lost so much fatty tissue under my cheeks that they might have to insert or inject something big to push them back out.

But I don’t have enough money for all of that so I think I will just work on some of the wrinkle areas.

I really hate those horizontal forehead wrinkles--worry lines. They're there all the time and make me look like I'm anxious, interrogative or frightened.



Dang, the wrinkles in my forehead are also going up and down. That frown furrow makes me look mean, but I want to look nice.

Those eyes look narrow and suspicious. The crow's feet are looking more like ostrich feet. Those cholesterol deposits on my eye bags look like zits.

Man, that nose looks like it's been used as a punching bag. That will be an operation in itself.

Those nasolabial folds really make me look old and gaunt. I don't think I'm a particularly bitter person but looking at my mouth would make one think so.

Sucking on those cigarettes also is hurting my facial appearance. If I don't stop soon, my lips may look like this, with vertical smokers lines around the mouth:


Here's my shopping choices. I think I will sleep on it.

Frown Line Fader – The area at the top of the nose and between the eyes is known as the glabellar area. Vertical lines here make one appear angry or worried. Frown Line Fader gives one a more peaceful and pleasant appearance. $280 & up.

Crows Feet Clean Up – Lines at the outer edges of the eye caused by squinting can make one appear mean, exhausted or skeptical. Crows Feet Clean Up restores a young, rested and kind persona. $336 & up.

Forehead Finisher – Horizontal creases on the forehead may cause an aged, questioning or scared expression. Forehead Finisher relaxes these lines, resulting in a serene, youthful and smooth finish. $224 & up.

Lip Line Eliminator – Vertical lines around the lip make one appear harsh and bitter. Lip Line Eliminator eases these lines and makes the person look as though they have a sweet, gentle demeanor. $112 & up

Choice Chin – Uneven muscle tone in the chin area may cause asymmetry and unwanted dimpling. Choice Chin will relax the muscles, resulting in a smoother and better-proportioned chin. $56 & up.

Botox Brow Lift-A small amount of Botox can block the depressor muscles of the eye and give a slight lift to the eye. $168 & up.

http://www.bodyperfectusa.com/menuofservices.html