Little School - We were poor, obviously neglected and deprived, and it was absolutely glorious.

 Little School Life
(aka Tater Hill)

Little School, now a modern facility known as JB Little in Arlington, is an old country school.  It was built probably not long after the turn of the last century.

When I attended it was a single story white frame building containing 6 classrooms, grades 1 thru 6, and a principal's office.  The bathrooms had been added and were outside in their own building a few steps away. As I recall the lunchroom was also a separate building, as was a small auditorium.

The school served a very large area of rural Tarrrant County.  Some kids probably lived 12 or 15 miles from others. All kids were bussed, on several different routes, to school. Few or none walked and no mothers drove their kids to school.  For this reason there was nothing much in the way of before or after school activities.  The classes were small, probably 15 or 20 kids per grade.  Because of this small class size there were no real "cliques", just a mild gradation from more popular to less popular.   We were all generally even lower on the economic scale than the Handley kids.  Most of us lived on acreages or at least large lots.  Many families did some small scale farming and several still kept livestock.

Our school experience was almost 19th century.  Not very different  from that of our fathers or even grandfathers.  When school started the boys went barefoot until the weather changed.  Besides maybe a swing set and merry-go-round, our recess activities were ad hoc, unsupervised and generally very rough. We had no gym, we wrestled constantly and freestyle, played Red Rover, Crack the Whip and a vicious form of Dodge Ball.  A favorite contest of the boys was to climb to the top of the 30 foot flagpole. Minor injuries were common.  Everyone in charge of the school today would be arrested for what they permitted us to do daily.

Many of the families had lived in the area for generations and were inter-connected by blood and marriage.  There were often several sets of related kids at the school forming "clans" across class levels, for mutual support and even protection.  I had several uncles that attended before me, and had my younger sister and three cousins there at the same time.  A most important social grouping was formed by which school bus route you rode. The wait at the bus stop,  the long rides to and from school were  an important social time, and if you were lucky a few of those kids of your age would live within a mile or two and you could socialize after school and on weekends. 

There were essentially no organized activities for us either during the year or in the summer, unless a parent was willing to go to heroic efforts. The exception was a small  Boy Scout Troop. We were, I'm sure almost exclusively one car families, so no soccer moms were available.  No little league baseball, no peewee football, no shooting hoops after school, no available swimming pools.  We learned to swim sneaking away to a muddy pond in the woods, and oh, watch out for water moccasins.

Two events of the year were of supreme importance to us.  A school sponsored trip to the Fat Stock Show, and just before summer, a trip to Forest Park.  That trip to Forest Park was like a trip to Disneyland is now.  Then we were turned loose on the world for summer.  I was lucky in that there were a half dozen or so boys of close enough age,  that lived close enough to get together by bicycle.  We left home in the morning an returned just before dark.  We formed a small semi-feral pack that roamed the abundant woods for miles around, fishing the ponds, hunting with our (gasp!) BB guns and exploring the banks of Village Creek, this was before Lake Arlington. We were  searching for Indian artifacts that were found there. There were no parks with baseball diamonds or jungle gyms.  We did however have an area where wild grapevines had covered several acres of the tops of tall oak trees.  We would climb to the top of the trees 30 or 40 feet up and spend hours chasing each other through the dense canopy of vines from tree to tree.  We were poor, obviously neglected and deprived, and it was absolutely glorious.

What we were, was not very well socialized by the norms of the times.  When we were thrown into Handley and then Eastern Hills, it was almost like going to school in a foreign country, and we lived so far out we couldn't even try to participate in that social whirl until we got cars of our own.  By then it was just too late. We were more or less permanently marginalized.  We stuck together, hunkered down and survived. Very few of us actually thrived.  I was actually advantaged that I had moved around so often and attended all kinds of schools and was better prepared to cope.  I think many of my old Little, or as we called it Little's, schoolmates were just bewildered by it all. It was not a particularly positive or enjoyable experience. Maybe for that reason I was the only member of my "pack" to go on  to college as far as I know.  Most joined the military or went to work right out of EH.  Going to Little's School in the early 1950's was in itself a wonderful experience, and I sometimes pity my own boys who enjoyed a more "Meadowbrook" existence.  But the cost of that "idyllic" boyhood proved to be socially prohibitive at EHHS. 

 
Adios

Handley & The Interurban

In 1900 the Ft. Worth population was 27,000, Dallas – 43,000.
In 1930 the Ft. Worth population was 164,000, Dallas – 260,000 (+500%)

I’m not sure I knew in ’63 there had been an Interurban rail line that ran through Handley, but until doing a little study for this piece I really never knew what an Interurban was. The Ft. Worth – Dallas line started in 1902 and shut down in 1934—well before our time. If any of our parents recalled it, it would have been from their childhood.

It was a 29-mile electric line that whisked passengers along at 5-mph during its early days, but had upped the speed to about 65-mph by the 1920’s. The Handley power station out by Lake Arlington was initially built to feed the power needs of the rail line, not in its present configuration of large generating units, of course, but the 2 older, small units at the north end of the power block might have been used for the rail line. They’re no longer running.

Highway 80, or East Lancaster as we knew it in our neighborhood, started out as a portion of the Dixie Highway that ran from Los Angeles to Savannah. The Dixie Highway was constructed over a period of years from 1915 – 1927. The Interurban predated the highway by a couple of decades and no doubt was the principal means of transportation between Dallas and Ft. Worth.

The picture collage above shows some net grabs of the Handley-Ft. Worth area involving the Interurban. The park was built by the traction company as a tourist attraction at its Lake Erie which was later made a part of Lake Arlington at the northern end. Lake Erie was initially built to provide cooling water for the power station condensers.

For some interesting reading about the ultimate demise of passenger rail transportation, Google Great American Streetcar Conspiracy for a number of discussions about something I first heard in Los Angeles in the 1960s when the last of their Interurban cars were still running.
The picture below shows a restored Handley business district as it likely looked before automobiles whizzed by. A map of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Interurban line can be found HERE.



All Aboard

1950-60s Eastern Hills Christmas Lights

The Eastern Hills subdivision that occupies the hill just north of EHHS was built out from about 1953 to 1963. This is the area bound by Weiler Blvd. on the west starting at Weiler’s intersection with Danciger; by Brentwood Stair (I-30) on the north: Oak Hill on the east; and Monterrey on the south.

Homes in that area were generally built by custom builders and had about 2500 sq.ft. of living space. From our youthful perspective, it was the local neighborhood of the well-off. Landscaping was lush, grass grew in luxuriant carpets of St. Augustine, even without sprinkler systems, gracefully curved streets, plentiful trees (a Texas rarity), and more than a few of the homes there had pools in the back yard—a real luxury in those days.

Original heads of household were nominally in their forties, most were WWII veterans, and were doing well in their careers. Houses cost about $35,000 - $50,000 when they were new—an average professional’s salary was $12-15,000 per year. About 15-years earlier, in the early 1950s, they had bought their starter homes elsewhere and discovered that when they bought their second car, they needed a second garage to house it; Eastern Hills homes were generally their first “move-up” houses. This demographic group of energetic WWII generation people gave rise to the old term, “keeping up with the Joneses” as they added second cars, parked boats in the driveways (RVs came later), and finally sought to make personal statements with the decoration of their homes.

Decorating for Christmas was one of the more socially acceptable excuses for not only celebrating the season, but also for showing off and competing with one another. What started innocently enough as a simple outlining of the house with Christmas lights quickly became a full-blown light show extravaganza to include lighting bushes, trees, and erecting mechanized outdoor figures—think, Griswald Christmas and virtually every house in that neighborhood decorated. By the late 1950s the Eastern Hills neighborhood had become a popular destination for light peepers at Christmas time; the streets were jammed for hours each night of the Christmas season.

Of course, once the kids left home, the impetus for extravagant decorating lessened until the fun of it went away altogether when younger crops of kids started stealing the bulbs. I think all the new crop wanted to do was hear the bulbs go “pop” on the pavement. Now that I think of it, the little bastards stealing those bulbs and making things miserable for our aging parents to do any further decorating were those same FBG's before they started scamming in the local fast food joints.

Anyway, for a few glorious years, that Eastern Hills neighborhood really sparkled for a few weeks each Christmas.

Ho-Ho-Ho

Lake Eastern Hills

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Here is a little lake I’ll bet most of you never knew of, it was a pond actually.  It is still there and located just a few doors north of the EHHS campus.  As the pictures show, only about 10-12 homes back up to it and you would have had to know someone in those homes to have gotten a look at it.  Pretty little scene just off the school campus most of us never knew of.

A year or so before we entered EHHS, a few of us decided to build a raft and sail the pond.  That effort lasted only a couple of days before we lost interest in the enterprise and I think one or two of the property owners came out to object to our vessel possibly setting sail on their pond.  Ran across the photo recently and was reminded of our failed enterprise.

Adios

Eastern Hills Christmas Lights

The Eastern Hills subdivision that occupies the hill just north of EHHS was built out from about 1953 to 1963. This is the area bound by Weiler Blvd. on the west starting at Weiler’s intersection with Danciger; by Brentwood Stair (I-30) on the north: Oak Hill on the east; and Monterrey on the south.

Homes in that area were generally built by custom builders and had about 2500 sq.ft. of living space. From our youthful perspective, it was the local neighborhood of the well-off. Landscaping was lush, grass grew in luxuriant carpets of St. Augustine, even without sprinkler systems, gracefully curved streets, plentiful trees (a Texas rarity), and more than a few of the homes there had pools in the back yard—a real luxury in those days.

Original heads of household were nominally in their forties, most were WWII veterans, and were doing well in their careers. Houses cost about $35,000 - $50,000 when they were new—an average professional’s salary was $12-15,000 per year. About 15-years earlier, in the early 1950s, they had bought their starter homes elsewhere and discovered that when they bought their second car, they needed a second garage to house it; Eastern Hills homes were generally their first “move-up” houses. This demographic group of energetic WWII generation people gave rise to the old term, “keeping up with the Joneses” as they added second cars, parked boats in the driveways (RVs came later), and finally sought to make personal statements with the decoration of their homes.

Decorating for Christmas was one of the more socially acceptable excuses for not only celebrating the season, but also for showing off and competing with one another. What started innocently enough as a simple outlining of the house with Christmas lights quickly became a full-blown light show extravaganza to include lighting bushes, trees, and erecting mechanized outdoor figures—think, Griswald Christmas and virtually every house in that neighborhood decorated. By the late 1950s the Eastern Hills neighborhood had become a popular destination for light peepers at Christmas time; the streets were jammed for hours each night of the Christmas season.

Of course, once the kids left home, the impetus for extravagant decorating lessened until the fun of it went away altogether when younger crops of kids started stealing the bulbs. I think all the new crop wanted to do was hear the bulbs go “pop” on the pavement. Now that I think of it, the little bastards stealing those bulbs and making things miserable for our aging parents to do any further decorating were those same FBG's before they started scamming in the local fast food joints.

Anyway, for a few glorious years, that Eastern Hills neighborhood really sparkled for a few weeks each Christmas.

Ho-Ho-Ho

Meadowbrook - Eastern Hills Neighborhoods

The accompanying picture came from a 1962 Clan yearbook and provides a good aerial view of not only the school grounds but also of some of the surrounding neighborhood. My family was not one of the earliest to settle in the area so I always wondered how old, some of the “older” houses were as I drove around the neighborhoods.

Note the YELLOW direction indicator in the lower play field. Meadowbrook Drive is behind us just beyond the lower left corner; the toll road is a mile or two north; Ft. Worth is to the left; and Handley is behind us off the right lower corner.

Generally, the entire housing stock north of EHHS (the Eastern Hills section) was constructed from 1954 to 1962. Along Weiler Blvd. on the left or West side as you go North out of the picture were some nice older homes with some acreage that were generally built during or just after WWII in the 1940s. A good looking little sophomore named Angie Meer and her brother, Kurt lived in one of the fancier homes there, and Steve Helmricks’ family settled in one of those older houses when they moved to the area about 1961.

Jesse E. Roach, founder of the Cattlemen's Steak House (c.1947), lived in the house adjoining the north boundary of the school grounds at the intersection of Weiler and Danciger. He was about 62 at the time and owned 4 restaurants, 2 of them in Dallas. Sometimes you could see over the fence and catch him out sunning by his pool. To my knowledge, he never socialized with any of us or walked over to see what was going on.

A number of the houses west along Meadowbrook Drive toward the Meadowbrook Jr. High School, including those surrounding the golf club, and those South of Meadowbrook Drive were built during the 1920s. One on Queen St. is for sale now and it was built in 1891.

Subdivisions behind Meadowbrook Drive (N & S) date to the 1940s and early 1950s. I think Gay Burton’s family lived in one of the large older homes that may have dated to pre-WWII. If I recall correctly, her home was located across from the Meadowbrook Golf Course club house. Others in those neighborhoods were Phil Nixon, Susan Begley, Mike Grizzard, and maybe Larry Guthrie.

By the way, the golf course was originally a private club opened in 1922 and was known as the Meadowbrook Country Club—it was about 40-years old when we graduated. The club apparently failed during the Depression and was then given to the city. I played it a few times and ran a sled down the “3-humps” as often as enough snow fell to permit. Some of us worked on the construction crews when it was rehabilitated in 1962.

For those from Handley or others who might not have known about the pleasures of sledding down the 3-humps hill on the Meadowbrook Golf Course, it was a fairway near the club house on Jenson Rd. The drop was fairly high and from the top, if the snow conditions were right, you could get a pretty long ride, descending over 3 distinct small hills. At the bottom, the run opened into an expansive plain giving plenty of room for the run out. A lot of kids came from all directions when the snow fell, so it was also a good social event and a terrific memory.

Adios.