Gone But Not Forgotten in San Antonio! - Part I (Del Rio: incorporated, artists)

[GWhopper]

You all may want to check out some of the photos if found on the post on flickr. Its from a scrap book of 1920's photos. There are about six or seven of them featuring a VERY different looking San Antonio in about the middle of the photo set.

(088) Alamo Garden on Flickr - Photo Sharing! (http://www.flickr.com/photos/blazerman/2432262163/in/set-72157604658074279/ - broken link)

[longgoneSAnative]

I just stumbled across this forum while looking for information about my former ag teacher at John Marshall HS, so if I mention things that have already been dealt with, forgive me for not having read the previous 496 pages in this topic.

The reference to Dr. Urritia is what grabbed me, along with a photo of Strange's Party House in another string. In the mid-sixties I had an after-school job at Booth's Enco station on the Austin Hwy, near Broadway, next door to the Bean Burger. Mrs. Urritia was one of my regular customers. She was quite elderly then, obviously. She was a great tipper (this was a full-service station). She brought her car in once a week for a wash; I'd drive her home, bring the car back, and then go get her when I was done. I don't remember where she lived, but I remember her telling me many times about her daughter having been killed. Later on, the story circulated that she'd been beheaded in an accident, and the headless angel between USAA and the entrance to the zoo was supposed to be a monument to her. That always sounded fishy to me.

As for Strange's . . . I grew up in the fifties about 1/2 mile from the corner of W. Quill and Bandera, where their family had an ice house long before the catering and party house came into being. Strange's was just the neighborhood ice house run by Mr. and Mrs. Strange, a wonderful dark place where we'd ride our bikes to get candy and cokes.

Bowlerland was across Bandera. Some friends and I turned the lights off in the men's room once at Bowlerland and were chased out of the building by an angry man who was trying to pull his pants up. Youth. A wonderful time to be obnoxious.

Anway, across W. Quill from Strange's, on the other side of the Woodlawn Hills Elementary parking lot, was Gloria's, another, smaller, ice house. This is where, a few years later, we'd ride our bikes to buy cigarettes from Gloria and her husband, Frank. This was when cigarettes were good for you. They later moved the store out Bandera a little ways, close to the intersection with Broadview.

One final memory and then I'll leave this thread to the regulars: Once, in the late fifties, when I was maybe eight years old, my older cousin and I were messing around outside Strange's and came across a bucket of hot tar that some workers had been using, maybe to patch up some cracks in the parking lot. We started poking in it with sticks, goofing around, and one thing led to another, and we got into a tar fight there in the Strange's parking lot. Hot tar really goes a long way when you fling it at someone off the end of a two-foot-long stick. Our moms finished shopping and came out of the ice house to find us covered head-to-toe in tar, having a great time. After the requisite chewing out, they laid newspaper on the tailgate of our '57 Plymouth station wagon and drove home with us sitting on the tailgate, legs dangling, feet occasionally touching the pavement at 30 mph. You don't see that happening very often these days. I can testify today that gasoline will eventually remove tar from a kid's skin, but it takes some of the skin with it.

OK, really, this is it, the last thing: My first paying job, of sorts, was as a shoe-shine boy at Strange's Barber Shop, which was part of the same building as the ice house, right next to the beauty shop. I was, again, maybe eight years old, and they let me bring my brand-new shine kit into the shop on weekends and hit up the men getting haircuts to see if they needed a shine. I got to keep whatever I earned, which wasn't much.

I was born in San Antonio in 1950, by the way, and lived there till heading off to UT in 1969. Never lived there since, but I've still got family and friends there, so I get back occasionally. I don't recognize much. Fortunately, I've still got my memories pretty well intact.

[940]

Thanks for sharing your memories...wish you'd write down more if you ever get the chance as yours seem to go back a bit further about what was around the nw side of town.

[longgoneSAnative]

Originally Posted by 940

...wish you'd write down more if you ever get the chance as yours seem to go back a bit further about what was around the nw side of town.

Thanks for the thought, 940, I'll do that. Looking back, I realize what a blast I had growing up in San Antonio, even though most of my waking thoughts back then seem to have been "get me out of this town." Now that I've been away for four decades, the nostagia washes over me when I let it. Some places that were important to me as a kid that I'm sure are now gone but not forgotten, at least by me, include:

The Kit-Kat Club (A private swimming pool and restaurant on Fredericksburg Rd.)

Twin Kiss (Great drive-in burgers on Bandera, across from James Madison Elementary, if I recall correctly.)

Toonie's (Another drive-in on Bandera, close to University Village, frequented by hoods and hot-rodders where supposedly minors could buy beer, but I never succeeded. Not for lack of trying.)

Roller-Coaster Hills (Unless you lived within a mile of the corner of Broadview and Bandera at a certain time in the fifties, this is meaningless. It was essentially a good place for kids to injure themselves playing BMX on hundred-pound bicycles, long before BMX was invented.)

Teen Canteen (Teen dance place in the basement of Wonderland Mall, owned by someone named Sam Kinsey, who I recall fancied himself as a sort of San Antonio Dick Clark, but who most kids were sort of leery of because, hey, why would a grown man want to be around teenagers all the time? Best bands: The Pipelines, The Chayns.)

The Airport (When SA kids said "the airport" in the 1960s, they didn't mean the terminal. They meant the lovers' lane where you pulled off San Pedro (there was no 281 big-deal road back then; it was just a four-lane San Pedro) at the west end of the runway. It was dark, the planes would come in a few feet above your car, and it was where many of today's aging baby boomers got their earliest biology lessons.)

[georgepwebster]

Originally Posted by longgoneSAnative

Thanks for the thought, 940, I'll do that. Looking back, I realize what a blast I had growing up in San Antonio, even though most of my waking thoughts back then seem to have been "get me out of this town." Now that I've been away for four decades, the nostagia washes over me when I let it. Some places that were important to me as a kid that I'm sure are now gone but not forgotten, at least by me, include:

The Kit-Kat Club (A private swimming pool and restaurant on Fredericksburg Rd.)

Twin Kiss (Great drive-in burgers on Bandera, across from James Madison Elementary, if I recall correctly.)

Toonie's (Another drive-in on Bandera, close to University Village, frequented by hoods and hot-rodders where supposedly minors could buy beer, but I never succeeded. Not for lack of trying.)

Roller-Coaster Hills (Unless you lived within a mile of the corner of Broadview and Bandera at a certain time in the fifties, this is meaningless. It was essentially a good place for kids to injure themselves playing BMX on hundred-pound bicycles, long before BMX was invented.)

Teen Canteen (Teen dance place in the basement of Wonderland Mall, owned by someone named Sam Kinsey, who I recall fancied himself as a sort of San Antonio Dick Clark, but who most kids were sort of leery of because, hey, why would a grown man want to be around teenagers all the time? Best bands: The Pipelines, The Chayns.)

The Airport (When SA kids said "the airport" in the 1960s, they didn't mean the terminal. They meant the lovers' lane where you pulled off San Pedro (there was no 281 big-deal road back then; it was just a four-lane San Pedro) at the west end of the runway. It was dark, the planes would come in a few feet above your car, and it was where many of today's aging baby boomers got their earliest biology lessons.)

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The submarine races! Thanks for that reminder

[Cibolo Rider]

Does anyone remember:

An ice skating rink at San Pedro Park around 1955 or so.

The roller skating rink on St. Mary’s where the boys had to be wearing a coat and tie and the girls had to have nice dresses on before they would let you in.

The Red or Green light atop the Transit tower. If it was red, someone had been killed in a car accident. If green, no fatalities that day. I don’t know if this was true, but I do know it would be either Red or Green each night. More nights green than red. Does anyone know for sure the significance of the color of the light.

[SATX56]

Originally Posted by Cibolo Rider

Does anyone remember:

An ice skating rink at San Pedro Park around 1955 or so.

The roller skating rink on St. Mary’s where the boys had to be wearing a coat and tie and the girls had to have nice dresses on before they would let you in.

The Red or Green light atop the Transit tower. If it was red, someone had been killed in a car accident. If green, no fatalities that day. I don’t know if this was true, but I do know it would be either Red or Green each night. More nights green than red. Does anyone know for sure the significance of the color of the light.

Don't know of but have heard of the ice rink. The Roller skating Rink on
St. Mary's I recall fondly!! You must have attended on a special night ..there was no dress code the years that I went!!! The Transit Tower lights thing sounds like hokum ..

[Cibolo Rider]

satx56: Thanks for the reply. It was probably late 50's early 60's when I went to the St. Marys Roller Rink. I think I'm right about the dress code for that period, but who knows. I might have just conjured that up. lol. The light thing might have been hokum but I believed it then. Checked the light every night then reported the status back to my parents. They were probably laughing up their sleeve.

[Dwangle]

I alway's heard that the Transit Tower light was a weather forcast. I never seemed to get the same answer for the forecast. The most common answer was " It is saying that the weather is going to change". Safe bet in south texas!

[Dwangle]

This is kind of way out there but when I was young, in the fifties, I remember a small open cockpit prop plane-maybe a Biplane- flying around with a loud speaker saying things like "Oswald Rabbit". Everyone would look up and watch it fly by but nobody had a clue about what it was doing. Does anyone else remember this?