Writer Kathy Metcalf remembers the Oak Lawn of her childhood
Trolley tracks used to run down Cedar Springs Road (Photo courtesy of Kathy Metcalf)
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
Not only was Kathy Metcalf raised in Oak Lawn, her parents were raised in the neighborhood, too. And her grandparents lived in the area as well.
Metcalf's mom graduated from North Dallas High School and her father from Jesuit, which, at the time, stood across the street from Holy Trinity Church on Oak Lawn Avenue -- where Turtle Creek Village now stands.
Her parents were 17 and 18 when they married. They rented an apartment on Rawlins Street, and that's where Kathy lived until she was six years old. Oak Lawn in the 1950s, she recalled, was already somewhat rundown, but was one of the more affordable neighborhoods to live in at the time.
Metcalf said her grandparents weren't really happy about her parents marrying so young, but her dad got a job in the mailroom of Republic National Bank -- a bank that eventually grew to be one of the 25 largest banks in the country before becoming part of Bank of America. Its 36-story, aluminum-clad tower was recently renovated into a mixed-use building, and it remains a downtown Dallas landmark.
"My dad worked nights," Metcalf said. "He did check processing." Occasionally, she added, she got to go to work with him, and that's where she learned to use a comptometer, the first mechanical calculator.
She also got to go into the vault one time, and she saw a $10,000 bill there.
"We didn't have a car, so everywhere we went we walked or rode a bus or a trolley," Metcalf said. At the time, trolleys crisscrossed Oak Lawn and looped their way into downtown.
"We'd walk to Cedar Springs," she said, but that was long before Cedar Springs had become the center of the gayborhood. Back then, the Black-Eye Pea (now Streets' Chicken) was a pharmacy, and where TMC now stands was a corner filling station. TMC's current patio was a diagonal drive-through for the filling station.
Metcalf said her father had a friend named Hubert who lived in an apartment complex that was torn down to build the North Dallas Tollway that split Oak Lawn in half. Hubert, she recalled, had a TV.
"On Saturday nights we watched the Saturday Night Fights at Hubert's," she said.
Metcalf also remembered her aunt, who lived at the end of the same block on Rawlins where Metcalf lived with her parents. "I think she was gay," she said. "She never married, had short hair and was masculine."
Metcalf recalled a restaurant called Chantles, a seafood place with a wonderful remoulade where her family would go when her father had a little bit of extra money. "I would stuff my face with crackers," she said. "And then we'd walk around the corner to the Esquire Theater."
The Esquire stood on Oak Lawn Avenue where Eatzi's is now and was the same vintage as the Lakewood Theater. Metcalf said it was a special treat to go to a movie at the Esquire, especially if they had a little extra money for popcorn.
Before the theater was torn down in 1981, it was converted from film to live theater. As its last production, it hosted the Dallas premiere of Hair, which, until that time, had been banned in Dallas. The show ran for about two months.
The Gayborhood beginnings
Turtle Creek Park, then known as Lee Park, became a place where the hippies gathered in 1968 and 1969. Easter in the Park became the city's largest hippy gathering during those years, and then the gay community began moving to Oak Lawn in larger numbers. Many of the private homes on the side streets off Cedar Springs Road were run down, and the gays and lesbians snapped the properties up and renovated them.
Not until 1975 did Cedar Springs Road start to become the center of the neighborhood. Adairs bar sat smack in the middle of what's now S4, and the owners and patrons of Adairs didn't like the queers that were moving into the area.
But then a restaurant called The Bronx opened that same year, owned by a new Dallas resident who had been at the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City. Then Union Jack moved from its original location on Hillcrest Avenue across from SMU into a space directly across the street from Adairs. The new shop featured racy store windows that often included male models in bathing suits and tight jeans.
Within a year, Adairs was gone from The Strip.
Over the next few years, Throckmorton Mining Company opened on Throckmorton, just off Cedar Springs (where Sue Ellen's is now), and Magnolia's Thunderpussy became The Strip's first country-western gay bar. It's now known as The Round-Up Saloon.
But, Metcalf said, she remembers the gay bars being downtown and around the area that's now The Crescent. She said she used to go to The Old Plantation, which was on Flora Street where the Dallas Museum of Art now stands, and to the Bayou Landing, which was in an old warehouse on Pearl Street at Cedar Springs Road.
Metcalf said that starting about the age of 16, she went to a bar called Aquarius that she remembers being on Maple Avenue and a deli in Oak Lawn called Trios.
Metcalf came out in 1969 when she was 21. But she was out to herself before that.
"Everybody tried to feminize me," she said. "My mom was always trying to put me in frilly skirts and dresses. Give me a t-shirt and sneakers any day."
When she was 16, her parents sent her to a psychiatrist, a woman named Gladys Guy Brown, whose office was on Oak Lawn Avenue near Preston Road.
"I had no idea why I was going," she said. "No one told me."
There Metcalf was given a series of tests that showed she was smart and artistic -- but she likely wasn't going to do dress design.
"If you read between the lines: She's gay. Deal with it," she said.
Her therapist tried to convert her, she said, but Metcalf was in full teenage rebellion. She ended up in group therapy.
"Us girls did everything we could to piss her off," she said. "One time we came dressed exactly alike, and she hated that."
Metcalf lived at home until she was 21. She was going to school at North Texas State University (now UNT) and got an apartment for $98 a month close to her work at Sears. The store stood alone on a stretch of land that would become Valley View Mall.
In 1975, she bought a house in the M Streets. The owner's father had died in the house, and the sons were giving it away for what he paid for it -- $9,000. She got the contents of the house for another $600.
Metcalf stayed in her M Streets house for 31 years, but she still continued to call the Oak Lawn gayborhood home.
"The Cedar Springs neighborhood felt safe," she said. "You could express yourself however you wanted."
And she loved the stores that popped up along The Strip: "The first Half Price Books was on the street. Remember An Occasional Piece?" she recalled. "You didn't have to look over your shoulder" when you were in The Gayborhood.
BOOK SIGNING
"All my life I've been creative," Metcalf said. "Poetry, arts and crafts -- I always had my hand in something."
In November, Metcalf published her first novel, Forbes Road, which took her 25 years to complete. The story revolves around a Polish immigrant family that has just arrived in a Pennsylvania coal mining town in the 1870s.
"Everybody in the story is someone I knew or a compilation of people I've known," she said.