Hundred-year-old home on Lakewood Boulevard. Photo courtesy of Evelyn Wolff.
Our grandfather’s house turns 100 this year.
I pass by it on my way home from work each day from Live Oak to Skillman Street, over Belmont Avenue, across Abrams Road, down Lakewood Boulevard. I am happy to see that the lovely red brick Tudor still stands snugly in the first block. Five steps up the stoop, the sloping sidewalk leads to the shade of the covered porch. Cars and SUVs line the front drive with its familiar porte cochere, just wide enough for the popular vehicles a century ago (a Ford Model T or Chrysler Imperial) to navigate to the backyard garage.
Our grandfather may have taken the same route to and from work at the corner of Live Oak Street and Haskell Avenue, diagonally across from where I work today. The 1930 census for Dallas lists him as an accountant for a medical practice. He joined them prior to World War I and became the business manager for the small hospital they established, Dallas Medical and Surgical Clinic. He worked there until his retirement in 1969 and lived in the house on Lakewood until his death in 1975.
After a tour of duty as a medic in the trenches of France, the young immigrant returned to Dundee, Scotland, to marry his childhood sweetheart and bring her back to the U.S. on a troop ship. The newlyweds rented a frame house on Sinex Avenue, just a block north of Lakewood — what today we know as Lakeshore Drive. In 1920, he sponsored his widowed mother-in-law, her two other daughters and her son, helping them immigrate to Dallas as well.
In 1925, he purchased a lot on Lakewood Boulevard, and construction began on a new home in the second installment of Country Club Estates. The official City plat records that W.E. Pearson was the owner, Dallas Trust & Savings Bank was the agent, and Myres Noves were the engineers for the 100-plus lots.
Our grandmother was expecting their third child, David, when the family of four moved in on June 22, 1926. Muriel, the oldest, was 6 and would be a first grader at William Lipscomb Elementary School. Her brother Arnold, whom they called Buddy, had just turned 3.
The one-story, three-bedroom house featured a basement, an unusual characteristic for a home in Dallas, and a large attic accessible via a staircase in one of the bedroom closets. In my mind, I can still walk through each room of the house and recall the stories that my mother told of growing up there. When the front door opens, you are immediately in the living room — no grand entranceway or hallway. I imagine the weight of the heavy light switch in my hand, feel the thick plastered walls, and see the camel-back sofa and my grandfather’s wingback chair in front of the marble fireplace. The living room is filled with light from windows on three sides, and a large archway frames the view into the dining room.
As Dallas continued to expand in ever-increasing circles, the new neighborhood was known for its convenient location. At the corner of Lakewood and Abrams, our grandmother could catch the streetcar downtown to shop at A. Harris, Sanger Brothers or Titche Goettinger. Her shopping done, the groceries would be delivered through the mudroom and into the modern kitchen outfitted with white aluminum cabinets. The back door was never locked, so the “ice man” could enter, take a ticket and leave the block of ice in the icebox. Before bedtime, the family dogs Buck, JoJo or Barron would be banished there and tucked into a box or basket. No posh pups in this house!
Our grandmother utilized the secretarial skills she acquired at her father’s secretarial college in Dundee, serving as the PTA president at Lipscomb. Meanwhile, our grandfather immersed himself in the city’s civic activities, including the Rotary Club, the Masonic Lodge, the Scottish Rite and the Retail Merchants Association. Together, they attended the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, where he served as a deacon, and she was the treasurer of the women’s auxiliary. The four children were baptized and confirmed there.
My mother, Sheila, was brought home from Florence Nightingale Hospital to the house on Lakewood in May 1928, and the lives of the four siblings would unfold in the rooms and on the streets of pre-war Dallas.
At Christmas time, my grandmother, her mother and sisters would take over the kitchen to bake tin after tin of Scottish Shortbread and Dundee Cakes to give as gifts to friends, neighbors and business associates. The family would squeeze into the tiny breakfast nook with its built-in china cabinet to eat roast beef with chutney or a leg of lamb with mint sauce. On Sundays, the dining room table would be set with pale green porcelain teacups and silver serving dishes so that the extended Scottish clan could gather for high tea or the Daughters of Caledonia could meet.
During those years, the youngest children pulled wagons through the streets to meet up with their Lakewood friends or rode bikes to White Rock Lake to swim and picnic. As they moved into junior high at Long and high school at Woodrow Wilson, they traveled further from home to the Saturday matinees at the Lakewood Theater and to Harrell’s Drug Store for malts and sodas.
Evelyn Wolff is a guest writer. This is part 1 of a multi-part series.
