LETTERS

Urban Pioneers Meet the Loan Arranger

Ashley Cheshire’s article in November’s issue, concerning the Old East Dallas urban pioneers, was an entertaining piece of fiction. The lovely and simplistic fairy tale of the house of one’s dreams, which ends dramatically in the $20,000 flurry of hammering and painting that restores the ancestral home to its former glory, is incomplete.

It’s far easier to obtain financing for an $8,000 American car that might, with velvet handling, survive a decade, than to obtain even half-decent financing for a Greek Revival prairie farmhouse that has already survived 75 years and gives every indication of celebrating the turn of the century.

In our experience, the Lakewood Bank’s policies seem to amount to nothing more than a last ditch attempt to manipulate zoning laws that, as they stand, will ultimately permit the leveling of this historic and irreplaceable area for the construction of “high density” housing.

Jill D. Parr



Another Saintly Julien Legend

Kudos to Blackie Sherrod for his fun-filled romp with memories of Jack Proctor in the October issue. Boy and man I’ve been reading the good ones for many decades and no one can touch Sherrod on a subject that amuses him, and fortunately this rubs off on the reader. Proctor was something special to us who remember him, beginning in those years at Oak Cliff High School (now Adamson) when he led a noisy group of rowdies from the upper reaches of the auditorium balcony, causing Principal Red Adamson’s hair to turn white a little earlier than expected. Sherrod mentions “The Front Page” in his word portrait, and this fits because Proctor and his peers actually put on the play in the earlier 1930s, appropriately taking over the City Hall auditorium one week when Bert Willoughby’s wrestlers decided to sit out a week. Ken Hand, mentioned in the article, played the lead, Hildy Johnson. Acting was never the same in Dallas, in spite of what Jane Sumner says of Margo Jones in the same issue. It’s too bad the likes of Jack Proctor don’t come along often. Perhaps in another 50 years.

Flint DuPre



Margo Jones

The article on Margo Jones by Jane Sumner brought back many happy childhood memories. Margo was dynamic and made theater in Dallas both exciting and innovative.

There is one slight correction: it was Peggy McCay (not McCoy as spelled in the magazine) who played the beautiful Juliet to Charles Proctor’s Romeo.

Joan C. Mulcahy