DICK HITT City Lights

Dary 26 when the Stoneleigh P burned, along with Poor William the Cabinetmaker’s cabinets and pet squirrel, an antique shop, and my favorite bush shirt and dress corduroys, which had been rushed to the likewise incinerated Valet Cleaners just before closing time the night before.

The Stoneleigh P was the noted hangout, restaurant, bar and free magazine stand that had become one of the last bastions of a sense of Dallas as it was not very long ago. You don’t have to be old to inspire nostalgia in Dallas; the Stoneleigh P was established in 1974. It occupied the barely disturbed quarters of what had been the Stoneleigh Pharmacy for more than 40 years, so named because it was across the street from the Stoneleigh Terrace Hotel.

When owner Tom Garrison got the news on the phone that his place was on fire he was groggy with sleep. But he said the first thought in his mind was “My God, why can’t 1 remember if I turned off the grill last night?” This is standard terror for a restaurateur who gets a fire call before dawn.

In fact, arson was suspected almost from the first moment, which the fire department sets at 3:39 a.m. The morning broadcasts and the next day’s papers quoted reports of “four youths seen running away from the small outbuilding” behind the burned complex of blackish red brick that had been antiquing on the job since 1929.

The fire and the events that followed had a certain showmanship to them. The first fire truck, a pumper unit holding its own water supply, broke down soon after arriving. Firemen said they encountered low water pressure in the hydrants; that is, there were hydrant pressures insufficient to fight a one-story-and-loft fire, across the street from an eleven-story hotel. Somebody should make a note.

The replacement pumper unit was maneuvering into position when it rammed a battalion chief, breaking his leg. From the penthouse across the street, Richard and Stephanie Potter said, the scene took on a Smoky Stover quality.

They said the firemen all seemed to be swarming around the fallen commander for at least 20 minutes. The Potters told the TV news on Saturday and the Dallas News on Sunday that the fire went unfought during those minutes of snake-dancing ministration to the injured chief. An attorney, who had been driving past and stopped to berate the firemen for not attending to the fire, was arrested and jailed.

The cold dawn of January 26 had the color and chill humidity of herring. Dozens of fire-watchers filled the lobby of the Stone-leigh Hotel by 6 a.m., watching the strobe flashes of the flames across the street, commiserating with Garrison and his staff that dribbled in through the morning, along with many of the Stoneleigh P’s stricken clientele. Garrison, his eyes stolid under the brim of his customary and crumpled Walter Brennan hat, shrugged toward the vaporizing restaurant and said, “There goes my wife.”

The lobby took on the spirit of a disaster canteen done in marble and parquet. “We’re so sorry,” many people told Tom Garrison. A hotel resident set up a shuttle of steaming teapots and cups. An irregular customer of the P, who had grouched to Garrison for a year about the difficulty of getting a hamburger cooked past rare, told him, “Finally. Well-done hamburgers at the Stoneleigh P!”

The Dallas Fire Dept. roped off the site and posted one of its new red-and-white “Arson

Suspected” signs, giving the phone number to call for the Burn-an-Arsonist Hot Line service funded (“Up to $5,000 . . .”) by the Dallas Association of Insurance Agents.

Kids clambered for the next several days atop the charred heap. On a morning eight days after the fire a cop stopped and . shooed away two boys, 8 and 11. The cop explained how “insurance regulations and investi-gation requirements prohibit anybody playing here, so get your butts home.” The 8-yearold still managed to scavenge a mint-condition Sal Maglie baseball card and a miraculously unscathed 45 rpm record from the rubble.

Assistant Fire Chief Barry Gardner explains the department’s conclusions after five weeks of examining its performance in the fire: “There is absolutely no question that the response to the first alarm of the fire was swift and efficient.” He says that it has been determined that “neither the breakdown of the first unit nor the accident to the battalion chief had any substantial effect on our ability to control the fire at all.” He says that the common attic shared by the tenants in the block, which greatly spurs the spread of a fire, and the subsequently discovered hole in the rear wall of the cabinetmaker’s shop, which helped the fire infiltrate from the outbuilding, had the blaze at an uncontrollable point by the time the first unit arrived.

Assistant Fire Chief and Fire Marshal Jerry Lambert says that the first report of “four youths seen running” down the alley has been superceded by information collected from more than one eyewitness.

Lambert shows some meticulous care for his work. “Please,” he said, “spell marshal with just one ’1’?”

He and his co-investigators have put together a sort of oral Identi-Kit description of the individuals they’re looking for. It may be fewer than four. “What we know now is that they were figures in the dark of unknown age. Their pace of movement suggested younger persons rather than older persons. They were tall enough to be mature, and quick enough to be young. We know that the fire was started by a flammable liquid.”

Valet Cleaners leased a defunct beauty college several miles away in East Dallas and converted it into a dry-cleaning plant within a week of the fire. They’ve been told that the burned complex will have been razed and rebuilt by mid-June.

Since the morning of January 26 Tom Garrison has been chafing to rebuild and reopen. He knows it won’t be the same but it’ll be there again.

“We’ll be back,” he said on the morning of the fire, as coils of smoke still rose.

“You can be like Neiman’s was after their fire, when Stanley Marcus said, ’Like the phoenix, we’ll rise majestically from the ashes,’” a sympathizer told him in the lobby.

“Well, why couldn’t 1 have said some-thing memorable like that,” Garrison said, “instead of “We’ll be back’?”



The Me Millennium

These bleeding-heart anthropologists burn me up every time they go onto the talk shows and prattle about how the cave man was so much tougher than us 1980 models. These talk-show theoreticians, these nattering nabobs of negativism (in the words of another great cave man, William Safire, who wrote it for Spiro Agnew) claim that when it comes to sheer hard-nose physical toughness, we are not in the same league as the Caveys.

The scientific historian handicappers say that we have softened and atrophied as we have been required to do fewer physical chores. Compared to our Piltdown ancestors, they say, we are quite effete. Even Terry Bradshaw. If a modern man and a cave man were thrust into an arena, unarmed, the cave man would unquestionably prevail. The odds against a modern man victory would be astronomical, greater even than USA over USSR in Olympic hockey.

In my opinion, their opinion reflects specious handicapping and is probably inaccurate to boot. I’m tired of being made to feel guilty about my eon. I’m not about to have this physiological-inferiority-of-the-species stuff thrown up at me. I think their defeatist theory is, in the phrase of the Cro-Magnon proverb, a load of brontosaurus glurk.

So the cave man faced harm from predators around every watering hole or from behind every clump of ferns, eh? Ha. How long would he last doing things we modern copers have to do? I’d like to see him loping his savage strides through the hedgerow on Waneta into the 5 o’clock In-wood traffic. I’d like to see his feral eyes pick out the LBJ entrance just west of Preston in the dark. Let’s see who wins when Ongga and his bone war club tangle at ramming speed with Harlan’s Seville in a territorial struggle for the same parking space at NorthPark.

They say the cave man was tougher and hardier than I because he could go out and club his dinner hyena to death and eat it raw, pebbles, leaves and all. Hyena tartare will never be one of my favorites, but my diet doesn’t exactly show any cowardice. Today for breakfast I had sodium silico-aluminate, potassium phosphate, palm kernel, dipotassium phosphate, monoglycer-ides, sodium caseinate, artifical flavoring, diglycerides, and partially hydrogenated coconut oil. And that was just the powdered cream in my coffee.

Tough? Who’s put in a tougher day, some cave man jogging from boulder to boulder, keeping an eye peeled for pterodactyls, or a congressman thinking up a story to explain why the Abscam tapes show him actually stuffing the money into his pockets?

Defensive and arrogant as it may sound, Ifeel that modern man’s peculiar prowessunder extraordinary tensions would makethe hypothetical physical match a close one.We’re about even with them mentally, too.The cave man bayed at the moon andmodern man invented the North Mesquitehair code.