RETROSPECTIVE RIP, 3419 HALL

OBOES AND CELLOS, deep and tremulous. Something dire’s about to happen. Cut to close-up of heavy teeth bolted to the front loader rigged on a D-7 Cat. Zoom out and dolly left as the teeth bite into stucco and tear out the first chunk of 3419 Hall.

Doomed. Doooomed. The foundation foundered long ago. The windows were felling out. The plumbing was so rotten that water was more a surprise than a surety. The wiring was a hazard on the order of three ex-wives and a brand new girlfriend at the same party. I could touch the ceiling in the center of my front room, miss it by a good 10 inches around the edges. But I plied my trade as a writer there for 12 years, and it had become a part of me. A part I’ll never replace.

From wood to brick, from stucco to steel. So goes Oak Lawn. I don a cynical mask. Thirty years from now, the brick and steel will give way to Ford only knows what, and another generation of grumblers will fret and stew, and then move out. Nobody will care. Not really. Everyone will be living north of Denton and taking the subway to work. If it’s finished.

It isn’t as if the passing of 3419 were unique. A lot of Oak Lawn has been shredded and disappeared to the old house graveyard. 3419 Hall was unique, though, because it was a Camelot of sorts-okay, a glorified garret-and as such deserves a eulogy. It’s the least I can do.

Every garret needs an artist, and 3419 housed its share. People who transformed it into more than a garret, and used it as a jumping-off place for greater things.

“3419 attracted creative people,” Salley Werner Vaughn says, remembering the mid-Sixties. “I tried to sell some of my paintings for $5 in a garage sale, but there were no takers.” Today, she lives in River Oaks and her work sells for thousands at Helen Serger-La Boetie Inc. in New York, a far cry from the garret where she spent some of the happiest times of her life. “I don’t know why I left,” she finishes, not a little wistfully, “but I was sorry I did.”

KRLD commentator Alex Burton, David and Lorine Gibson, and my son and I met to exchange memories the Sunday before the fall. “I put up that light 22 years ago,” David says, pointing. “My rent was $37.50 a month and the Theater Center paid me $25. Many a month I didn’t know where I’d find that extra $12.50, much less money for food.”

We reminisced about the Theater Center, tried to figure out how many of us lived or camped out there. Garret-cum-flop house for kids who gave their all to study under Paul Baker. Some have done pretty well. David has, certainly. He designs the lights for the Dallas Summer Musicals and is the Hon. Prop, of David Gibson Co. that, among other things, ironically enough, makes models for the developers who put up the buildings that replace the 3419s of the world.

We took pictures and laughed at long-forgotten tales later expanded on by others.

“Bees,” Murray Smither tells me over a beer. Murray’s an art advisor and consultant who’s a curator for exhibits for places like The Crescent and assembles private collections. Not in 1961. “I was downstairs, Number Two, and there were bees in the rear wall, in the room I called my studio. The hive was so big that honey oozed through the cracks.

“I enjoyed knowing the local artists. They covered my kitchen with graffiti.”



GERALD TOMLIN, American Society of Interior Designers, now offices in New York and Dallas. He designs residential, hotel and corporate jet interiors, and textiles and furniture. On the phone from New York he remembers the rent at 3419 and how cold it was in the winter. “Fifty-five a month for the whole lower side of the house was cheap, even then, and a boon for someone starting his own business. But cold? I used to put water in the refrigerator overnight during the winter so it wouldn’t freeze.

“I loved that place, and worked hard on it. Before I was finished, my apartment was featured in House and Garden.” What’s this? A touch of class for the old place? Just a mite out of character, given what it looks like now, isn’t it? Don’t worry. Time, weather and raccoons will take care of that.

“Remember them?” Cecilia Flores asks me another day. Starving actress at the time, she was in Number Four, second floor front, in the mid-Seventies. “How they’d climb the outside walls, come through the windows, and trash out the kitchen? Cereal, rice, popcorn, Alba! My God, remember Alba? Did I really drink that stuff? Did Kerry really drink Postum?”

Kerry is Kerry Newcomb, my old partner, now in Fort Worth, and he tried Postum precisely once. We spent four of the best years of our lives in Number Five, upstairs rear, and we had more story ideas than East Texas has ticks. The Invasion of the Worms. The Great Tapioca Catastrophe. A Day No Mule Would Snort. Buffalo! We dreamed of being the drive-in movie kings of the world, and settled for notoriety as Peter Gentry, Shana Carrol and Christina Savage.

3419 had never seen anything quite like it. Ten hours a day, six days a week. Pages flew. New York editors, not believing the stairs and hall that looked like a scene in a Charles Addams cartoon, came to visit. Christina’s first bodice ripper, Love’s Wildest Fires, stayed on The New York Times Book Review Best Sellers list for 13 weeks. Heady days for a couple of country boys whose wives had begun to tire of hamburger, canned asparagus and tuna.

Alex Burton remembers those days. He sublet one of my extra rooms in ’69 and used it as a hideaway from the noise and confusion in the newsroom at KRLD. You want to know the truth? Alex snores when he writes. At least he said he was writing when the Do Not Enter sign was on his door.

Now, at our Sunday farewell, he stands in what used to be a bedroom. “The string quartet was right here,” he says, recalling one Gibson extravaganza. He shakes his head. “Chamber music and engraved invitations to a birthday party for a water heater. Who ever heard of a birthday party for a water heater?”

Lorine had. It was her idea. We want to compliment her, and find her staring at the kitchen wall where the old cast-iron instant-on water heater, now out of code and long gone, once hung.

“It’s like a funeral,” she says, coming to and pointing us toward the picnic she’s spread on the balcony overlooking Lee Park. Some funeral. Some picnic. Cold sirloin, cheese, bread from La Madeleine, homemade herb mayonnaise and Perrier. A far cry from our garret days. “I’m glad we came, though. It makes it easier to say goodbye, somehow,” she says.

So say goodbye, folks. Flat land here, this time next week. No more 3419. Only memories, as they say, and thanks for them.

Ric Spiegel, man of a hundred voices, has taken John Wayne, Groucho Marx, Mister Rogers and his Macintosh to new digs in Oak Cliff. Yeah, Cecilia’s doing all right. Acting, teaching, directing and producing here and in San Antonio.

Our very own dealer, shipped off to Huntsville for two years after they caught him with a pillowcase full of illicit dreams, now lives in the wilds of East Texas.

The gentle eccentric, a world-class pack-rat who filled Number One with broken TV chassis and used clothes and whose collection of branches and limbs won a fire department red tag award, is dead of a heart attack, God rest his soul.

The raccoons have moved out of the ceiling and are gone for good. So’s the woodpecker who fouled my front window with distressing regularity. That was one healthy bird. They sing for some people.

Did we sing a farewell song? Naw. You gotta be tough at a time like this, and not a one of us can carry a tune. Just lift a sentimental glass to ourselves and the rest of the idiosyncratic crew that was nurtured by that marvelous old ruin, that glorified garret, where they kept the halcyon days.

An old friend, Bill Dowson, once said, “Dallas’ll be a right pretty town if they ever finish it.” Well, they’re making progress. 3419 is finished anyway.