Stained Glass and Clyde Barrow
One particular night in Autumn of 1967 some mates and I, sophomores at North Texas Condition University, adjourned to the Campus Theater on the courthouse sq. in Denton, Texas, to watch the then-new Hollywood motion picture ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. That minor but pretty well-liked opus experienced its environment premier there a couple of days prior to, getting been filmed in small towns all all over Denton and Dallas Counties exactly where a lot of of the properties housing the banking companies robbed by the initial Bonnie and Clyde are nevertheless standing. The movie by itself was a instead skinny time period trend present, and neither Warren Beatty nor Faye Dunaway were in particular convincing as the 1930s-era desperadoes Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The film’s glamorizing and romanticizing of the outlaw approaches of Barrow and Parker type of complimented the rebellious ‘hippie’ counter-society notions trendy amid a lot of late ’60s American bourgeois school kids.
The adhering to weekend, even though traveling to my parents in Dallas, I stated having gone to see ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’ My mom replied, “He applied to bounce me on his knee.” “Actually?!” I reacted. She nodded yes and smiled to herself. Some years afterwards, 1 detail getting led to one more and one more, I acquired to the bottom of that fairly unforeseen addition to my initial practical experience of the notorious area pair.
Someday throughout the 1980s I came to discover, following a little informal, entertaining research at the Dallas General public Library, that the legitimate story of the Barrow gang is, as is normally the situation, significantly a lot more interesting and advanced than the one-dimensional well known fantasy. To be sure, the sociological undercurrents of the authentic tale are thoroughly regarded as important background. In the 1990s I occurred on a fascinating and perfectly crafted tiny reserve titled ‘Running With Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Speedy A long time of Ralph Fults’, by John Neal Phillips. One particular chapter in this electric recounting of the amazingly violent ordeals of a range of the associates of Barrow’s Lake Dallas Gang tells of Barrow soon after getting released from one of his stints in jail. Acquiring resolved to check out heading additional or a lot less straight, he set out to find work, hitchhiking and bussing from Texas to Massachusetts. But his record and his timing (This was during the Good Melancholy, when jobs ended up scarce) still left him with no prospective customers, and he returned, homesick, to Dallas.
A handful of years back, through a single of my visits with the proprietor of Molloy Glass and Mirror, a small shop on Floyd Avenue in Dallas, and a person of the oldest businesses however in operation in Dallas, I was surprised to find out from him that for numerous several years Dallas had been a little bit of a hotbed of artwork glass producing for church buildings, commercial properties and residences. He fished out a circa Nineteen-teens Dallas phone listing and confirmed me that the business with the most adverts in the directory was Dallas Art Glass Organization, with about 100 workers.
At the very least two artwork glass stores other than Molloy’s ended up positioned on Floyd Street and the adjacent Swiss Avenue all through the Terrific Melancholy. A person was the United Glass and Mirror Organization. Following Clyde Barrow returned from the North, he was hired by that organization as a shipping and delivery driver. Apparently he was properly-favored. He’d saunter more than to Molloy’s and dangle out with the employees there, so I am told. But at that time in Dallas, situations of legal mischief would carry the local constabulary out to spherical up the regular suspects. Clyde’s currently being in that category meant squad cars and trucks in the street in front of United Glass and Mirror. Just after a couple episodes of the ensuing detrimental publicity, United resolved to permit Barrow go. That was the previous time the disappointed and short-fused Barrow gave any believed to legitimate work.
The art glass organizations in Dallas utilized a selection of immigrant artisans, most of whom ended up Czech or German. Following my maternal grandfather immigrated to the United states of america from Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1913, he labored at a selection of stained glass shops around Texas until he was equipped to dedicate full time to his own studio afterwards. His initial spouse died in the early 1930s, leaving two youthful little ones. It would not have been abnormal for those people young children to have been at their father’s locations of work, two of which were United Glass and Mirror and Molloy Glass and Mirror, the place they’d have very likely arrive into get in touch with with the shortly-to-be desperate, hardened, wished killer Clyde Barrow.
The existing-working day write-up-present day, cosmopolitan intercontinental crossroads acknowledged as Dallas, Texas has held a bit of its previous towniness. A person encounters common locations, usually unchanged from times gone by, in more mature locations of the city. The developing that was as soon as the filling station/snack bar that Barrow’s father, with whom Barrow was quite near, constructed in entrance of the minimal frame house he experienced crafted earlier, stands on Singleton Avenue in the West Dallas spot. The tiny duplex in entrance of which Barrow shot and mortally wounded a sheriff’s deputy is continue to close by on North Winnetka Avenue. The household in which Bonnie Parker lived with her mother is on Douglass Road just south of Wycliff Avenue, in the vicinity of Maple Avenue. And the building which housed a café where by Parker was a preferred waitress in advance of she satisfied Barrow now homes a grinding store, in close proximity to the Baylor Healthcare facility intricate in Old East Dallas, a few blocks from those people artwork glass retailers on Floyd Avenue and Swiss Avenue, and an straightforward and enjoyable bike trip from the chair in which I sit typing.
I frequently pass by the buildings associated with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, very a great deal like structures in Dallas neighborhoods in which I invested my childhood. It truly is not at all difficult for me to imagine the affable foreseeable future vicious outlaw, in his sincere working man’s clothing, bouncing my mom, then a really younger boy or girl, on his knee, leaving her, unusually, with a nice memory.
