Beckley Avenue Trivia
Following is a collection of newspaper articles, published primarily in the Dallas Morning News over the past 60 years, relating to events, features and stories on South Beckley Avenue. If you have any additional stories or photographs of the time, please drop us a note and we will be happy to include your material.
People of Beckley Avenue
Mrs. O.F. Wolff, formerly Gwendolyn James of Streeter, Illinois lived at 1526 Beckley until 1958. She had moved to Dallas with her husband given his interest in the opening and development of the Beckley Club addition. E.C. Tidwell, member of the Dallas Master Barbers' Association in 1929, and director of the Oak Cliff Barbers Association in 1939, lived with his family at 1606 Beckley. Louise Tidwell, E.C. Tidwell's daughter, was a bright Dallas socialite who graduated from the North Texas State College; she was member of the Future Teachers of America. Kathryn Livingston, employee of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company for 20 years, lived at 1614 Beckley - her daughter Lillian married a californian, Mr. LeRoie Woolley Jr. - member of the Pasadena band. W.G. Swindle, the man known for saying, “When I hit 'em they stay hit”, lived at 1502 Beckley. W.G. Swindle operated Swindle's Cafe in the 500 block of North Akard and was charged with murder in 1941. During a street fight over a parked car in front of his establishment, he fatally hit Jack Bond, secretary of the hairdresser's association and beautician operating next door to Swindle in downtown. A grand jury exonerated Swindle a month later.
Jack Barr ran for Place 7 and lost (1951)
Two Dallas political groups Saturday officially entered the April 3, 1951 city election race to oppose the incumbent Citizens Charter Association ticket (he lost by a significant margin, editor's note). The Nonpartisan platform pledged to make City Hall a temple of democracy instead of a house of autocracy, give city employees cost of living adjustments, improve alleys for rapid removal of garbage and to reduce the threat of polio and other diseases; give Oak Cliff a police station and tax the penthouse at the same ratio as the poverty stricken shack; permit no hike in public utility rates until the general public's income is increased, and to settle the racial housing problem on a fair and common sense basis.Jack Barr was one of the leaders in the movement for annexation of Trinity Heights to Dallas and was a trustee of the old Trinity Heights school district. He had been in the contracting business ever since he came to Dallas at 21 years of age.
Barr initiated the All-Dallas party in the 1947 city election and lived at 1518 South Beckley with his wife and seven children. In a speech, Jack Barr, ousted leader of the All Dallas, GI and Veterans party, turned oral guns in 1947 on that group and some of its candidates in a speech at Lee Park. Barr, originator of the All Dallas faction of the party, told about 100 listeners at the open-air meeting: "I have been placed in a position comparable to a father who is fighting his own children. My confidence has been violated though promises of some of the men who were my candidates and one of the cochairmen. Now, if this group of men will double-cross me like they have, how can the public expect anything except the same kind of treatment?" Barr said that "on account of my former party's action" he would vote for one man from each of the give groups, which have City Council tickets in the April 1 election "in order to try and break up any secret agreements that might have been planned by any of the groups running." After saying that he once was a member of the Ku Klux Klan but resigned "as soon as I saw the racial hatred and strife it was creating," he charged: "The KKK apparently is reviving its influence again, and I want both a Jew and a Catholic on the Council to cure this evil." (© Dallas Morning News, March 24, 1947, Section II, Page 1)