April 10, 2005 – Propelling Dallas into the 1970s

April 10, 2005 – Propelling Dallas into the 1970s

The Dallas of 1970 was a city coming to terms with itself. In 1964 a mere six years earlier, the city gained international attention as the place where John Kennedy the 35th President of the United States was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald as his motorcade crept along Elm Street in Dealy Plaza. It was the place of yet another highly publicized killing as Jack Ruby in full view of the world shot Oswald with a Colt Cobra .38 Special revolver in the basement of the Dallas County Jail at 600 Commerce Street just two blocks from where Oswald bullet found Kennedy. Could such a city claim itself part of a civil world where such violence seemed to occur unchecked. The great fault of the city was its insularity. Here was a place with little cultural diversity. Ft Worth, considered a country hick by folks in Dallas, had more culture than all of Dallas, largely due to Amon Carter—a self-made man of poor upbringing, who became a publishing giant acquiring the Ft Worth Star and Telegram newspapers and radio and TV stations. In the eyes of Dallasites, Amon Carter was an uppity intellectual putting on airs about how much more learning in arts he had.

There were some memorable moments that marked the end of the decade of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. Apollo 11 took off for the moon at 8:32 A.M. on Wednesday July 16, 1969, with Neil Armstrong in command, Buzz Aldrin piloting the Lunar Module Eagle and Michael Collins piloting the Command Module Columbia—Michael Collins, the forgotten astronaut that went to the moon but never set foot on earth’s cousin. After a four-day trip on Sunday July 20, 1969, the astronauts arrived at and began orbiting the Moon. At 12:47, Armstrong and Aldrin began their two and a half hour journey to the moon’s surface. Like everyone else on earth we held our breath as descended to the moon’s surface, finally taking a breath at 3:18 P.M. when Armstrong announced that the “Eagle had landed.” Twenty-two hours later, at 12:54 P.M. Monday July 21st, listening to radio reports, my work mates and I heard that the two astronauts had fired the rockets on the Lunar Module and hd began their ascent to rendezvous with the Command Module. It was quite a rush and a great way to end the decade.

By the time, ME, IM, and I had arrived; this attitude was starting to change. The two cities had put their longstanding feud aside and were working on the Dallas-Ft Worth Airport—I have lots to say about this but not now. When we arrived the migration from the north and east into the Sunbelt was just beginning. Until then, the major industries in Dallas were insurance and banking. Houston with its greasy hands was the oil capital. Dallas with its starched collars, well-cut business suits and manicured fingernails dealt in abstract means of revenue generation. Being part of a wave sweeping over Dallas, ME, IM, and I were oblivious to the changes that were taking shape. Truth be told, I was scared out of my wits because President Nixon in February 1970 had proposed a $5.7-billion cut in defense and space outlays, the largest customer for my employer Collins Radio and its neighbor up the Expressway Texas Instruments. Needless to say there were cycles of layoffs, almost every Friday as 1970 came to a close.

People I worked with were scrambling to find and transfer into groups within Collins that still had funding. For some fluke of fate, I had been transferred into a group documenting an incredible computer system that company founder and CEO Arthur Collins himself had help design. This was his baby and he wanted to make it something that would compete head on and win against the giants of the computer world back then: IBM, Control Data, Univac, GE, RCA, Honeywell, among others. For me it was false sense of security. Even Collins sacred cow took a cut. I was going to be let go and I knew it. My boss wouldn’t look me in the eye and avoided me during the week. There was nothing I could do but wait for the axe to fall. When Friday finally came around, he called me into his office and told me I still had my job. I was completely confused and he explained that he had given his notice this morning and so the company decided to keep me on. The reality was that my boss’s group was being merged into another and he would have had to work for a man he could not abide. On the other hand, I didn’t have that problem.

While the world around us was in turmoil, IM, ME, and I carried on with me going to work and school to make ends meet. We shopped at the Gibsons on Jupiter Boulevard, where we bought ME a rocking horse—a plastic horse suspended on four springs, which she would ride it with such force that it threatened to move. To dress stylishly on a tight budget, we comparison shopped between Gibsons, K-Mart—just off Highway 75 at the Arapahoe Road Exit in Richardson, and Target—just west of the newly opened Valley View Shopping Mall. Valley View along with Northpark Mall—the bigger and more upscale of the two occupied the area along side 75 between Park Lane and Texas Highway 12—were where the three of us would spend hours window-shopping. Once on a rare occasion we would buy something from Neiman Marcus in Northpark Mall, a British food item or some such. And we would occasionally have dinner at the Wyatt’s in Northpark—cafeteria style dining in an upscale setting.

I had no way of knowing it at the time but my new boss, a retired military enlisted man, who dressed in a suit every day and had a meticulously clean desk whenever I went in to see him, was looking out for me. He had no real work for me to do—writing manuals and the like, so he put me to work shipping manuals out to commercial customers. I spent my days in the huge Collins Radio print shop. It was run by a soft-spoken black man in his forties, Mr. B, a leader in the black community in Plano who had pushed the town government into the new age of equality among the races. Plano was still a small bedroom community but fast filling up with new families immigrating from the north central part of the country to Dallas, but Mr. B was successfully using these new immigrants to dilute the power of the good ole boy city government of old.

Collins was doing a great deal of business back then with telecommunications companies, who were building new and expanding existing infrastructure. They were buying racks of Collins communications equipment, which would end up being installed in microwave repeater sites all over the country. I shipped a lot of manuals to then upstart long distance carrier MCI. I made shipments to every Bell Operating Company as well. I loved the mindless work of laying out stacks of manual, collating them, inserting them in envelopes, adding a label and sending them off. When I wasn’t talking with Mr. B or his assistant ER, another black man who not only worked the print shop at Collins but also owned a farm just outside of Plano, I was running over college lessons in my head. As soon as 5:00 PM rolled around I jumped in my car and headed into Dallas for evening classes. The new decade was accelerating me to a better place in life and I was enjoying the ride.