8 thoughts on “A book you never knew you wanted to read…until now?!”
I remember the donkey lady but I thought she lived over by Madison! I never knew the story behind it. I think that gas station has been turned into shopping or Walgreens.
Looks like y’all are good and enjoying retirement!
Can’t wait to read it. I bought the paperback so I could get your autograph, which will certainly be worth something in the future (century to be determined).
I was gonna buy the audio book, but found out Donald J Trump was not available to be the narrator until he left office! Bummer!
Hi Marc, can’t wait to get this! I’m ordering it today. Jim and I use to talk San Antonio lore all the time. Our cast of characters will have been from a decade earlier, but it will be great fun to compare our recollections with yours.
Marc, I received your book on the 21st of March and started reading right away. I got the paperback as I have a Nook rather than a Kindle. At the outset, I want to say that I enjoyed your book very much. It provoked lots of thoughts about life in San Antonio in the “old timey days” and growing up there.
It seems that you and I have a shared interest in putting our thoughts down on paper. In my case, it’s more of a compulsion than a casual interest. I write every day. I get tremendous satisfaction out of it.
In regard to our experiences growing up in and around San Antonio, there are similarities. I too worked in a gas station, pumping gas and fixing flats, when I was fifteen years old. It was a maturing experience that served me well over the years. It was a “Humble” gas station. “Humble in word and deed”, as they say. Humble gas stations were bought out by someone during the gas crisis in 1973. I drove by the station in 1966 and all the guys were gathered around the TV in the office watching the UT tower shooting which was being carried live on public television. It was the only live feed going.
Many of my teenage adventures also involved cars. Driving way too fast on a gravel road, I nearly rolled my father’s pickup truck sliding into a corn field. Relieved after the close call, I went home and parked the truck in the driveway. I thought I had gotten off scot-free until my father called me outside to ask how a person could get a cornstalk stuck in between a tire and a wheel rim.
I also unwittingly drove the getaway car in a liquor store burglary. I should say under the duress of the moment rather than unwittingly. I was at a party with friends when the call went out for more booze. A guy I knew from school said he could get some liquor if I would give him a ride. Since we were both under age, I figured he had some kind of connection who would buy the liquor for us or he knew a place that would sell booze out the back door. So, I drive up to this liquor store and it is closed. The guy says “Wait a minute, I’ll be right back.” He picks up a rock and throws it thru the front window of the liquor store and grabs two bottles of liquor. He then threw some money into the store thru the broken window. The guy ran back to my car and jumped in. I wasn’t about to sit around and discuss the moral implications of what had just happened, so away we went as fast as I thought prudent in the circumstance. The thing about the money was so unusual that the liquor store burglary appeared in the local newspaper under a headline of “A Conscientious Burglar”. I read the Conscientious Burglar’s obituary in a San Antonio newspaper about twenty years ago.
You mentioned Lester Roloff. Jim and I both had male parolees who were sponsored by Lester Roloff. The parolees were mostly young inmates who heard Roloff on the radio and requested placement with him. Roloff had an island about 40 mies south of Corpus Christi, in the Laguna Madre, reachable only by boat or by air. Roloff offered to fly us to the Island to visit the parolees. “Naw, we’re not doing that.” So, he brought them to us at the office for monthly reports. To a man, all of the Roloff parolees absconded the moment they were able to get off the island.
Many of the differences in our experiences relate to the changing character of San Antonio over time. To me, San Antonio had a small town feel in the fifties and sixties. That changed in the seventies and eighties when the population began to grow rapidly. Jim and I use to talk about that a lot . We agreed that the turning point from one cultural era to another was Hemisfair in 1968.
Jim recalled that in the early fifties, San Antonio had only one TV station. Local television was broadcast from the Tower Life building and was on the air only for brief times during the day. I recalled that a guy playing a guitar led the morning line up. Jim actually remembered that his name was Bill Showmette. He played the guitar, sang, and told stories for about an hour. We’re talking about a stupefyingly boring small town vibe. Television was such a novelty that people would have watched ice melting, if it was on TV. Jim and I agreed that lack of air-conditioning in most homes in the 1950s impeded San Antonio’s growth.
One of the constants in San Antonio over many generations has been the presence of the military. Jim and I worked in what was then called the South Central Area of the Division of Parole Supervision. Included in the original iteration of the South Central Area were the cities of Waco, Austin, Corpus Christi, and San Antonio. The headquarters was in San Antonio and the hiring was done there. At least ninety percent of the parole officers and supervisory staff in South Central Area were retired Army and Air Force officers. Most were retired Lieutenant Colonels who were WW II veterans. Needless to say they were a pretty competent bunch and they had a strong public service ethic. They were also upright and had rigorous personal standards, damn the consequences. Before our time, one of the Light Colonels in San Antonio had a pre parole investigation on an inmate who was to be sponsored by Red Berry who was an infamous San Antonio gangster and also a state senator. According to legend, our Light Colonel rejected the pre parole placement based on the unsavory history of the state senator. Red Berry was not happy and influential people in Austin were not happy. Some wanted our parole officer fired. He wasn’t fired, but the inmate was released to the gangster’s care and tutelage.
Some of the reminisces and recollections Jim and I shared regarding specific San Antonio places and personalities included the following:
Playland Park on Broadway, which had a decent rollercoaster, but also some shady carnival games which were rigged for the house to win almost always. The park was still open in the 1970s. Did you ever go there?
Frontier burgers. Jim and I thought they were the best burgers ever. It was next door to Playland Park.The burgers were heavy on meat and grilled over an open flame.
There was a fabulously popular Mexican Restaurant on Highway 90 with Delicious food and large servings for a reasonable price. The restaurant was bankrupted and driven out of business by a lawsuit after they served alcohol to a kid who drove off and killed someone in a wreck. That was big news back in the day. Once again Jim’s recalled all the details.
There was a State Hospital on South Presa Street, where Jim worked for a while. He had lots of stories about that experience. Coincidentally, I applied for work there, but had second thoughts after visiting the place and I didn’t follow up.
If you wanted to go to the movies, you went to one of the drive-in movies or the downtown movie theaters like the Majestic, Texas, and Aztec. I took dates to the Majestic, because there was cheap valet parking at the Nix Hospital nearby. The Majestic was segregated and Blacks had to climb rickety wooden stairs in the ally at the back of the theater to get access to the upper balcony.
One of the characters in town,I previously mentioned, was Edward “Red” Berry a predecessor of Jack Hanratty. He was a twice elected Texas state senator, who ran a gambling enterprise from a huge mansion on the east side of San Antonio.
Then there was Ricky Ware, an edgy rock and roll disk jockey at KTSA in the late 1950s. In the1980s he morphed into a right wing talk radio host. That was a revelation to me. I hadn’t thought about the fact that most disk jockeys are actors who aren’t tied to any particular genre of music. Like a chameleon they can change their on-air personalities to fit public demand.
A popular restaurant was the original Earl Abel’s restaurant on Broadway at the intersection with Hilderbrand Ave. I took a girlfriend to eat there before we attended her Incarnate Word High School prom. Incarnate Word High School was about half a block down the street on Hilderbrand from Earl Abel’s and the prom was being held across the street from the high school at the then brand new USAA building on Hilderbrand. AT&T later owned the building. I think Incarnate Word University owns that property now. Some local thugs driving down Hilderbrand, catcalled the prom goers as we walked to the prom venue.
WOAI radio station’s broadcast tower and station was right off Highway 81 (now I-35) near Selma. Back in about 1956, a B-29 heading for a landing at Randolph Air Force base knocked down the tower. In later years, the radio station that was at the base of the tower was sold to the City of Selma and became Selma City Hall, from which the good people of Selma operated a speed trap on Interstate 35.
Buttercrust Bakery on Broadway hosted generations of field trips by elementary and middle school kids. Each kid got a piece of warm fresh bread slathered with butter.
Here’s a bit of minutiae that a lot of people my age remember and Jim recalled also. There was a blind guy who sold pencils outside the front door of Woolworth’s downtown. He was a fixture there for years.
Then, this is something that flew under the radar of most people at the time. it occurred. After World War Two, scores of German rocket scientists were brought to the United States in a secret project called Operation Paper Clip. Those scientists became essential to our getting to the moon ahead of the Russians in 1969. Many of the German scientists were originally kept at Randolph Air Force base. The children of those scientists began showing up in San Antonio public schools in about 1954, when I was in fourth grade. One of the German kids who came to my school was later valedictorian of his class at my high school. Go figure! Did I say that the German Kids seemed smarter, at least more disciplined, than us.
Wow, you have quite the memory and quite a few things to remember. It’s funny that you and Jim talked about these things, I’m not sure we ever had a conversation about any SA history. He probably thought that our age difference would relate to the experiences. I did tell him I had written the book but I never gave him the version as I was writing.
I do remember most of the “later years” things you spoke about.
*I did go to Playland when I was younger, my sister actually took me.
*I do remember Ricky Ware and his sone, I believe his son is still on the radio.
*That is a crazy story about you being the driver in a robbery, so close to big trouble for you.
*When I worked for AT&T I actually worked at the building across from Earl Ables. And when I went to Corpus I actually went to the Roloff compound selling yellow pages. I had just enter the trailer of a plumber when “brother so and so” came through behind me and said “no, he is not buying any yellow pages.”
*I would bring my mom a burger from Frontier, I still love them and now want to go get one. There was one near Jim’s house but we never went.
*Some of my funnest memories of movies was the San Pedro Drive Inn, seems we were there every week.
*I was in 4th grade and did get to go to Buttercrust, I still remember the smell.
You had a lot of great info, SA has so much great history.
We need to go to lunch, let’s plan to before I head back to NC.
McGaffs On The Fly 
I remember the donkey lady but I thought she lived over by Madison! I never knew the story behind it. I think that gas station has been turned into shopping or Walgreens.
Wow, what memories.
Per the Texas Real Estate Commission regulations please find a link to the Information About Brokerage Serviceshttps://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/tm84tnozgq9mgev1uyc9v/ibs.pdf?rlkey=9pujfkwqlzi2cot58msgc6877&st=mrftjw3q&dl=0 and Texas Real Estate Commission Consumer Protection Notice.https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/x2vaf2yju87q4imgklvhv/Consumer-Protection-Notice-2023.pdf?rlkey=ifgs6fuuykpcbqmcehnano33e&st=h9v90ukb&dl=0
Thank you,
Shelly Johnson, Broker Associate
Remax Associates
1862 W. Bitters Rd. #300
San Antonio, TX. 78248
210-410-2700 call or text
210-340-3028 fax
shelly@shellyjohnson.com
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Fun times, Brett and I found the “real” donkey lady bridge…turns out it was about a real person with made up tales.
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Looks like y’all are good and enjoying retirement!
Can’t wait to read it. I bought the paperback so I could get your autograph, which will certainly be worth something in the future (century to be determined).
I was gonna buy the audio book, but found out Donald J Trump was not available to be the narrator until he left office! Bummer!
Be safe my friend.
Keith
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Autographs are free, unfortunately I’m not sure they’ll ever be worth more than the ink itself.
Thanks for following, hope you got your Class A…it is so much fun on the road.
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Hi Marc, can’t wait to get this! I’m ordering it today. Jim and I use to talk San Antonio lore all the time. Our cast of characters will have been from a decade earlier, but it will be great fun to compare our recollections with yours.
>
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Thanks for checking it out, let me know how it compares to your memories.
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Marc, I received your book on the 21st of March and started reading right away. I got the paperback as I have a Nook rather than a Kindle. At the outset, I want to say that I enjoyed your book very much. It provoked lots of thoughts about life in San Antonio in the “old timey days” and growing up there.
It seems that you and I have a shared interest in putting our thoughts down on paper. In my case, it’s more of a compulsion than a casual interest. I write every day. I get tremendous satisfaction out of it.
In regard to our experiences growing up in and around San Antonio, there are similarities. I too worked in a gas station, pumping gas and fixing flats, when I was fifteen years old. It was a maturing experience that served me well over the years. It was a “Humble” gas station. “Humble in word and deed”, as they say. Humble gas stations were bought out by someone during the gas crisis in 1973. I drove by the station in 1966 and all the guys were gathered around the TV in the office watching the UT tower shooting which was being carried live on public television. It was the only live feed going.
Many of my teenage adventures also involved cars. Driving way too fast on a gravel road, I nearly rolled my father’s pickup truck sliding into a corn field. Relieved after the close call, I went home and parked the truck in the driveway. I thought I had gotten off scot-free until my father called me outside to ask how a person could get a cornstalk stuck in between a tire and a wheel rim.
I also unwittingly drove the getaway car in a liquor store burglary. I should say under the duress of the moment rather than unwittingly. I was at a party with friends when the call went out for more booze. A guy I knew from school said he could get some liquor if I would give him a ride. Since we were both under age, I figured he had some kind of connection who would buy the liquor for us or he knew a place that would sell booze out the back door. So, I drive up to this liquor store and it is closed. The guy says “Wait a minute, I’ll be right back.” He picks up a rock and throws it thru the front window of the liquor store and grabs two bottles of liquor. He then threw some money into the store thru the broken window. The guy ran back to my car and jumped in. I wasn’t about to sit around and discuss the moral implications of what had just happened, so away we went as fast as I thought prudent in the circumstance. The thing about the money was so unusual that the liquor store burglary appeared in the local newspaper under a headline of “A Conscientious Burglar”. I read the Conscientious Burglar’s obituary in a San Antonio newspaper about twenty years ago.
You mentioned Lester Roloff. Jim and I both had male parolees who were sponsored by Lester Roloff. The parolees were mostly young inmates who heard Roloff on the radio and requested placement with him. Roloff had an island about 40 mies south of Corpus Christi, in the Laguna Madre, reachable only by boat or by air. Roloff offered to fly us to the Island to visit the parolees. “Naw, we’re not doing that.” So, he brought them to us at the office for monthly reports. To a man, all of the Roloff parolees absconded the moment they were able to get off the island.
Many of the differences in our experiences relate to the changing character of San Antonio over time. To me, San Antonio had a small town feel in the fifties and sixties. That changed in the seventies and eighties when the population began to grow rapidly. Jim and I use to talk about that a lot . We agreed that the turning point from one cultural era to another was Hemisfair in 1968.
Jim recalled that in the early fifties, San Antonio had only one TV station. Local television was broadcast from the Tower Life building and was on the air only for brief times during the day. I recalled that a guy playing a guitar led the morning line up. Jim actually remembered that his name was Bill Showmette. He played the guitar, sang, and told stories for about an hour. We’re talking about a stupefyingly boring small town vibe. Television was such a novelty that people would have watched ice melting, if it was on TV. Jim and I agreed that lack of air-conditioning in most homes in the 1950s impeded San Antonio’s growth.
One of the constants in San Antonio over many generations has been the presence of the military. Jim and I worked in what was then called the South Central Area of the Division of Parole Supervision. Included in the original iteration of the South Central Area were the cities of Waco, Austin, Corpus Christi, and San Antonio. The headquarters was in San Antonio and the hiring was done there. At least ninety percent of the parole officers and supervisory staff in South Central Area were retired Army and Air Force officers. Most were retired Lieutenant Colonels who were WW II veterans. Needless to say they were a pretty competent bunch and they had a strong public service ethic. They were also upright and had rigorous personal standards, damn the consequences. Before our time, one of the Light Colonels in San Antonio had a pre parole investigation on an inmate who was to be sponsored by Red Berry who was an infamous San Antonio gangster and also a state senator. According to legend, our Light Colonel rejected the pre parole placement based on the unsavory history of the state senator. Red Berry was not happy and influential people in Austin were not happy. Some wanted our parole officer fired. He wasn’t fired, but the inmate was released to the gangster’s care and tutelage.
Some of the reminisces and recollections Jim and I shared regarding specific San Antonio places and personalities included the following:
Playland Park on Broadway, which had a decent rollercoaster, but also some shady carnival games which were rigged for the house to win almost always. The park was still open in the 1970s. Did you ever go there?
Frontier burgers. Jim and I thought they were the best burgers ever. It was next door to Playland Park.The burgers were heavy on meat and grilled over an open flame.
There was a fabulously popular Mexican Restaurant on Highway 90 with Delicious food and large servings for a reasonable price. The restaurant was bankrupted and driven out of business by a lawsuit after they served alcohol to a kid who drove off and killed someone in a wreck. That was big news back in the day. Once again Jim’s recalled all the details.
There was a State Hospital on South Presa Street, where Jim worked for a while. He had lots of stories about that experience. Coincidentally, I applied for work there, but had second thoughts after visiting the place and I didn’t follow up.
If you wanted to go to the movies, you went to one of the drive-in movies or the downtown movie theaters like the Majestic, Texas, and Aztec. I took dates to the Majestic, because there was cheap valet parking at the Nix Hospital nearby. The Majestic was segregated and Blacks had to climb rickety wooden stairs in the ally at the back of the theater to get access to the upper balcony.
One of the characters in town,I previously mentioned, was Edward “Red” Berry a predecessor of Jack Hanratty. He was a twice elected Texas state senator, who ran a gambling enterprise from a huge mansion on the east side of San Antonio.
Then there was Ricky Ware, an edgy rock and roll disk jockey at KTSA in the late 1950s. In the1980s he morphed into a right wing talk radio host. That was a revelation to me. I hadn’t thought about the fact that most disk jockeys are actors who aren’t tied to any particular genre of music. Like a chameleon they can change their on-air personalities to fit public demand.
A popular restaurant was the original Earl Abel’s restaurant on Broadway at the intersection with Hilderbrand Ave. I took a girlfriend to eat there before we attended her Incarnate Word High School prom. Incarnate Word High School was about half a block down the street on Hilderbrand from Earl Abel’s and the prom was being held across the street from the high school at the then brand new USAA building on Hilderbrand. AT&T later owned the building. I think Incarnate Word University owns that property now. Some local thugs driving down Hilderbrand, catcalled the prom goers as we walked to the prom venue.
WOAI radio station’s broadcast tower and station was right off Highway 81 (now I-35) near Selma. Back in about 1956, a B-29 heading for a landing at Randolph Air Force base knocked down the tower. In later years, the radio station that was at the base of the tower was sold to the City of Selma and became Selma City Hall, from which the good people of Selma operated a speed trap on Interstate 35.
Buttercrust Bakery on Broadway hosted generations of field trips by elementary and middle school kids. Each kid got a piece of warm fresh bread slathered with butter.
Here’s a bit of minutiae that a lot of people my age remember and Jim recalled also. There was a blind guy who sold pencils outside the front door of Woolworth’s downtown. He was a fixture there for years.
Then, this is something that flew under the radar of most people at the time. it occurred. After World War Two, scores of German rocket scientists were brought to the United States in a secret project called Operation Paper Clip. Those scientists became essential to our getting to the moon ahead of the Russians in 1969. Many of the German scientists were originally kept at Randolph Air Force base. The children of those scientists began showing up in San Antonio public schools in about 1954, when I was in fourth grade. One of the German kids who came to my school was later valedictorian of his class at my high school. Go figure! Did I say that the German Kids seemed smarter, at least more disciplined, than us.
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Wow, you have quite the memory and quite a few things to remember. It’s funny that you and Jim talked about these things, I’m not sure we ever had a conversation about any SA history. He probably thought that our age difference would relate to the experiences. I did tell him I had written the book but I never gave him the version as I was writing.
I do remember most of the “later years” things you spoke about.
*I did go to Playland when I was younger, my sister actually took me.
*I do remember Ricky Ware and his sone, I believe his son is still on the radio.
*That is a crazy story about you being the driver in a robbery, so close to big trouble for you.
*When I worked for AT&T I actually worked at the building across from Earl Ables. And when I went to Corpus I actually went to the Roloff compound selling yellow pages. I had just enter the trailer of a plumber when “brother so and so” came through behind me and said “no, he is not buying any yellow pages.”
*I would bring my mom a burger from Frontier, I still love them and now want to go get one. There was one near Jim’s house but we never went.
*Some of my funnest memories of movies was the San Pedro Drive Inn, seems we were there every week.
*I was in 4th grade and did get to go to Buttercrust, I still remember the smell.
You had a lot of great info, SA has so much great history.
We need to go to lunch, let’s plan to before I head back to NC.
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