MARSHALL, EUGENE

Eugene Marshall
Spence Street and Streetcars
From Proud Heritage, Vol. III by DCPA. This 352 page hardcover book is available online.

Nevermore
By Eugene Marshall

In 1945 we moved from “the street that never was” to the street that is “nevermore.” Our part of Spence Street is now underneath I-45. We said goodbye to Canal Street and moved to 3631 Spence Street in South Dallas, a street one short block west of Colo-nial Avenue and three houses north of Metropolitan.

We had arrived. We had moved uptown. We had indoor running water, and in-door potty in a huge bathroom with a bathtub on four legs and hot water to boot. I even had a room for myself, except for the times one of the boys, (my uncles), was staying with us. The hot water heater was a strange funny looking thing. It sat on a shelf half way up one of the walls of the kitchen and was about three feet high. When you looked underneath it and up , you could see a big coil of pipe inside a steel frame. When you turned on the hot water, somehow the heater was triggered to come on. All kinds of fire came on around the pipes. The excess heat was guided through the steel frame into a vent stack that went through the roof. It really made the kitchen hot.

Colonial Avenue was a major street for the area. Down the middle of the street was a set of rail tracks. This was my first experience with public transportation. The trolley cars, or streetcars as we called them, ran on the tracks. They were like the ones that now run on McKinney Avenue tracks. In wintertime, if I had been ill, Grandma would give me money to ride to high school. Otherwise, I would walk. When I was old enough and allowed to do so, I rode the streetcar to town to pay the utility bills. Sometimes my folks would give me a couple of tokens to use as passage on the streetcars. Remember them?

Transit Tokens

I can remember times when the cars were going too fast, and in turning a corner, had the pole disengage from the power line. You could hear the clunky clunk as the trolley left the line. The car stopped and the driver trotted to the rear and put it back on the line. Sometimes he had to go out-side to do that. The seats were made of wood with wood slats for backs. The backs had steel frames around them. On the aisle side was a loop of the steel that allowed someone to hold while they were standing. At the end of the line, the driver would change ends. What was the back became the front. The driver would go down the car grabbing the loops, pulling the backs to the other position until all the seats were facing the proper way. Clank, clank, clank the seats would go. The cars were small and sometimes carried a lot of people. If the driver had to come to a quick stop, people holding on to the chair backs would of course be flung forward, al-most pushing those in the seats out onto the floor.

One of the Dallas Streetcars

When you were a kid, and you wanted to go somewhere, you rode the trolley from our house to the fairgrounds. We boarded the trolley on Colonial, transferred at Forest Avenue, (Martin Luther King) to a car going towards the Fairgrounds, the Myrtle car. At Myrtle we caught another car, the Fair Park car to the Fairgrounds. To go to the ball game we road the Ervay car, which we caught on Colonial Street, to downtown and transferred to a trolley going to Oak Cliff. They had a via-duct for the trolley cars. It ran north of the Corinth Street viaduct across the Trinity River. The ball-park was Burnett Field. Dallas had only a minor league team. As I remem-ber, at one time, they were called the “Rangers,” they also had the name “Ea-gles.” As the trolley ran across the viaduct, it picked up a lot of speed. That was a thrill for us as it swayed from side to side. I remember a cou-ple of times being in an auto with the family and seeing the interurban going or coming. This was a car similar to the streetcars but only larger. It too was powered by electricity. The Interurban terminal was in the build-ing that is bounded by Ervay, Jackson, Wood and Browder Streets. The inter-urban went to Denton, Waco and places in between. The building is still there and the huge generator that pow-ered the cars is still in the base-ment. The building later became the terminal for the Continental Bus Line.