The State Fair of Texas begins its 135th year this week in Dallas. In 1886 it was originally called the Dallas State Fair and Exposition, and by 1905 the annual event at Fair Park became the State Fair of Texas. The pandemic did not allow a full fair experience in 2020, but it wasn’t the first time Texans missed their annual celebration. The fair was cancelled in 1918 and 1942-1945 due to war, and in 1935 to prepare for the Texas Centennial exposition in 1936. This year promises to bring back exhibits, entertainment, college football, and great food.
DeGolyer Library has books, photographs, and manuscript collections relating to the State Fair of Texas. Our large cookbook collection includes annual cookbooks of winning recipes:
State Fair of Texas cook books
Memorabilia can be found in the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas manuscripts and artifacts collection. Here is a sample of the opening day pins, employee and guest badges, and programs:
State Fair of Texas programs
Dozens of tickets from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas manuscripts and artifacts collection have been digitized. Photographs and postcards related to Fair Park are also available in the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection. Photographer Lynn Lennon documented the State Fair in the 1980s and her work is available in our digital collection.
[Swing ride, State Fair of Texas], Lynn Lennon photographs, Ag2002.1405
Please contact degolyer@smu.edu for questions about State Fair of Texas materials in DeGolyer Library.
Three club members standing in front of “Welcome to Miami” sign
Summer in Miami…Texas
You can spend your summer traveling to Paris (Texas), or Italy (Texas). But why not instead take a trip to Miami (Texas)? Miami, the county seat of Roberts County, is on U.S. Highway 60 between Canadian and Pampa in the southeastern part of the county.
15 portrait images forming the letters XX
This photograph and scrap album, kept by Ruth Chisum of Miami, Texas, records the organized outdoor activities of the XX Club of Miami 1922-1923. More than 400 photographs, clipped images, and news clippings are mounted on these album pages. Portrait images of 15 members of the club form the title “XX Club”.
We do not know much about this women’s social organization. My co-workers and I speculate that the XX Club could have been named for the XX chromosome, XX as in kisses or XX meaning 20 in roman numerals. One of the joys and frustrations about archives is that sometimes we just can’t find out everything we want to know about a collection!
Members of the XX Club playing in the Vapor Baths of MiamiClub members on horseback
Most of the images are uncaptioned, but still manage to narrate the activities of a Texas Panhandle “cowgirl” club in the 1920s. These images record the social club on various outings with many pictures of members in western garb, horseback riding, playing with dogs, hiking, hill climbing, motoring, swimming, and general horsing around the Texas countryside.
Not a bad way to spend the summer months.
Contact Samantha Dodd, curator of the Archives of Women of the Southwest for additional information or assistance with accessing these materials. For more information and access to photograph collections, contact our Curator of Photographs Anne E. Peterson. The DeGolyer continues to expand our digitization efforts, adding new content weekly. We have thousands of items digitized and searchable in our digital collections with many thousands more to come!
President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. However, it was two and a half years later before Texas slaves got the message when Union Major General Gordon Granger issued the order in Galveston, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.” It was June 19, 1865 establishing the basis for the holiday, “Juneteenth” (“June” plus “nineteenth”), today the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States.
For years, Juneteenth has been recognized with some form of observance in almost every state. On June 15, 2021 the Senate unanimously approved a bill to make Juneteenth a legal public holiday. The next day, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the bill. Then on June 17, President Joe Biden signed into law legislation establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a U.S. federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.
As we are now at the hundredth anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, people look back at the atrocity with questions even today. They wonder how such a thing could happen. The Tulsa massacre occurred when white mobs attacked the affluent Greenwood African American community. The complete devastation of the Greenwood neighborhood, known as Black Wall Street, that was burned to the ground is hard to comprehend. It has been called the deadliest and most destructive massacre in our country’s history. It was a brutal attack on the prosperous black neighborhood with thousands of angry white people targeting the area and its citizens in a wave of violence that included murder, shootings, the looting of homes and businesses, fires set by torches, even incendiary explosive devices dropped from small airplanes that caused buildings to burn from the roof down. A number of the more graphic photographs were printed after the massacre as postcards such as these. Members of Tulsa white supremacist organizations displayed them and mailed them to sympathizers around the country. What caused the terrible outbreak? Apparently a young black teenager named Dick Rowland entered an elevator in an office building downtown. At some point after that, the young white elevator operator, Sarah Page, screamed, and Rowland fled. It has largely been accepted that Rowland may have only stumbled into the girl. The police were called, and the next morning they arrested Rowland. Later a large group of angry white men gathered outside the courthouse demanding Rowland, and rumors of a lynching spread. The white men grew to 1,500, some armed. About 75 black men had gathered to protect Rowland, some also armed. After shots were fired, the outnumbered black men went back to Greenwood, and there the massacre began. In the end, 35 blocks were burned to the ground, as many as 300 blacks were killed, and nearly 10,000 people were left homeless. No one was ever charged for these crimes, and prosperity for the African American community has never returned. For generations the tragedy was repressed, only now at the 100-year anniversary getting the attention it deserves. By Anne E. Peterson, Curator of Photographs
Despite the recent damp spring weather, we are looking forward to sunnier days ahead. Summer is fast approaching and with that barbeques, beach balls, and swimming. Browsing through the SMU digital collections of the Archives of Women of the Southwest, Kenda North’s photographs of sun bathers stood out. Some of the 1970s summer fashion featured in these photographs would not be out of place today.
Harlequin, 1977; Photograph of the midsection of a sunbathing woman wearing a blue polka-dot bikini.Mich in Pool, 1978, Photograph of the midsection of a sunbathing woman wearing a green swimsuit.
Kenda North has been specifically working in color in photography her entire career with innovative work with dye transfer materials in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her career has been marked by consistent experimentation and techniques of available color processes. North has had over 50 one person exhibitions and participated in over 100 group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Her photographs are in over 50 public collections throughout the U.S. and Europe. From 1989 to 2020, North was on the faculty at the University of Texas, Arlington. She was Chair of the Art and Art History Department from 1991 to 1999 and was awarded Professor Emerita in summer 2020.
Striped suit, 1977, Photograph of the torso of a sunbathing woman wearing a striped bikini.Visor, 1977, Photograph of the upper body of a sunbathing woman with her head covered by a visor.
The Kenda North photographs and papers, 1972-2017, at the DeGolyer Library consists of 1,059 photographic prints and large framed pieces. The majority are in various color processes. There are hand colored dye transfer prints, Polaroids, and Cibachrome prints. Also included are notebooks, her exhibition invitations and announcements. These images come from the sunbather series. “The “Sunbather Series” was photographed and printed from 1976 to 1982 and consist of 20 Hand colored dye transfer prints with titles and number identifications. They started with photographs made on public beaches from Chicago to Los Angeles with focus on sections of the body in the landscape.”
Self Portrait, 1976, Photograph of the upper body and head of a sunbathing woman wearing a black and white bikini top.Green suit, 1976, Photograph of the torso of a sunbathing woman wearing a green bikini.
Contact Samantha Dodd, curator of theArchives of Women of the Southwestfor additional information or assistance with accessing these materials. For more information and access to photograph collections, contact our Curator of PhotographsAnne E. Peterson. The DeGolyer continues to expand our digitization efforts, adding new content weekly. We have thousands of items digitized and searchable in our digital collections with many thousands more to come!
“I’ll be home for Christmas,” promised Bing Crosby in 1943 in one of that year’s top hits. “I’ve been here all year anyway,” quips one of the myriad of memes trending on social media at the end of 2020. Both allude to situations in which protagonists long to be reunited with their loved ones for the holidays, though the circumstances differ: being home-bound during a pandemic, or far away from home during a war. Several DeGolyer Library manuscript collections document experiences of Dallas people who spent more than one holiday apart from their families while fighting in wars or as prisoners of war.
The John C. Cox papers include the letters, postcards, photographs, army periodicals, ephemera and artifacts documenting the Dallas native’s deployment to the Pacific during World War II. One of the first photographs in the collection is dated March 1943 and illustrates a fully decorated Christmas tree with gifts underneath. Prior to his departure for military training in California, Cox’s family organized an out-of-season Christmas, unsure whether their son and brother would make it home for the actual holiday that year – or ever.
The correspondence with his family reveals that Cox was spending Christmas in the Philippines in 1944. A letter from December 26, 1944 recounts the events of the previous two days, starting with a Japanese bombing on Christmas Eve: “The celebration started on Christmas Eve. The Japanese were helping us celebrate, I think … [They] gave us a show. They raided us about 4 times during the night.” But further down, the letter reveals the attempt at spending the holiday as close to tradition as possible amid the attack: “I had just gone to the chapel to the Christmas Eve carol service, where I was going to act as an usher … when the red alert went on. We had an overflow crowd [and] had some Filipino soldiers and their families with us.” “A meal was served consisting of “hot coffee and hot cocoa, plus coffee cakes and candies” – apparently not the usual fare, given the letter writer’s appreciation: “All were very good and really hit the spot.” What he really appreciated, though, was finding “five letters and 3 Christmas cards. So, it was really heavenly,” he writes, along with receiving “one Xmas package from you, Mom, containing the fruit cake in a can, the Vienna sausage and rolls of mints. So fine a package,” he concludes before wishing his family a very Happy New Year. The following year, Christmas would find Cox among other American soldiers returning home aboard the USS Tabora (AKA-45) cargo ship. His letters from December 1945 and the discharge papers from January 13, 1946 show that he had just missed another holiday season with his family.
Half a decade after the end of World War II, the Korean War would also cause numerous families to spend the holidays apart. Among the materials included in the Sam Johnson congressional papers, there are several photographs and memorabilia from the earlier period of his life, when he was an Air Force pilot. This photograph from November 1952 documents how Sam, wife Shirley and their young son celebrated a combined Thanksgiving and Christmas right before Sam’s deployment to Korea, where he flew more than 60 combat missions.
Johnson also flew for the Air Force during the Vietnam War. In April 1966, Johnson’s plane was shot down and he was injured and captured as a POW. No correspondence was allowed to and from his prison cell in Hanoi, where the days were counted with marks in the wall, according to Captive Warriors, his autobiography published in 1992. On the first Christmas in captivity, Johnson was offered a” dish of candy and a bowl of bananas” by one of the prison officers, who looked suspiciously benevolent; though tempted by the rare sight of fresh fruit, Johnson and his cellmate turned them down fearing that Christmas was used as “another opportunity for propaganda” by their captors. Being injured and imprisoned brought “many reasons for sadness and loneliness,” but he instead thought of his family and “visualized Shirley and the children spending Christmas without me. I felt their loneliness… and I wanted to reassure them, to let them know that I was going to be okay.” It turned out that six more holiday seasons would pass before Johnson’s release and return to the United States in February 1973.
Whether memorialized in songs, letters, social media or marks on a wall, time away from family or friends is not easy on anyone. Browsing collections such as the papers of Congressman Sam Johnson or John C. Cox reminds us that celebrating the holidays in unfamiliar and hostile places during a war can be particularly hard. Nonetheless, they also inspire us to appreciate the little things and every minute we get to spend with our loved ones.
Best wishes for a very happy and much better 2021!
Contact Ada Negraru for information about the John C. Cox World War II papers and Congressman Sam Johnson papers (in process).
References
John C. Cox World War II papers, DeGolyer Library, MSS 105
Aqui la calavera esta, senores, de toditos los buenos valedores; Gentlemen, the skeleton of all the good protectors is here (1913)
“The air is cool, the season fall, soon Halloween will come to all…” This week brings October to a close and with that my favorite holiday of the year is fast approaching. Halloween, All Hallows’ Eve, or All Saints’ Eve, is celebrated in many countries on October 31st. It is a time dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), and martyrs. Halloween is immediately followed by Día de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead. Celebrated nationally on November 1st in Mexico and elsewhere, the Day of the Dead is also named All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. This holy day involves family and friends gathering to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died, building offrendas and helping support their spiritual journey.
In the DeGolyer Library’s holdings is a substantial collection of Mexican broadsides illustrated by the artist José Guadalupe Posada. This Mexican printmaker is considered the “Father of Modern Mexican Art” and also “printmaker to the Mexican people.” To view this influential artist visit the DeGolyer Library’s digital collections.
Calavera de los carros de la limpia; Gibes at the New Sanitation Vehicles ca. 1910
José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) was born in Aguascalientes, Mexico. He is most known for his broadsides featuring Calaveras, skulls and skeletons. These works portrayed daily lifestyles, the abuses of government, and the exploitations of people sometimes using skeletons. Following Posada’s death, these works became associated with the holiday Día de los Muertos. Most of Posada’s prints were published by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo in the form of inexpensive news sheets and corridos (Mexican ballads about struggle against oppression and injustice) sold in markets and aimed at the lower class and illiterate.
Calavera Tapatia, 1910
The DeGolyer Library also holds photographs by image makers working in Mexico such as Alfred Briquet, Hugo Brehme, Charles B. Waite and others. There are photographs of the Mexican Revolution by Manuel Ramos, Walter Horne, and other photographers throughout Mexico and on the border. The Elmer and Diane Powell Collection on Mexico and the Mexican Revolution is an important resource for the study of Mexico. The Powell collection consists of photographs, real photographic postcards, Posada prints, original artwork, broadsides, currency, periodicals, books and manuscripts related to Mexico and the Mexican Revolution.
Spooky in Special Collections banner
Want to learn more about Posada and other “haunting” images in the archives? Then be sure to register for the upcoming Archive’s Month panel: Spooky in Special Collections.
Join six wonderful Texas institutions starting at 1:30pm CT on Friday, October 30 for a live, virtual event on Zoom as we share and answer questions about some of the spookiest items from each of our collections. It’s sure to get you in the Halloween spirit!
Registration is free, but required to attend and participate so don’t delay! Register today!
Schedule of the featured repositories presentation times, All times listed are for Central Time Zone.
1:40pm DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University
Melvin C. Shaffer World War II Photographs housed at the DeGolyer Library depict local populations and conditions of North Africa, Italy, Southern France, and Germany from the years 1943 to 1945. Included are images of war-torn Europe with shattered buildings, wounded soldiers, army hospitals and bases, and even Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in 1944.
Melvin Shaffer With Cine Special Motion Picture Camera, 8th Evacuation Hospital, Italy, 1943.
Melvin Shaffer was born May 9, 1924 in Shinnston, West Virginia, a rural town with an economy based on mining and oil fields. After high school, he attended college in Phillipi, West Virginia. While there, he worked as a medical photographer at a local hospital.
World War II interrupted Shaffer’s college experience, and he enlisted in the army in 1943 at the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C. He received training as a medical corpsman and further training as a medical photographer. In August 1943, Shaffer was transferred to Northern Africa. During the course of the next two years, he traveled extensively to such places as Casablanca, Sicily, Salerno, Naples, Anzio, Rome, Florence, Poltava, Southern France, Dachau, Munich, Berlin, Nuremburg and Paris.
Shaffer explained his wartime duties, “Beginning in Italy, these assignments expanded beyond the development of instructional materials to encompass the documentation of the medical history of the war. This ultimately involved making motion pictures of every major campaign in Italy, the invasion of southern France, and the final push across southern Europe to Dachau and ultimately to Berlin — the emphasis always being on filming medical care, from the battlefield to the final disposition of a case.”
Berlin, Late May, 1945.
To access the Shaffer online WWII collection at the DeGolyer, see: https://www.smu.edu/libraries/digitalcollections/mcs/
Melvin Shaffer has written an autobiography published by the DeGolyer Library. To order, see: https://secure.touchnet.net/C21403_ustores/web/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=1946&SINGLESTORE=true
By Anne Peterson, Curator of Photographs, DeGolyer Library, SMU
Today’s social environment reflects the turbulent and difficult times in which we find ourselves. We are experiencing national and global anger over the senseless killing of George Floyd and other African Americans by police. Black lives do matter, and people of good will acutely feel for those who are in pain. We are aware that we must continue the struggle for meaningful and enduring change to overcome acts of racism and violence that corrode our nation and the world.
Sadly, these recent events have a related, dark past stretching back for centuries. Some acts of racial violence have received attention, while others have gone undocumented. In the photography collection at the DeGolyer Library, we hold illustrations of past racial injustice in our region. The importance of photography in documenting such events can not be overestimated.
Lynching of Allen Brooks in Downtown Dallas, 1910.
In Dallas on March 3, 1910, Allen Brooks, a 65-year old African-American laborer accused of rape, awaited arraignment at the Dallas County Courthouse. An angry vigilante crowd of white men had gathered outside. They broke into the courthouse and threw Brooks out a second-story window. He was then stabbed and beaten. With a rope around his neck, he was dragged through the street and strung up on a telephone pole near the Elk Arch in downtown. A crowd of 5,000 men, women, and children dispassionately watched as if it were a sporting event. Spectators took pieces of Brooks’s clothing as souvenirs. The sensational story of Allen Brooks’s lynching was disturbing enough to make national and even international newspapers; however, there is still no marker to commemorate his violent death.
While times were tough for most blacks after the Civil War, they still had their emancipation to celebrate. It was June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston with the announcement that the war was over, and slaves had been emancipated two years before. The day came to be known as Juneteenth, an annual day for African Americans to celebrate their freedom and advancement.
Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, 1913, Corpus Christi, Texas.
Post Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist hate group, was active throughout the south, and Texas was no exception. Their initial goal was the suppression of African Americans, but by the 1920s they also included hatred of Catholics, Jews, and foreigners. In 1922, with six thousand members, Fort Worth had one of the strongest Klans in the country. Its members, to quote the Star-Telegram on April 3, 1922, were the “best men in every walk of life,” and many were policemen. When the city finance commissioner, W.B. Townsend, died in 1923, the Dallas Morning News reported his funeral included what was called the first Klan funeral parade ever held.
Fort Worth Klan No. 101. Realm of Texas Knights Ku Klux Klan, 1923.
The Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riot and massacre that took place May 31 and June 1, 1921, has been called the single worst incident of racial violence in U.S. history. A black teenage shoe shiner, Dick Rowland, was accused of assaulting a white female elevator operator. The ensuing racial attack by white mobs destroyed more than 35 square blocks in the wealthiest African American community in America, known as Black Wall Street. The Red Cross estimated 300 blacks dead, 1,250 residences burned, and many homes looted. However, those published estimates could greatly underestimate the real numbers.
Negro Slain in Tulsa Riot, June-1-1921.
Hispanic Americans have also faced racism and violence and are also documented in our collections. In Dallas, in the early morning of July 24, 1973, 12 year old Santos Rodriguez and his 13 year old brother, David, were taken from their home, handcuffed, and put in a police squad car. They were accused of robbing a gas station vending machine. Without a warrant, the boys were taken to the gas station for interrogation. A white officer, Darrell L. Cain, tried to get a confession from the Rodriguez brothers, but they consistently denied the crime. Officer Cain then got out his gun, removed some bullets, and put the revolver to Santos’s head. Threatening to kill him, Cain began to play Russian roulette. He pulled the trigger, an empty round. Cain fired again, sending a bullet into Santos’s head killing the boy instantly. It was later proved that the Rodriguez brothers had nothing to do with the petty cash robbery. Cain was sentenced to five years in prison for murder with malice; however, he only served two and a half years for killing the Hispanic child. A few days after Santos’s death, there was a march of protest attended by a multiracial group of 5,000 Latino, African American, and white citizens.
March of Justice for Santos Rodriguez, July 28, 1973.
The struggle for racial equality and human rights has been ongoing for a very long time. My great-great-grandfather was a white abolitionist. William Harrison Smith, who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was a church deacon and part of the Underground Railroad. He operated a “safe house” in the 1850s and 1860s and helped get fugitive slaves north to safety in Canada. Because helping slaves was illegal, everyone who worked with the Underground Railroad worked secretly, usually at night and did so at great risk. It is important to remember in the turbulence of today that the Underground Railroad was interracial. It’s an example of whites and blacks working together for a common cause to promote liberty and ultimately equality. Times have changed since the Underground Railroad in the 19th century, but clearly much more change is needed. The future holds promise along with many challenges. Black and brown lives matter, and we all need to work toward a future of lasting change for racial equality.
Photographs such as the ones shown here, and many more like them in our collection, help to illustrate where we’ve been, and how much more work we have to do to form ‘a more perfect Union.’
Anne E. Peterson, Curator of Photographs, DeGolyer Library, SMU
This winter, we celebrated the life and professional legacy of Andy Hanson with our exhibit Andy Hanson: Picturing Dallas 1960-2008. The exhibit allowed visitors to appreciate Hanson’s incredible talent and reflect on the history of Dallas. If you were unable to visit the exhibit, you can explore the virtual exhibit at any time by clicking the link below:
Much of Andy’s career was spent in a Dallas newsroom, covering the city’s politicians and leaders. If you’d like to learn more about the political history of Dallas, consider the following collections:
Earle Cabell Papers
Earle Cabell (1906 – 1975) was a dairyman, food merchant, Dallas mayor, and United States Congressman. In serving as mayor of Dallas, Cabell followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. His term was from 1961 to 1964, during which time he guided the city through the John F. Kennedy assassination and aftermath. Cabell served four consecutive terms as Texas’ Fifth District Congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1964 to 1972.
Erik Jonsson (1901-1995) was the Brooklyn-born co-founder and president of Texas Instruments, and mayor of Dallas from 1964 to 1971, which saw among other achievements the development of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. A strong advocate for education, Jonsson founded what would become The University of Texas at Dallas.
You can view the finding aid, in three parts, here:
James M. Collins (1916-1989) was raised in Dallas and earned a bachelor’s degree from SMU before serving as a captain in Patton’s Third Army, where he earned a Purple Heart. After years of working in his family’s insurance firm, he was elected in 1968 to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving Texas’ Third Congressional District. After leaving politics in 1983, Collins served as president of SMU Alumni, and as a member of the SMU Board of Trustees.
Dallas in the second half of the 20th century was known for its booming businesses and high-society, marked by glamour and decadence. If you’d like to read more about some movers and shakers captured by Andy, check out the following collections:
Caroline Rose Hunt papersCaroline Rose Hunt (1923-2019) was the third of legendary oilman H.L. Hunt’s fifteen children. As an adult she was recognized as the richest woman in the world, thanks to careful management of her inheritance, and bolstered by the success of the numerous hotels she opened and operated under the Rosewood Hotels and Resorts banner. In addition to her business interests, Hunt published a novel and two cookbooks, and was a dedicated supporter of the arts and humanities.
Stanley Marcus (1905-2002) was the eldest son of Neiman Marcus department store founder Herbert Marcus. He joined the family firm after attending Harvard Business School, and became the creative heart of the company, launching numerous initiatives including in-house fashion shows, industry awards, and the annual Fortnight celebrations, which brought international culture and fashion to Dallas. “Mr. Stanley” was also a noted patron of the arts and humanities in Dallas, as well as a critical voice for social justice in the city.
Ebby Halliday (1911-2005) went from selling women’s hats to founding and leading one of the world’s largest independently owned real estate firms, earning her the nickname the “First Lady of Real Estate” and recognition as one of the business leaders of Dallas.
If you’d like to learn more about the history of Dallas, consider the following titles:
Big D: triumphs and troubles of an American supercity in the 20th century by Darwin Payne
The Dallas Myth: the making and unmaking of an American city by Harvey J. Graff
Dallas: A History of ‘Big D’ by Michael V. Hazel
If you have any questions about the collections mentioned above, please email Christina Jensen at cwjensen@smu.edu, or stop by the DeGolyer reading room.
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