In close proximity to most old college campuses is (or was) a small business strip known as “The Drag,” so-called, as nearly as I can determine, because of its similarity to what one dictionary defines as the main street of a small American town. Built in the days before campus student unions and university stores, the Drag provided not only drug and dry goods to the campus and the neighboring communities, but more importantly, places for friends to meet and to generally “hang out.”
Situated at the south edge of the campus, TCU’s Drag occupies half of the east side of the 3000 block of South University Drive. (I see that I still use present tense, although my guess is that the Drag is moving inexorably into the past.) Most who attended TCU and went on to spend their lives elsewhere remember that particular block in no more than four- or five-year spans, those being the years that they spent as undergraduates. Today, as I walk along what remains of TCU’s Drag, I feel the air heavy with association that reaches back beyond fifty years. Almost palpable, it is still so full of all that has passed from it.
Once this summer, I sat on the east side of the Bailey Building, which stands on the west campus across University Drive from the Drag, and tried to remember just where everything was when I first knew it, my mind painting a sort of historical mural, with what is present in the foreground and forms of images past filling in the background. Far back and faint in that background is a short row of shops that run a quarter way down the block. On the northernmost corner stands the TCU Drug Store, and next to it is Rilda Smith’s Portrait Studio, and then Mr. Sampley’s TCU Cleaners.
Recall becomes jumbled here. I think I know the names of the other shops, but placement eludes my memory’s brush. An old annual picture taken in the forties helps to sketch in the alignment: the TCU Beauty Shop next to the cleaners, then the TCU Shoe Shop, the TCU Barber Shop, Blackburn’s Five and Dime, and last in the row, TCU Plumbing.
This was a time when shop doors stood open in the hot Texas summer, and overhead fans moved the unconditioned air about, and flyswatters stood at the ready. Some, as did the TCU Drug Store, had screen doors, and Blackburn’s had friendly bells that jangled when the door opened so as to alert proprietors to the presence of customers. In cold weather, heaters that hung far back and from the ceiling provided warmth. In the here and now, all doors are closed against whatever weather and only occasionally does one encounter a flying critter inside.
The people who tended the shops in that long ago and whose faces are just visible in the distant scene were, for the most part, friendly. I recall especially the TCU Barber Shop’s Dudley Peacock, who performed his tonsorial artistry on the menfolk and who, one day when I was twelve, pulled my long, thin red hair back, worked it into a single braid, cut it for the first time in my memory, and handed the severed bunch to my mother for safekeeping or keepsaking or, as it turned out, for both. His jovial banter kept the experience — my rite of passage — from being a painful one for the still-shy pre-teen who sat so silently while he cut.
As I sat across from the drag on that summer day in 1990, scenes appeared that reached farther back and were fainter still, back beyond my own memory. Flickers flashed from another’s past giving a momentary glimpse inside the Drug where an old Victrola plays and a young highschool girl named Elizabeth dances the Charleston with a young college boy named Arthur while another young college boy, Willis, looks on and decides then and there he will have that girl to wed, and did. Dancing was forbidden on the campus, but Mr. Rogers at the Drug liked the kids and allowed it, sometimes. And as I sat, I thought I could hear the streetcar clacking down the University Drive tracks toward the Drag which was the end-of-the-line from town, the trolley loaded with student celebrants returning from the Central Christian Church downtown where a TCU basketball team had triumphed. Legend has it that the students would rock the car so hard that the conductor had to stop several times along the way out to the campus to allow it to settle and to keep its wheels from jumping the track.
Sometime in the forties, the original line of Drag shops was extended south almost to the corner of Berry St. This was when the TCU Theatre was built, the popular Spudnut Shop was opened, Dave Bloxom’s Pool Hall teemed with players and kibitzers, and Mary Evelyn’s and the University Men’s Shop became classy places to buy classy clothes.
For those of us who went to TCU in those days and in the early fifties, the Drag included the Colonial Cafeteria across University to the west, then turned east on Berry and continued down a couple of blocks past the Zip, the Hi-Hat Lounge, the Rathskeller, Owen’s Drug Store, El Chico’s Mexican Restaurant, Carshon’s Delicatessen, and Schotta’s Cafe and Cake Shop. Most of these places are gone altogether now and some are in new places away from the Drag toward better accomodations with more traffic. The buildings that housed Dave’s place, the Spudnut Shop, and Mary Evelyn’s were torn down to be replaced by the ultimate replacer, a parking lot.
The Drag is not so popular and, thus, not so populated as it once was. Convenience of goods and eats in the Student Center and the mobility of today’s students have contributed to the decline of business there. A car, now, is part and parcel of going off to college and there are few who do not have ready conveyance to the local malls and strip shopping centers that offer “more and better.”
What fills the present is short to tell. The old Drug building is being remodeled (for yet another time) from a night spot called the Klymaxxx! into the ready-to-wear Sweat Shop. The TCU Cleaners doggedly holds its old place between the newcomer modelling agency and Jon’s Grille, next to which are the Greek House restaurant, Flash photo shop, and some vacant places with “For Lease” signs in the windows. Of all these I like Jon’s Grille the best. Its interior spans what was the beauty shop, the shoe shop, and Dud’s barber shop; its ceiling tiles, windows, and floors, still speak of the past — and the folk are friendly.
The saddest aspect of all that remain is that of the TCU Theatre, a silent ghost, silently waiting for its time to end, doors shut and boarded up, as if to lock inside the memories of Saturday matinees when neighborhood kids filled front row seats and followed the latest episode of western serials and watched the cartoon antics of Popeye, Roadrunner, and Daffy Duck; as if to hide away the secrets of Saturday nights when young couples sought out its most remote balcony seats; as if to block the view of a patriotic public who cheered the Allied victors and hissed the Axis villains as they watched the world at war brought to horrible life in those pre-TV days of the RKO newsreels.
On that summer day in 1990 as I sat sketching this mural, the past seemed closer than the present. And as I watched, I got the notion that the buildings were watching too, looking back at me, marking my aging as I am marking theirs, as if we are both gnomons, measuring the shadows that we cast on the mural, recording our time on this TCU hill.
©1990 Joan Hewatt Swaim