South Dodge Entertainment Then and Now

My grandmother loved to dance and roller skate. There wasn’t much going on in the area around the Beeson House while Irene was growing up but she could enjoy two of her favorite activities right across the street.

“Jim McDowell opened a dance hall in a vacant garage (large) across the street from our house. 10 cents a dance with live bands, open Wednesday and Saturday nights. Some Saturdays, it would last ’til dawn…known as a Sunrise Dance. The parking lot would be covered with whiskey bottles. Some of the bottles were fancy. I met my first girl friend there. Girls came with their parents. One eve a good-looking young man asked me to dance but I was too shy. Wished later I had.”
Irene Beeson

Jim McDowell was the former Ford County Weed Supervisor who died in 1980. In 1930, he rented a room from my great-grandparents at the Beeson House. Jim’s occupation was listed on the 1930 Federal Census as manager of a public dance hall, working on his own account.

The vacant garage in question was Percy Orval Riley’s Sunnyside Garage, which may have previously occupied a location on South Second Avenue but I’m not completely sure about that. Irene’s best friend while she was in grade school was Florene Riley, who was Percy’s much-younger sister. Incidentally, Florene married Cecil Metcalf and was Barry’s mother, for those of you who are Dodge locals.

The first Sanborn Fire Insurance Map to include the northeast corner of what is now Beeson Road and Sunnyside Avenue was published in 1932. It’s a black and white PDF so I’ve included screenshots of Pages 1 and17 here.

This image from Page 17 is great until you start wondering what the heck Highway 45 was.

The map below kind of made me think it was actually showing McArtor Road (formerly Hwy 56) but it’s definitely what is now Beeson Road. All you have to do is look on a current map at where the railroad tracks cross 14th Street and it’s obvious. Plus, the 1930 Federal Census lists the Beeson House on “Township Highway.” Now we’ve all learned something.

In 1928, Riley Garage was listed on “Beeson Highway” but it moved to a new spot at 613 Sunnyside Avenue, which is where Poor Boy Kustomz is currently located. That building was dark green with white doors for many years, if I remember correctly. Percy and his wife, Alice, lived next door at 615 Sunnyside. The house which occupied that lot has been gone for several decades. His mother, Flora, lived on the other side of the building at 611 Sunnyside. Cecil and Florene (Riley) Metcalf lived a few houses south at 707 Sunnyside. At one point, the Riley family owned all of those lots.

Anyway, the dance hall became a roller skating rink while Irene was in high school (Class of 1940.) I’m not sure if it was ever opened as a public rink or if Irene and her friends just found a way inside and skated on the maple floor. I do remember her saying holes in the roof eventually allowed rain to ruin the floor and their fun. Here she is posing out front along Sunnyside and facing south.

In the background, you can see the porch roof of the house that is still located at 708 Sunnyside Avenue. When I was a kid, I skated at the rink up on the bypass and it had concrete floors so I was amazed when she told me she skated on wood floors. It seemed so sketchy to me for some reason.

There was no business listing there by 1947 and it seems like it was torn down in the 1950s. The lot was really junky for a long time and then someone came in and cleaned it up maybe in the late 1980s or early ’90s. The satellite view on Google Maps still shows a clear outline of the foundation.

Here are a few photos I took recently:

Speaking of skates, I rolled around on these white ones throughout my childhood. Then I carried them around with me from state to state for decades until finally surrendering them to my cousin in their original box. Roller skates are serious business.

Here’s some bonus content. I labeled this photo “skating rink” while Irene was still alive but I was studying the sign a couple days ago and thought I must have been mistaken. It looks like it’s a cafe so why would I think it was a skating rink? Well, if you look between the “CA” and “FOUNTAIN,” you will notice “PUNCH BROWN” in faded letters.

(L to R): Mary Jane Heft, Eleanor Sage, Irene Beeson – Photographer Unknown

That seems kind of weird unless you know that Punch Brown ran a skating rink! He had been undersheriff of Finney County circa 1917 and then relocated to Dodge City. In 1925, he opened a skating rink in the Merchants Pavilion on the west side of Second Avenue at Water Street.

Not to be confused with the Hoover Pavilion, which was built in 1919, the Merchants Pavilion was constructed by the City of Dodge City in 1925 initially to house exhibitors’ booths at the Great Southwest Fair. When Punch Brown converted the building to a skating rink, he also added a separate dance floor. The idea was for the building to be used for dancing and skating during the winter and then booths could be brought back in for the fair each year. The 1926 Sanborn Map shows both pavilions as well as the surrounding structures.

The facility ended up hosting all sorts of events.

The City decided to sell the pavilion in 1929 to fund improvements at Wright Park and the fairgrounds. It’s unclear how exactly that transpired but Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co. was located there in 1937. Mayrath Machinery Company was in this building in 1945.

*Dodge City Daily Globe,* October 20, 1945

I think Mayrath may have been there a touch earlier because Dodge flooded in 1942 and the Minneapolis Moline sign can be seen in this photo. Someone else will have to decide if that year jives with the cars. That is not my department!

The building appears to have been vacant by at least 1947. By 1957, the building was home to Nufer-Stremel Used Cars. Now this is how you sell cars!

*Great Bend Daily Tribune,* August 5, 1958

That business morphed into Nufer-Hutton Used Cars by 1961. I can’t remember ever seeing a building in that spot. It makes me wonder if it was a victim of the 1965 flood.

The Google Maps satellite view makes it easy to see where the building was situated just south of Overhead Door.

Unfortunately, I didn’t grab any photos of this location while I was in Dodge this last time because I had no idea where this post would take me. If anyone knows for sure how the Merchants Pavilion story ended, please leave a comment!

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August 22, 2022 1

Help a Researcher Out: Identify These Musicians

My grandmother, Irene, was beyond surprised when she realized she had a granddaughter who was interested in her family’s history. Her parents had a museum that began in their home and later required construction of a larger building to house the exhibits. Most of the collection was sold to another local museum before I was able to get in on the action but she did retain several items of interest.

Some of my earliest memories involved playing with literal museum pieces from the pioneer days on the prairie. I learned how to do a lot of basic activities of daily life using those pieces. Irene had a set of irons in various sizes for pressing different sizes of fabric. So the one you would use to iron bedding would be different from the one for a child’s dress. I remember her showing me how to heat the iron over the fireplace. She gave me some linen handkerchiefs to practice with and despite being as careful as a grade schooler could be, I burned my hand. That led to a First Aid lesson on current burn remedies as well as the methods used by pioneers and how she saw things evolve throughout her life.

Irene was a practical person and she made notes when I expressed interest in a particular photo or piece of china. She made sure I took those items with me when I left for college and I’ve been dragging them around for nearly 30 years. One of those cherished items was a photo of Irene at four years of age with her sister, her grandmother, and her uncle’s girlfriend. I only knew the girlfriend’s first and last names and that she was from California. Her name was relatively common and I didn’t think I stood a snowball’s chance in Hell of ever learning anything more about her.

I began a newspaper search for the girlfriend and was overwhelmed by the number of results found. Then I saw one that listed the correct name with the middle initial V and thought if only I could be so lucky. So I looked into this person with the middle name Veronica and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t her.

Veronica’s father was a retired railroad official who took a job in Long Beach as Vice President for a startup brokerage. He was also an original trustee for the brand-new and totally badass all co-op Sovereign Apartments, where he owned a large flat. The family came from Kansas and lived in Kansas City for a while before moving to California. One of Veronica’s sisters married a well-known Kansas City musician and composer and I recently learned the sister was a musician herself. Now I know how Veronica met my grandmother’s uncle.

The late teens and early 1920s were huge for people in the Kansas City entertainment scene moving to the Los Angeles area. Dr. E M. Hiner was a dentist and celebrated bandleader who had a successful music school and was tight with John Philip Sousa. Dr. Hiner moved to LA in 1919 and ultimately founded the music department at what is now UCLA. His former home on Figueroa Street is included in a tour of historic properties and there is a bandshell dedicated to Hiner and Sousa in a park across the street.

Irene’s uncle moved to LA at the same time as Veronica and her family in 1920. Veronica’s brother-in-law had his own orchestra which was featured in “La Fiesta” at the Million Dollar Theatre. By 1932, he was playing in the RKO Hillstreet Theater Orchestra. As the Great Depression progressed, he found steady work as a WPA musician. His nephew was a Hollywood radio performer who later became an insurance adjuster and convicted jewel thief. I know Irene’s uncle played professionally in the LA area but that’s about all I know. Many of the American Federation of Musicians Local No. 47’s records were destroyed by fire around 1970 so I may never learn more about his career.

For now, I have this band photo taken by Hollywood photographer Albert Witzel.

Although I can make a couple guesses, the only person I can identify with certainty is the gentleman in the back row, third from left. Help me ID any of the others and I’ll buy you a beer…or twelve.

I’ll up the ante if you correctly identify this car.

I don’t think I ask for much but this is turning into the brickiest of brick walls. It really shouldn’t be such a problem. After all, it’s only been 100 years.

Help me out, people. I’ve reached out to nearly everyone I can think of and haven’t received many replies. I’m starting to run out of ideas.

September 13, 2021 0

On To-Do Lists and Family Dynamics…Because Shut Up

The year I turned 40, I decided to stop doing things I don’t want to do. I decided I wasn’t particularly interested in anyone’s opinion of me or my life choices. Since it no longer mattered how I was perceived, I stopped cooking. Other than occasionally boiling water or putting a frozen pizza in the oven, I would microwave whatever or have a sandwich.

When the lockdowns began in March, everyone started baking bread. I went through that phase in the 1990s so it definitely wasn’t for me. We were still trying to figure out how to sell a TV show when no one was pitching or shooting so I kept my focus where it belonged. Changing viewing habits throughout this bizarro year have caused us to reshuffle our projects so that I have a bit of downtime. While I wait for the baton pass, I’m revisiting all of those things that have been “on the list.”

My grandmother died in 2012 and I was the executrix of her estate. There was a small piece of property which had been bouncing around in my grandfather’s family since 1930 and was finally sold around 1995. This particular quarter-section of dry farmland was in a corner of Kansas few have reason to visit. Most of us in the family had a vague idea of its existence but had never seen it and there was a general air of annoyance whenever it was discussed. When my grandmother died, it never occurred to me that I would need to think of that property again.

As an only child, I am mystified by sibling relationships. I never learned the fine arts of manipulation and emotional blackmail. This has probably held me back in my career. Regardless, I never understood the weirdness in my grandfather’s family. He and his two siblings were adopted from different families so I just chalked it up to different backgrounds and really only paid attention at Thanksgiving and Christmas. When I got tired of being around the whole fam-damily, I would go outside and hang with the animals. There was a fucking LION for Christ’s sake…but that’s another story for another day.

So I’m sitting here in Mexico thinking about my storage unit in Arizona. I need to deal with the contents and stop paying for what feels like unnecessary baggage. There are family heirlooms which need to be given to cousins with children. There are documents I need to retrieve and keep with me. There is furniture to be sold or donated. There is book research I can pick up and actually finish. And there are a few outstanding questions which need to be answered. This is how I landed on 160 acres in Morton County, Kansas.

We never straightened out the mineral rights. Just thinking about this gives me a headache. There are multiple deeds back and forth between my great-grandmother and her children with weird percentages for the surface land and other splits for the mineral rights. All of these people are gone so multiple estates were involved. There was a fair share of acrimony involved. People felt entitled. Agitation from outside the family exacerbated the issues. It became one of those things that ends up being dropped because the inevitable fight isn’t worth a small monetary gain.

When I was a child, I could never understand when an adult would answer a question with, “Leave it alone; The past is in the past.” I’ve reached a point where I not only understand that answer but I FEEL that answer deep in my bones. I still don’t understand what was so special about this piece of land that was tiny compared to the rest of the acreage the family owned. If it was so important, I don’t understand why the issue wasn’t resolved while everyone was still alive. I certainly don’t understand why people have to make things so goddamned complicated.

I still struggle with choosing what deserves my mental energy. I still have a million questions and a million things I want to do. There are a lot of loose ends. It seems the ongoing exercise is accepting that some things can and probably should be left undone.

September 22, 2020 0