History Dork

If there's any doubt that john_clarke is a complete history geek, it'll all be confirmed on January 28. On that day, I'll attend a half-day symposium on the History of Dallas crime. It seems as though a bunch of historians are presenting a series of papers on different aspects of Dallas crime. And I can't f'ing wait. The first lecture is named something like this: "Harlots & Hopheads, the history of vice and drugs in Dallas from 1880 to 1950." It starts at 8:15 a.m. On a Saturday. And I will be on the front row at the downtown police department to hear this.

I'm not sure exactly how I got this way. I've always dug Texas history since I was a little kid. I'd write long drawn out history reports in my 4th Grade hand writing about General Santa Ana, the Mexican general who somehow got his butt kicked in the Texas revolution, even though he better equipped soldiers than the Texans and 4 times as many of them. The story goes that all of the Mexican soldiers were taking a siesta when the Texans attacked them at San Jacinto, insuring the Mexican defeat. At least that's what we were taught in elementary school. I now realize that story is likely a bunch of crap. It probably had more to do with the fact that Mexican soldiers were all likely conscripts who just wanted to get back to their wives in Monterrey instead of shooting at a bunch of whisky breathed gringos all day long. They probaly had little invested in this fight.

When I moved back to Dallas after living in Fort Worth, I had been a crime reporter for several years. So my interest in crime was at an all time high, and my interest in history still persisted. I dug the fact that after some research, I could find out all sorts of morose things about the places where I've lived in Dallas. For example in the early 198o's, Dallas police killed a guy who refused to put down a shotgun right in front the house I rented. The guy was half-crazed and got mad at two guys who used to live in the same house as me --- decades earlier. Crazy guy was firing at will at the two guys before DPD put an end to that . . . and the crazy guy. Sure enough, I looked at the side of the house seventeen years later and there were still shotgun pellet marks near the front bedroom.

Now I've taken to running Dallas street names through an newspaper data base to see what happened on them decades earlier. For example, there's couple of really cool old houses that I've always liked on a street called Powhatten just south of downtown. According to the old newspaper stories, Powhatten was the street in the 1930's where people went to score herion. Cops were always dragging "hopheads" out of several tenenment buildings on that street that have long since been bulldozed. To this day, Powhatten and the area around it still sucks as it's now a playground for skid row residents. You can't wash the history of crime off that street, even though it's just blocks from the shiny brand new Dallas Police Headquarters.

So I'll be there at Police HQ on January 20 to get even more hopped up on the dark history of my hometown.