Stained glass and Clyde Barrow
One fall afternoon in 1967, some friends and I, sophomores at North Texas State University, gathered at the Campus Theater on Courthouse Square in Denton, Texas, to see the then-new Hollywood movie ‘ Bonnie and Clyde’. That minor but hugely popular play had its world premiere there a few days earlier, having been filmed in small towns in Denton and Dallas counties, where many of the buildings that house the original Bonnie and Clyde robbed banks still stand. . The movie itself was a pretty skinny period fashion show, and neither Warren Beatty nor Faye Dunaway were especially convincing as 1930s outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The film’s glamor and romanticism of Barrow and Parker’s outlaw ways complemented rebellious notions of the ‘hippie’ counterculture in vogue among many bourgeois college Americans of the late 1960s.
The following weekend, while visiting my parents in Dallas, I mentioned that I had gone to see ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. My mother replied, “He used to bounce me on his knee.” “In fact?!” I reacted. She nodded and smiled to herself. Some years later, one thing led to another and another, and I got to the bottom of that rather unexpected addition to my initial experience with the notorious local couple.
Sometime during the 1980s, after a brief and entertaining casual investigation at the Dallas Public Library, I discovered that the true story of the Barrow gang is, as is often the case, much more interesting and complex than the popular myth. one-dimensional . To be sure, the sociological backgrounds of the true story are properly regarded as important history. In the 1990s I came across a fascinating and well-crafted little book called ‘Running With Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults’ by John Neal Phillips. One chapter in this electric account of the incredibly violent experiences of various members of the Barrow’s Lake Dallas gang follows Barrow after being released from one of his stints in prison. Having decided to try to go more or less straight, he set out to find work, hitchhiking and traveling by bus from Texas to Massachusetts. But his background and his opportunity (this was during the Great Depression, when jobs were scarce) left him without prospects and he returned, longing for his home, to Dallas.
A few years ago, during one of my visits to the owner of Molloy Glass and Mirror, a small shop on Floyd Street in Dallas, and one of the oldest businesses still in operation in Dallas, I was surprised to learn from him that for many years Dallas had been a kind of hotbed for making art glass for churches, commercial buildings, and homes. He looked up a Dallas phone book from about the 1990s and showed me that the company with the most listings in the directory was the Dallas Art Glass Company, with about 100 employees.
At least two art glass stores other than Molloy’s were located on Floyd Street and adjacent Swiss Avenue during the Great Depression. One was the United Glass and Mirror Company. After Clyde Barrow returned from the north, that company hired him as a delivery man. He apparently was very well liked. He hung out at Molloy’s and hung out with the employees there, I’m told. But at the time in Dallas, cases of criminal mischief would lead local police to round up the usual suspects. Clyde being in that category meant street patrols in front of United Glass and Mirror. After a few episodes of the resulting negative publicity, United decided to let Barrow go. That was the last time Barrow, frustrated and sullen, thought of legitimate employment.
Art glass companies in Dallas employed a number of immigrant artisans, most of whom were Czech or German. After my maternal grandfather emigrated to the US from Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1913, he worked in various stained glass shops in Texas until he was later able to devote himself full time to his own studio. His first wife died in the early 1930s, leaving behind two young children. It would not have been unusual for those children to have been at their father’s workplaces, two of which were United Glass and Mirror and Molloy Glass and Mirror, where they would likely have come into contact with the future. desperate, hardened, wanted killer Clyde Barrow.
Today’s postmodern, cosmopolitan international crossroads known as Dallas, Texas has retained a bit of its old city. One finds familiar places, often unchanged from the past, in the oldest parts of the city. The building that was once the gas station/snack bar that Barrow’s father, with whom Barrow was very close, built across from the small frame house he had built earlier, is located on Singleton Avenue in the area of West Dallas. The small duplex in front of which Barrow shot and fatally wounded a sheriff’s deputy is still nearby on North Winnetka Avenue. The house Bonnie Parker lived in with her mother is on Douglass Street, just south of Wycliff Avenue, near Maple Avenue. And the building that housed a cafe where Parker was a popular waitress before she met Barrow now houses a polishing shop, near the Baylor Hospital complex in Old East Dallas, a few blocks from those art glass shops on Floyd Street and Swiss Avenue, and a nice easy bike ride from the chair I sit in to write.
I regularly pass by buildings associated with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, much like the buildings in the Dallas neighborhoods I grew up in. It’s not hard for me to imagine the future affable vicious outlaw, in his honest working man’s clothes, throwing my mother, then a very small girl, over her knee, leaving her, strangely, with a pleasant memory.