Every once in a while, it's good to step back from normal news and consider the impact that a person or a place could have on a community. On this page, you will find a few of the feature stories I've written for various newspapers over the years. The stories are all a little longer and more in-depth. My hope while writing them was to reveal a little more about the subjects. If the stories do that, then I've done my job. If not, I still think they are pretty cool.

 

Matinee Idol: Theater's Renovation Plans Continues

Originally appeared in Grand Prairie Today.

 

      In its heyday, The Uptown Theater served as a beacon and a landmark.

      The green and pink neon pulsed and chased as people filed into the theater on weekend nights, buying popcorn and pickle juice snow cones while they waited for the latest creature feature to begin. The lights would go down and guys would snuggle up to their best girl and hope she would squeeze him tight as “The Wolfman” stalked through those dark woods on the celluloid screen.

      From its opening day in April of 1950 through the mid-1990s, The Uptown provided innumerable laughs, gasps and tears to its many patrons. And now, thanks to an effort by the city of Grand Prairie and the theater’s former owner, it will have an opportunity to share thousands more.

      The Plan

      Some time in the spring of 2008, the former one-screen movie house will open its doors onto a 400-seat performing arts theater.

      Broken into two phases for the exterior and interior work, plans for the $3.5 million project call for a full stage and orchestra pit built out into what is currently the seating area. The slope of the seating will be reconstructed for more of a stadium-style feel to allow for better sightlines to the stage.

      The city also purchased additional space in an adjacent building for prop storage and dressing areas, which were not feasible in the current building. The exterior of the building will be repainted and re-lit with the theater’s classic neon look.

      The one major change will be the digital marquee in place of the old plastic lettering that long showed patrons what movies were playing. The lobby area will be restored to its former glory, following the feel of the old Uptown, while also expanding into an adjacent building to allow a larger waiting area and the renovation of the public restrooms, which were not adequate by modern standards.

       “While the theater inside was not going to be a restoration, we still wanted it to have a 1950s era feel when you come into it,” Project Manager Marshall Warder said. “The exterior is going to be brought back to what it was when it was originally built and we wanted the inside to be similar to that same era.”

      Warder said that the work will bring back the original look of the theater, which so many consider a downtown landmark.

       “You can see what it looks like now, but it is just sort of in a deteriorated condition,” he said. “We are not just going to let it go to ruin.”

      The first phase of the theater’s redevelopment has gone out to bid and city officials expect to have the bids in by Feb. 27. But the theater is not just going to be a showpiece. It will be an actual working theater and a new, permanent home for the local performing arts community.

      He said right now, the city is lacking in facilities of The Uptown’s size in Grand Prairie. There are three arts spaces that come to mind. Two of those are owned by the Grand Prairie School District — the Keel Theater at South Grand Prairie, which seats about 200 people and the Chambers Auditorium, which seats 2,200-2,300 and is oftentimes too big for many productions.

      The other alternative is The Nokia theater which is much too large for community

theater.

       “This is a good mid-range size that is lacking in the community,” he said.

      Proponents also hope the theater could become a “people generator” for downtown, drawing people back to the area. It could, they say, spur development in the area.

       “When you have reasons for people to come to the downtown area, then you will have other facilities that will hopefully seize on that opportunity to take advantage of that — sandwich shops, delis, cafes, and those kinds of things,” Warder said. “That is certainly a goal — the fact that we are bringing people into the downtown area will serve as an encouragement to take advantage of that.”

      The Players

      Of course, business development is a secondary benefit. One of the groups that will benefit directly from the theater’s renovation is the Grand Prairie Arts Council, which will mount stage productions in the newly refurbished theater.

       “We are thrilled,” GPAC Executive Director Libby Clawson said. “We are so excited.”

The Arts Council was incorporated in 1978 and has never had a permanent space, although there have been a lot of different temporary homes for the city’s theater troupes and the arts council.

       “The Uptown has been on the Arts Council’s radar for years,” Clawson said. “There have been several attempts over the years to work deals with The Uptown and they just never worked out before, for one reason or another.”

      When the theater’s owner, Donna Easterling, sold it to the city in 2005, Clawson and several members of the GPAC worked with the committee to determine the facility’s makeup. She said to preserve that building and the history that it has with the town seemed like the right thing to do.

       “For all of the people who were born and raised here, The Uptown holds really fond memories,” she said. “Although The Uptown is not everything that we need — which still concerns us — it is a great venue. It’s just wonderful.”

      Clawson noted that she would like to have workshop or rehearsal space, but said the performance space was needed desperately. Clawson said that many of the GPAC’s board members have been looking at it for years and she has been scrambling the whole time to find performance spaces. She said that the city obviously wanted to support the arts in the city, considering how the GPAC continued to thrive despite no permanent home.

      The GPAC does a lot of free programming. In order to do that, the council produces theater that it can charge tickets for.

       “When it becomes difficult to find venues over and over again, it really cuts into your moneymaking abilities and then we can’t fund all of the free things we do,” she said.

      The arts council will be one of the users of the facility, but not the exclusive occupant. The city will likely hire a theater director.

      The Vision

      But before anyone can enjoy the performances that will dance across the stage, Killis Almond, the project’s architect will have to set out a vision for the space.

      Almond, a Grand Prairie native, said he can still remember coming to see “The Thing” at The Uptown and having to sit far in the back because the theater was so packed with children waiting to get scared out of their socks.

       “My parents would drop us off when they had some shopping to do downtown,” he said. “My big sister and little brother and I used to go down there all the time.”

      Almond has been doing preservation work since he got out of college. He got into theaters after doing the Opera House in Galveston. And it was his work with the Paramount Theater in Abilene that first drew Grand Prairie planners to him. At the time, the people involved had no idea he had grown up in and around the city.

       “It’s just one of those interesting sidelights,” Warder said.

      Now based in San Antonio, Almond specializes in restoration projects like theaters.

       “Theaters are very complicated structures and, frankly, I like the challenge,” he said.

Almond said this project is more of an “adaptive re-use,” and he stops short of calling it a restoration, instead thinking of it as a rehabilitation. But whatever he is calling it, he said he is glad to have the opportunity to work on the building.

      He said that all projects are important, but this one holds a special place in his heart. Although it is not one of the larger projects he has worked on, it is important to Grand Prairie and therefore important to him.

       “I appreciate being able and being asked to come back to my hometown,” he said. “To use my expertise on a project that has direct benefit to people I know and their kids and great-grandkids

is kind of neat. It’s much like going back home in a way.”

      The Historical Perspective

      Donna Easterling knows a little bit about going home. For decades, The Uptown has been like a second home to her.

      Built by her mother Helen Fisher and her two brothers Jerry and Sherman Silver in 1950, it was a first run theater that started out with 1,000 seats.

       “We had kiddie shows on Saturdays and matinees,” she said. “People would just drop their kids off and we watched their kids.”

She remembers pie eating contests and pickle juice drinking contests. In 1960s, the theater had battles of the bands and “go-go” contests. She remembers her family showing “The Tingler” which came with a surprise electric shock piped into the audience’s seats.

      Even now, Easterling keeps binders full of reminders of that time, when her family owned The Uptown, along with two other theaters, The Wings and The Texas. The Uptown stayed as a first-run through the early 1960s. She took over The Uptown in 1965 and ran the theater for eight years before starting to rent it out to exhibitors. It stayed as a theater until the early 1990s and then the space was rented it out as a church.

      Easterling said she realized it was the right thing to do when she was approached by the city about selling the theater in 2005.

       “It was like giving away a baby,” she said. “But the people who took it could take care of it and you no longer could.”

      And now she is ready to see The Uptown reborn.

       “I’m thrilled with what they are going to do,” she said.

      So, it seems, are a great many people.

 

Volunteer firefighters served for love of city

Originally printed in Cedar Hill Today, Jan. 17, 2002

 

      In 1941, a group of Cedar Hill residents banded together in service of their community and in the process began a legacy that lasted for 60 years — the Cedar Hill Volunteer Fire Department.

      The city will honor that service in a ceremony Saturday, Jan. 26, when a plaque commemorating the firefighters who served in that time is unveiled at Fire Station No.1.

      The department, organized in May of 1941, began with 11 members, but swelled to 45 in its heyday and fought some of the worst fires Cedar Hill has ever seen.

      It was a point of pride and a sense of duty that drew them to the service, according to Assistant Fire Chief Bobby Grashel.

      “The guys that were involved back then took pride in their community and wanting to help people,” Grashel said. “I grew up wanting to do that.”

      And so did a lot of young men in the early days of the volunteer department. Many of the people involved in the volunteer fire department still speak about how they enjoyed helping people, whether it was fighting fires, answering ambulance calls or just teaching fire prevention to schools and civic groups.

      “They got to help a lot of people and they were something needed in the community,” former Chief Charles Ray Sims said. “I just thought it was interesting.”

      It was so interesting to Sims that he was a volunteer off and on from 1949-84, when he became the paid chief until 1995. And in that time, the service became more than just a group of men gathered to fight fires. Sims expressed a feeling of family in the ranks.

      “The firemen I had, the volunteers were all real good,” Sims said. “They were real good to me.”

“It sort of grew to be one big happy family.”

      That was no doubt aided by the fact that the service drew on family members and friends in the then small town.

      “My father was a volunteer fireman out here,” six-year volunteer Kenny Hendricks said. “And I had an uncle who was on there for a while. As a matter of fact, if you go up to Cotton Patch there is a picture (near the hostess stand) with a bunch of guys on a fire truck. My father was one of them.

      “It’s been in my blood all my life.”

      That was not uncommon, according to Sims.

      “It seemed that if one member of the family got in there and they saw how he liked it and all, then it seemed like the others would join,” Sims said.

      Grashel officially joined the department in October 1973, but said he felt like a part of the department before that. Working at Sims Drive-In, Grashel was a part of the volunteer firefighter family.

      “They would let me out of school to go to fires,” Grashel said.

      But the department was not just a social fraternity. It was a needed part of the community.

      “They didn’t have anybody. If they didn’t do it, then who was going to do it?” Hendricks said.

Sims agreed.

      “There wasn’t a paid (fire service) around here,” Sims said. “We had to use Dallas and all they had then was (1923 open-top model truck). That is what they had to come out here with.”

      Most of the trucks had to come from downtown Dallas, because Oak Cliff was not built out yet.

      That meant it took a long time to respond and put the homes and businesses of Cedar Hill in jeopardy.

      The first squad elected E. W. “Cat” Switzer, a downtown business owner, as chief of the department and founded the department downtown as well. Switzer served for six years before WWII forced the department to restructure. His son, Elbert Switzer served for four years.

      The department went into the ambulance business in 1968 after they decided they needed to be able to transport patients as well as put out fires. A funeral home in Duncanville donated an ambulance to the cause.

      The department would face one of its greatest challenges in 1974. There was a big butane fire as Hwy. 67 was being widened. A butane truck was refueling at some temporary tanks on the highway and a spark caught it on fire.

      “This was a huge fire,” Grashel said. “The butane tanks had ignited and you could see it 50 miles away —  as far as the glow.”

      The fire was shooting flames 150 feet in the air and caught a couple of buildings on fire.

      The fire department set up a perimeter half mile away until it could burn down some and then laid some lines so they could begin putting water on it.

      “We were on it for probably three or four days,” Grashel said, adding that Dallas County, Duncanville, Dallas and DeSoto fire departments were on scene. “We had a lot of people on scene.

      “I guess that was he biggest fire we have had here.”

      By 1978, Cedar Hill had a volunteer fire department of 45 men, according to historian and Switzer descendant Shirley Hendricks. There were no serious injuries or deaths in the history of the service.

      The city began to employ a paid service in 1984 and many of the volunteers took jobs with the department. In fact, for the first few years of the paid fire service, the city only hired former volunteers.

      “It was only right,” Sims said. “If they volunteered to do it, then they ought to get paid to do it.”

      But unfortunately for the volunteer service, that meant their ranks would be thinned. That, combined with a changing society, is what eventually ended the volunteer service.

      The number of volunteers had slowed down “tremendously” since the paid service started, according to Hendricks.

Grashel said the biggest reason people do not volunteer as much is the time constraints placed on them by modern life.

      “Everybody is busy today,” Sims said. “It seems like back then you had a lot of time.”

      But even more than that, the city’s growth has made volunteering for fire service difficult.

      “I can remember when we didn’t make 200 calls the whole year, and we are making 200 calls a month now with ambulance and fire,” Grashel said. “It’s a sad time, but it is a good time also, because it shows the city is growing - that we are moving forward into the next century.”

      The fire department will unveil a cast plaque dedicated to all of the volunteers in Cedar Hill at 3 p.m. Jan. 26.

 

         Click this link or the photo to see the full story

​