2011-10 Visiting the Old Neighborhood in Dallas

We went down the Dallas Ft.Worth area for the wedding of LeAnn's niece Amy to Jeff.  My mom was invited to the wedding, and since we lived in Dallas for about 10 years from in the 1960's and early 1970's, we decided to go back to the old neighborhood and see how much had changed.  We got in our "cop car" that we had rented.  The kids were so embarrassed to be riding around in this car

Before going to the old neighborhood, we went into Arlington to see the Texas Ranger's Ballpark (who would win the American League pennant later that night)  Across the parking lots was the new $1 billion Cowboy Stadium.  When I lived in Dallas, I had gone to Ranger games in Arlington Stadium, which had been nearby, Texas Stadium in Irving, which is now a big empty lot that we drove by.  The new stadiums are beautiful, and it is nice that they are both near each other to share many facilities.  We didn't have time to go in either of the stadiums.  One of the parking lots we pulled into appeared to be open,but someone came over and told us we had to leave because they were doing some high speed car tests in lot.  Again, the kids got so embarrassed that we got asked to leave and couldn't understand how I would not know this was going on.

Taking the freeway over to the old neighborhood, the first thing that me and my mom noticed was how much traffic there was for a Saturday morning.  They were working on the freeways, so even the through streets were packed.  We pulled in front of the old house and got out to take a bunch of pictures.  The house looked good with a new walkway from the sidewalk and a large planted area between the sidewalk and driveway.   Overall, the house looked very well kept.  Many of the houses looked good, but there were a few that were in pretty tough shape.

Next, we drove over to Herbert Marcus Elementary School where I went to 1st through 7th grade.  Since I went there, they have added another addition onto the school.  This was the second addition since they added a large wing on while I was going there.  Besides the new addition, there are a bunch portable classrooms out back.  There were portable classrooms in use when I went to school there too, so the more things change, the more they stay the same.  There was a janitor out front cleaning the walkway when we drove up, so we talked to him for a little bit.  He said there are over 800 students there now, most of them Hispanic.   Even the message board outside the school was written only in Spanish

Behind the school is a cricket pitch and there were people playing cricket back there.  We hadn't even heard of cricket when I was going to school there.  Where there were cornfields and horse farms out beyond the ball fields, there are now nothing but houses and even some large office buildings (probably 15-20 stories tall).  The old park area where we would spend our summers used to have a pool, basketball court and covered activity center.  Only the covered activity center is still there, but there is a new rec center where the basketball court and pool used to be.  I would assume there are courts inside the building now.  It looks very nice.

We drove over to our old church, Walnut Hill Lutheran, and not much had changed there, except that again the message board out front now was all in Spanish, and the trees are so big that the entire lot is shaded.  The education wing was built not long before we left, and that is were I had my first job.  Me and my dad cleaned the kindergarten rooms 3 nights a week.  My mom worked at the kindergarten.

We next drove to the other side of the freeway into Farmer's Branch.  We stopped at a small park that straddles both sides of a creek that we used to hunt for tadpoles, crawdads and small fish.  It's all still there and I saw some turtles and fish along the banks.

It was a lot of fun to get back to see everything and bring back a lot of old, good memories.  I had forgotten some of the names of the roads, mixed up a couple of locations of where things were, but was still able to get around pretty good.