42 replies to this topic

[bryanr]

Hello All

Mike Nichols is doing a really fun site, please take a look, it is fun.

http://hometownbyhandlebar.com/

Bryan Richhart

[Hometown by Handlebar]

Thanks, Bryan. I have been inspired by THIS site to learn more about my hometown. Mike

[Doohickie]

Do you ride much around the east side? (The site doesn't get past the filters at work.)

[bburton]

What a delightful Blog! Thanks. Many new insights for those of us who enjoy the scenic details of our city.

[bryanr]

As for the East side, Mike was a Poly High grad, so he does have a lot from there as well

[Doohickie]

I've ridden out to Wesleyan a few times. I never feel comfortable, though, unless I'm with a group. Mostly it's the loose dogs I don't like. I see those on the south and west sides, but the ones on the east side seem bigger and more feral to me.

[Joshw]

Man, what a great blog.

[Ron Payne]

Officially added to 'My Favorites'!

[Hometown by Handlebar]

Do you ride much around the east side? (The site doesn't get past the filters at work.)

Doohickie, my goal is to get to Quanah Parker Park from nearby Foster Park via the Trinity Trails. Last year I went from South Hills to Sycamore Park in Poly, going through Cobb Park on the TT branch there. The city has done a lot of work on that park, whose image has suffered a lot since I practically grew up in it as a barefoot boy with cheek of tan.

[Hometown by Handlebar]

Man, what a great blog.

Thanks, Josh. You began http://www.bikingbankhead.com/ (great concept) about the time I set up HbH after posting to Facebook for ten months.

[Hometown by Handlebar]

What a delightful Blog! Thanks. Many new insights for those of us who enjoy the scenic details of our city.

Thanks. I bookmarked THIS site back in the age of dialup, I think, and have learned a lot from it.

[Doohickie]

Do you ride much around the east side? (The site doesn't get past the filters at work.)

Doohickie, my goal is to get to Quanah Parker Park from nearby Foster Park via the Trinity Trails. Last year I went from South Hills to Sycamore Park in Poly, going through Cobb Park on the TT branch there. The city has done a lot of work on that park, whose image has suffered a lot since I practically grew up in it as a barefoot boy with cheek of tan.

If you're going to ride from Foster Park, let me know when you're going if you would like some company.

I've ridden to TWU where my son is a junior. My wife also works on the east side at EHHS. I live in the McCart/Sycamore School area. I will admit to being a bit intimidated by the East Side. Even with the connections I have there, I am not really very familiar with the area.

[bburton]

*** bump ***

For those who might have missed this post the first time around. This Blog is an entertaining and educational read, and it has purty pictures. Highly recommended.

http://hometownbyhandlebar.com/

[John S.]

Fascinating read! Sometimes in the hustle and bustle of Fort Worth's role as a modern day metropolis many of the colorful stories from the City's past are nearly forgotten. Dr. Richard Selcer's well-researched Hells Half-Acre revealed that Fort Worth actually was as wild and wooly as the Wild West legends claimed. The slower pace from the seat of a bicycle allows one to take in more sights from the surroundings including subtle clues from the past that might be missed from a fast moving automobile. As I mentioned to the blog's creative author: ride on!

[Doohickie]

*** bump ***

For those who might have missed this post the first time around. This Blog is an entertaining and educational read, and it has purty pictures. Highly recommended.

http://hometownbyhandlebar.com/

I'm really enjoying his blog so far. We go a lot of the same places. He knows more history.

[bburton]

*** A Final Bump ***

This blog has entertaining narrative and accompanying photos along with old newspaper clippings. There's new "yarns" every day. Bookmark it and enjoy!

[Dismuke]

Wow. This is wonderful.

[Phil Phillips]

Great stuff. Very entertaining.

[mmiller2002]

Wow. This is wonderful.

Is this the shortest Dismuke post ever?

[Dismuke]

Wow. This is wonderful.

Is this the shortest Dismuke post ever?

No. This is.

[Doohickie]

I learned that the author of Hometown by Handlebar, Mike Nicols, passed away yesterday, March 5, 2023, at the age of 73. Thank you Mike for all you have taught us about Ft Worth.

[UncaMikey]

I learned that the author of Hometown by Handlebar, Mike Nicols, passed away yesterday, March 5, 2023, at the age of 73. Thank you Mike for all you have taught us about Ft Worth.

 

Oh no! So sad to hear this. I loved his blog, and we worked together via email to investigate some local mysteries. A great loss for Fort Worth history.

[John T Roberts]

This is really sad news.  He was a valuable resource on the city's history.

[Stadtplan]

Thanks for sharing.  So sad to hear this.  Mike was an exceptional historian. 

 

Here's the S-T article about his passing:

https://www.star-tel...e272777290.html

[Austin55]

This is incredibly sad, and a huge loss to Fort Worth's knowledge. I never met Mike personally, but I feel like I knew him. I'm glad he dedicated so much of his time to putting everything he knew and learned down on "paper" on his blog to share with the world. It's an incredible resource. 

[txbornviking]

that is a sad loss indeed... the detailed history he made available for our city provided some of the impetus for how my daughter got her name.

[Dismuke]

Definitely a huge loss. I have no doubt that there are a number of people who have developed an interest in the city's history who otherwise might not have if they hadn't stumbled across his blog.  And he was one of those people I would very much have enjoyed an opportunity to meet in person.

 

I wonder if he made any provisions for his site to be preserved and maintained. It is an invaluable resource and it would be very sad for it to be lost as well.  

 

Archive.org's wayback machine has made captures of it which is better than nothing. But, very often, their archived copies don't have fully functional site navigation and site search features and they are not discoverable through search engines such as Google.

 

I see that  his domain name is registered through March of 2025. But should payments to the hosting service at some point stop being made, the site will disappear. 

 

Simply hosting the site to keep it online would not be expensive and I doubt it would be difficult to find someone willing to host it for free.  I would be willing to provide free hosting space for such an effort and I am sure that there are plenty of others who would as well. But, before somebody could do so, they would need to get approval from his estate/heirs as his postings on it will continue to be covered by copyright protection for the next 70 years. 

[John T Roberts]

There are several historians looking into all of this right now.  Since his passing was so recent, I don't have a lot of information.

[Stadtplan]

I downloaded a copy of his site for my own reference offline. I figured better do it now while its still top of mind.

[Dismuke]

I downloaded a copy of his site for my own reference offline. I figured better do it now while its still top of mind.

 

Great minds think alike!  I did the same thing last night.

 

Some years back I learned the hard way of the importance of making an offline copy of websites one depends upon for reference, especially if the website contains information that is impossible or not easy to find elsewhere and especially if the site is maintained by a single individual.  The first time an important website suddenly went dark on me I was able, in the nick of time, to replicate some but, unfortunately, not all of the information from Google's cache copy before it, too, disappeared.

 

The other reason it is good that people make offline copies is, in case the site does go dark, there will exist backup copies in the event someone is able to give approval to an effort to bring it back. And there is always a possibility in such situations that a site owner's heirs would like to keep it going but lack the necessary knowledge and/or passwords to access the hosting account in time. There is a certain downside in hosting a website with a platform such as WordPress in that one's postings are composed directly on the site's server.  That is extremely convenient, but it does mean that a copy of the content is not available on the owner's hard drive unless a special effort is made to export a backup,  something that is extremely easy to overlook or forget to do.

 

The website I mentioned going dark on me did so as a result of the owner losing interest in updating it and eventually deciding he no longer wished to pay for webhosting. When I offered to host an archived copy of it for free he replied that, unfortunately, his only backup copy was destroyed in a hard drive crash.

 

I think there is a pretty good chance that Mike Nichols recognized the importance and value of his site and perhaps already made arrangements for its preservation. But one never knows - there is sometimes a tendency among talented people to take what they do for granted and regard it as no big deal when, in fact, it is extraordinary. 

[Stadtplan]

It's amazing how often people's life work goes forgotten soon after they pass.  Sometimes people don't have close family members that take an active interest in their hobby / passion.  My friends liquidated an estate for a fairly well-published photographer (don't ask me his name, I'd need to go find that later), and it was really sad to see how his only surviving relative (his son) basically took all of his camera bodies (to sell) less accessories, cases etc and left significant portions of his work behind.  I bought some of the items that I thought were unique but he spent a career in publications and advertising.  Another friend who does professional photography in Dallas got a call one day from an old photographer buddy on our side of town.  Basically, he told my friend to come get his equipment.  He knew his kids didn't understand its value or care about giving it a good home so he wanted it to go to someone who could actually use it or sell it to those who would enjoy it.  I'm sure money wasn't really a factor considering but it was the gesture that stood out to me.

 

As motioned in the S-T, Mike has another website that mainly serves as a conduit to his book "Lost Fort Worth."  It's reassuring that at least this portion of his research lives on in perpetuity.

 

https://lostfortworth.com/

 

https://www.amazon.c...s/dp/1626192359

[Stadtplan]

 

I downloaded a copy of his site for my own reference offline. I figured better do it now while its still top of mind.

 

Great minds think alike!  I did the same thing last night.

 

 

Dismuke, just curious....what was your final download size on hometownbyhandlebar.com?  I came out with 4.20GB.  I spot checked a few sections and it appears to be loading up correctly from the local drive.

[Dismuke]

 

 

Dismuke, just curious....what was your final download size on hometownbyhandlebar.com?  I came out with 4.20GB.  I spot checked a few sections and it appears to be loading up correctly from the local drive.

 

 

Mine came to be 6.84G.  But that does not necessarily mean that your download was incomplete.  When I looked at the file structure of the download I noticed a LOT of duplication.  There was a version of the site in .html as well as a version in .pbp.  For me to view the .php files through my browser I would either need to upload everything to a web server or install a local web server on my computer.  Furthermore, there were subfolders under which the html content was mostly duplicated.

Mike's website uses Wordpress.  When one visits the site and clicks through its internal links, the pages that one views are dynamically generated.  They do not exist as standalone pages as would be the case on a static html website.  All of his posting tittles, the text of everything he wrote in his postings and readers' comments to his postings are stored in an SQL or a similar database and the Wordpress software pulls from that database as well as from image files stored on the web server so that, when someone visits the site, the most up-to-date content displays in their browser.  It is exactly the same as how this forum works - when we submit a posting the information goes into the database so that when someone visits a given topic any new postings or edits are immediately displayed.

 

To be able to view and navigate the website offline, however, requires a different approach. So what the website download software does is navigates through such a site's internal links and saves each dynamically generated page as a static html file and edits each file so that all the internal hyperlinks correctly point to where they are supposed to.

I am not sure why the software I used created duplicate versions of html files.  One GUESS on my part is that perhaps there might be low bandwidth versions and/or mobile friendly versions.  At the end of the day, I seem to be able navigate through it well enough.  And if the site were to disappear, I could, if necessary, provide it to anybody who might have approval to revive the site.  

If you are concerned that your download software might have missed something, the software I used is a free program called Cyotek WebCopy.  I just used the software's default, out of the box settings.

 

[John T Roberts]

I just found out that Mike Nichols' family has not done anything with his website and now there are no payments being made for the site.  I know that a couple of you have downloaded it for their personal use, but does anyone know how the website could be kept running for the public to use?

[Dismuke]

I have a copy of the website and am willing to make it available if that is what is necessary to keep the site public.

 

I had heard somewhere that the University of North Texas/Portal To Texas History had expressed willingness to make the site available.

 

Do you know if that was the case and, if so, what has happened with that?

Do you know what the issue for the family is?  Are they simply not wanting the site to be kept up?  Or are they just at a loss as to how to go about it given that they probably have other things on their plate with regard to his estate and their own probably busy lives?

 

The best way in the short-term would be to identify a person/organization the family is willing to turn the web hosting account and domain name over to.  My guess is we could, among ourselves, take up a collection to keep the hosting bills paid - and if the hosting service  he used was exorbitantly expensive, it can always be moved to one that is less expensive. 

The benefit of that is the domain name stays active plus one can make a backup of all files directly from the server as well as the Word Press database that powers the site.  That is the BEST way to get a backup from the site.   If the family would be willing to make or allow someone to make such a backup, then that would help.

The backup I made SHOULD work if uploaded to a web server.  It seems to work when I navigate it via the files on my local drive.  But if that were to be uploaded to a web server, the site would be a collection of linked static .html files - not another Word Press installation.  That alone is not necessarily a problem because, presumably, there will be no need to further update the site.

If it becomes necessary, I can easily provide web space for the site - and I can get a different but similar domain name (hometownbyhandlebar-archive, for example).  If all goes well, I would simply upload the files and, in theory, it should work. Realistically, my hunch is that there might be instances where the backup software automation might have become confused about linking - so it is possible that, once it is up, people might discover some glitches with site navigation which will need to be manually corrected.

But I think the BEST outcome would be for some sort of ongoing institution or organization to take over the site.  I am willing to do so - and I am sure there are others who would be as well. But suppose I were to take it over - and then something untimely happened to me.  Everyone would be back at square one again.  That is why I liked the idea of UNT/Portal of Texas History taking it over - they are not likely to disappear any time soon or just suddenly decide they no longer wish to pay for/mess with keeping the site going. 

[Dismuke]

John - 

 

Are you still actively involved with Historic Fort Worth?

If there is no deal for UNT/Portal to Texas History to take the site over - seems to me that providing an online home for the site would be entirely consistent with HFW's mission.  And doing so might make more people and thus more potential supporters aware of the organization.

 

if it is simply a matter of know-how among staff/volunteers - then you can count me as a willing volunteer on that.  What I would do is help get the site transferred and maintain it - and, after that has been done, I will ask HFW to identify a couple or so staffers/volunteers so that I can train them how to keep the site going themselves.  That way, if I somehow disappear from the scene, there would be multiple backups.  Keeping a website - especially one that is no longer updated - up and running isn't rocket science so getting some others trained shouldn't be a problem.

[Doohickie]

I just found out that Mike Nichols' family has not done anything with his website and now there are no payments being made for the site.  I know that a couple of you have downloaded it for their personal use, but does anyone know how the website could be kept running for the public to use?

If you are on Facebook and are friends with Mike Nichols, you may have noticed that William Joseph Gabriel has been posting links to the blog on Facebook somewhat regularly.  He apparently knows the family.  He said the blog went down because of a problem on the family side but it's back up again.  If you or Dismuke wants more info, you might contact Gabriel on FB.

[Stadtplan]

John - 

 

Are you still actively involved with Historic Fort Worth?

If there is no deal for UNT/Portal to Texas History to take the site over - seems to me that providing an online home for the site would be entirely consistent with HFW's mission.  And doing so might make more people and thus more potential supporters aware of the organization.

 

if it is simply a matter of know-how among staff/volunteers - then you can count me as a willing volunteer on that.  What I would do is help get the site transferred and maintain it - and, after that has been done, I will ask HFW to identify a couple or so staffers/volunteers so that I can train them how to keep the site going themselves.  That way, if I somehow disappear from the scene, there would be multiple backups.  Keeping a website - especially one that is no longer updated - up and running isn't rocket science so getting some others trained shouldn't be a problem.

 

Perhaps an organization could take over both of these websites:

 

https://fortworthgazette.blogspot.com/

 

https://hometownbyhandlebar.com/

[Stadtplan]

From top of thread....this is SO COOL!

 

[John T Roberts]

Thanks, Doohickie.  I do know Billy Joe (Gabriel), but I haven't been on Facebook today.  I will see what I can report.

[Dismuke]

 

Perhaps an organization could take over both of these websites:

 

https://fortworthgazette.blogspot.com/

 

https://hometownbyhandlebar.com/

 

 

Great catch regarding the late Pete Charlton's Fort Worth Gazzette site. That is definitely a valuable site and one that comes up for me regularly in local history related Google search results. 

 

Fortunately, I don't think the Fort Worth Gazette site is under immediate threat as it is hosted on Blogger, a free service offered by Google. So there is no danger of it being shut off for lack of payment.  But Google has a terrible track record of starting various offerings only to eventually shut them down.  If Google did decide to kill off Blogger, it will be big news and very likely lots of advance notice.  Hopefully, there would be efforts to archive it as there were when Yahoo shut down the pioneering Geocities free hosting platform. But the problem with such archives is the content is usually invisible to the major search engines and thus would be of little use for anyone trying to research Fort Worth history who is unaware it exists.

 

So just in case...I have made a local backup of that site as well.  And I completely agree that it would be a good idea to have a future willing host for it in mind in the event that Blogger shuts down.

 

As an aside, that is one of my concerns with so many online discussions about various topics how being hosted on Facebook. Yes, it is convenient and it does make it easy for someone without a lot of tech knowledge to start a new group. But there are some Facebook groups where participants are posting original, quality research and information that is not available anywhere else, most of which is completely invisible to anybody trying to research the subject through a search engine. Very often, a person can't even find it through Facebook's search engine as many groups have now been changed to "private" mode due to problems with spammers. Plus, what if Facebook down the road decides it no longer wishes to host them? I still remember when MySpace was a thing and people hosted content there. And, of course, in the present day, there is the sad, ongoing, slow-motion train wreck formerly known as Twitter. 

 

Thanks in part to John's website, this Forum as well as Mike Nichols and Pete Charlton's websites, a person who sees a cool old building in Fort Worth and wants to learn more about it or is curious about the city's history is much more fortunate than someone with a similar curiosity about buildings and the history of other cities.

 

Last weekend I was in Waco and decided to explore a run-down industrial area that had some interesting 1920s era buildings. Suddenly, I spotted an area of mostly empty lots with some remnants of a 19th century residential neighborhood, including an interesting circa-1887 Italianate cottage with really nice original wood ornamentation still intact despite the house's less-than-pristine condition. I took snapshots of all the buildings and the house and made note of their address. I figured when I got home I could just do some quick Google searches that would answer my questions about them. 

 

Finding information about the commercial buildings was difficult and time consuming. Finding information about the house through Google was next to impossible. Nothing came up other than worthless Zillow-type listing sites which claimed it was built in 1920, something that one could tell was incorrect by merely looking at the house. I was eventually able to find most of what I wanted about the history of the house - but only after I went down the time consuming rabbit hole of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and searches of 19th century Waco newspapers archived on Baylor University's website. 

 

Had those old commercial buildings existed in Fort Worth, every last one of them would be on John's website with a summarization of exactly the sort of information I wanted to know about them. The house wouldn't be on John's website. But if a house like that existed here in Fort Worth, I am quite certain that there would be one or more threads about it on this Forum and voices expressing concern about its prospects for the future. All anybody curious about them would have to do is type the address into Google and maybe add the word "history" to narrow down the results.  One can't do that if the information is hidden behind the wall of a Facebook group or a web archive.

 

This website, as well as Mike and Pete's, are assets to the city- especially given that a significant portion of its population is no longer from here. It is more than a matter of convenience for a handful of researchers and eccentrics. Someone such as myself who is sufficiently interested will eventually find the information he is looking for. But, for someone who is either new to the city or has never previously paid all that much attention to how buildings look and makes a Google search after coming across an old building that strikes them as cool, the results that turn up could very well be the start of a door-opening experience that leads to the person becoming knowledgeable and passionate about the city's history and surviving heritage. The creation of as many such people as possible is something that is highly desirable for anyone who does not wish to see that heritage wiped away by bulldozers. On top of that, people who have a deep appreciation of a city's history usually care about its future as well.

[John T Roberts]

Dismuke, the Sanborn Maps and local newspapers are two of the main sources I use in researching historic buildings.

 

Thanks for the comments about the website.  So, in case if you are wondering what is going to happen to it after I pass on, I'm planning well in advance to donate the site to Historic Fort Worth and the Fort Worth Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.  The two organizations work on various events together from time to time, so when the time comes, they can work out who will manage and operate the site.  Both organizations have the expertise to continue keeping up with both new and old buildings and city events.

[Dismuke]

I think that your having made plans to keep the site going is something everyone here regards as great news.

 

Here's a few more resources people might find helpful in researching historic buildings.

 

City directories: These are increasingly being made available online through various websites and, into the middle of the 20th century, provided a lot of detail. They contain an alphabetical directory where one can look up a person or business by name.  Very frequently listings for individuals would also provide the name of any spouse they might have had as well as their profession and/or where they were employed.  They also had a streets directory that provided information about who/what business occupied any particular address on a block by block basis. For longer streets they segment the listing with cross streets -  particularly helpful if there have been changes in street names and/or address numbering schemes in subsequent decades.

 

For online access to Fort Worth city directories, anyone with a Fort Worth Public Library card can access them through the library's website at https://www.fortwort...rtments/library. After logging in with one's library card information, click on Databases-->Genealogy & History-->Heritage Quest-->Search-->Search City Directories.  To access a directory in order to browse through it, one must enter in SOME sort of search through the form.  My recommendation is to put John Smith in the name fields.  Under the Location box after "Lived in" start typing "Fort Worth" and select Fort Worth, Tarrant, Texas, USA once the option appears. Then place your desired year in the "Residence Year" field at the bottom and click on "Search."  You will get a jillion results for John Smith. Click on any of them.  To the left of the results, you will see a small image of the city directory page the results came from.  Click on that and you will be taken to a full-sized online copy of the directory that you can browse through on a page-by-page basis. 

 

Tarrant County Resources: Tarrant County provides two websites that many people might not be aware of. Other localities might or might not make such information available online.

 

Tarrant County Deed Cards Online:  https://taxdeed.tarrantcounty.com/

 

This provides online images of historic property tax records from 1876 to 1984. To search for a given property you will either need to know the name of its subdivision as well as its lot/block number or know both the abstract number and grantee. Most people will wish to search by subdivision.  You can find that information by going to the property map on the Tarrant County Appraisal District website and clocking on the appropriate parcel for the property.  

 

Once you know the subdivision name, enter it into the appropriate field on the Deed Cards Search site and click on Go. The results will show all of the blocks in that subdivision.  Browse through that listing until you find the particular block and lot number you are wanting information on. The old card will show various ownership changes with the property. It also in most cases provides an outline of any buildings on the lot. This can be useful if one is researching a building that no longer exists. 

 

It was useful for me when researching the history of my house.  It has always been obvious to me portions of the garage apartment behind my 1920s era house were built at different times. I was able to confirm this when I came across an aerial photo of the neighborhood from the late 1930s which showed only the garage portion standing.  But on the deed card, I could see the outline of my house and the garage portion of the backhouse in black ink.  The apartment portion was drawn in later in red ink and there was a notation. also in red ink, that was dated 1946.  Mystery solved.

 

The only problem with this database is it apparently isn't complete. I attempted to use it to research a house in a different subdivision from the same era as mine just a few blocks away.  I was never able to get any results for that subdivision despite entering in different variants of its name.

 

Tarrant County Official Records Search  https://tarrant.tx.publicsearch.us/

 

To use this site to search for historic property information make sure that the search option is set for Real Estate instead of Assumed Names, Marriages and Foreclosures.

 

One can find an AMAZING wealth of information through this site - some properties more so than others. To get the most results, click on the Search Index & Full Text (OCR) option. Be prepared for sifting through the search results to be somewhat tedious as you will be reading legal documents with the usual verbose legalese.  And the sort of information you will find for any given property will vary depending on what sort of filings have been made over the years.

 

With my house, I was able to pull up the mortgage for its original 1920s owner. I was also able to pull up the mechanics lien for the house's construction that included its contractual due date. I already knew the year the house was built - but this answered my question as to whether it was early or late in that year.

 

I used the site to research Fort Worth area 1930s nightclubs.  For one nightclub that existed outside city limits on Hwy 80 in what is now Arlington, I found an electrician's mechanics lien from when the club's owners purchased and remodeled the property. That document listed in excruciating detail every part that was to be used in the electrical work and its cost - down to the conduit clamps. I pity the poor person who would have had to type that up on an old fashioned manual typewriter. Usually mechanics liens do not contain that level of detail. My hunch - that is all it is - is that the electrician (correctly) recognized that the club's owners were rather shady characters. He probably feared that there was a decent chance he might need to enforce and defend its amount in court.  For a couple of other area nightclubs I was able to find documents related to their sale that included an inventory of all of the nightclub's contents which were included in the sale.  They listed such things as furniture, kitchen tools, dishes and even how many boxes of unsold cigars and packs of chewing gum were on the counter by the cash register. Such information provides a look into the day-to-day operations of such clubs that would otherwise be next to impossible to find. I was able to learn that one night club on Eighth Avenue in Fort Worth included living quarters for its owners/operators. Such living quarters for nightclubs outside of the city limits seem to have been the norm - but I was a bit surprised to see it for a club on a commercial block very much within the city.  I also learned that a couple of clubs were owned by the same individuals. I saw a document about legal action taken by a lady who had leased the hat/coat check in stand at a prominent nightclub in order to compensate her for a period the club had been closed down during the agreed upon term of the lease.

 

The site is also useful for researching people. For example, type in "Smith Ballew" a bandleader based in Fort Worth in the 1920s who went on to national fame as a crooner and film star and returned to Fort Worth after he retired from show business in the 1950s. You will find a few dozen results of various documents relating to him from the decades after he moved back to the area.

 

To do the deepest dive possible, you will want to be creative with your search terms. You will definitely want to search by subdivision name/lot/block. Often that is the only way to locate documents for a property. But there are occasions when street addresses were used as well. Sometimes you will get results when searching for a business name - other times not. If you know the names of people who owned the property, you can search by that.  If the last name is not common, I would search simply by last name because people used to commonly abbreviate the spelling of their first name or go by initials. But, obviously, if the last name is common, it will be necessary to find ways to narrow down results as, like I mentioned, reading through the results to see if they contain any sort of information you are interested in can become a bit tedious.

 

Be warned: all of these resources can become a huge rabbit hole.  Probably best to avoid them until later if there is something else you really need to get done.