Here goes:
Yesterday, I took a little backroads road trip and ended up in Brownwood which has an interesting old downtown area. The city was obviously quite prosperous during the 1920s but, unfortunately, like so many other West Texas town, it does not seem to have ever fully recovered from the Great Depression.
While exploring downtown, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a surviving store building from a once successful retail chain that had locations in a number of Texas towns. Not only is the store building in decent condition with many of its original interior details appearing to be intact from a peek through the windows, it looks as if someone is in the process of restoring it.
The contest is simple: the first person who can correctly identify this retail chain wins the contest and the prize.
The pictures below will provide some clues and here are some others.
This chain had locations in a number of Texas towns. Fort Worth had one. So did Mineral Wells. So did Hillsboro. So did, obviously, Brownwood.
This chain opened its first retail stores in the 1920s and experienced phenomenal growth. In 1926, the chain had 10 stores. By 1930 it had 550 stores.
This chain was successful enough to have its own in-house private brand record label. Such store brand record labels were quite common at the time and often featured excellent recordings by some of the era's jazz greats recording under various pseudonyms. Today collectors refer them as "dime store labels" even though they were not limited to just dime stores. Large department stores such as Hudson's in Detroit and mail order giants such as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward also had their own record labels.
The chain also sold its own brand of radio sets. In fact, I have a beautiful wooden 1939 table top "farm radio" shortwave/standard (i.e. AM) broadcast set sold by this chain which is in working order. A "farm radio" is a radio set which required batteries and was thusly named because large parts of rural America were not electrified until the 1950s. The batteries were very expensive (especially for many rural residents during the Depression) so such radios were rarely left on as idle background chatter. Because such batteries are difficult to obtain today, mine operates from a workaround "battery pack" of ten modern 9 volt batteries and a single modern "C" battery. This chain's products were far more popular in rural areas than they were in the cities.
If you are over 45, chances are very good that at some point in your life you have been inside one of this chain's stores or, at the very least, walked or driven past one in operation. If you are under 45 chances are just as good that you have at least heard of this chain.
Now, here are some basic rules to the contest: Only one guess per person allowed - a posting listing every 1920s retail chain imaginable will be disqualified as will "it is either ___ or ____" postings. If after posting your answer you decide that you want to change your mind, you may do so just as long as you make it very explicit in your posting "I am changing my answer to ......." In fairness towards others I ask that if you are a native or former resident of Brownwood that you please disqualify yourself from posting your answer publicly. (You may, however,email me your answer privately at dismuke@dismuke.org and if you are the first former Brownwood resident to do so and nobody else has provided the correct answer on the Forum, I will send you the prize to you as well. In other words, you will not be penalized for being from Brownwood - but I want to give others a chance as well ).
Now, the prize for the winner will be a collection of CD-Rs containing the following:
- An audio CD featuring approximately two dozen tracks of popular recordings from vintage "Hit of the Week" records. Hit of the Week was a one-sided cardboard 78 rpm record sold through newsstands for 15 cents from 1930 - 1932 during the worst years of the Great Depression. Even 15 cents was more money than most could spare for phonograph records and the company that made them folded in 1932. All of the recordings are from my collection and have been restored by yours truly using the new audio restoration equipment that I purchased several months ago.
- An MP3 CD featuring approximately 100 half hour episodes, including commercials, of the old Burns and Allen radio program staring George Burns and Gracie Allen. Most of the episodes are from the 1940s but there are a few from the 1930s and early 1950s as well.
- An MP3 CD featuring approximately 100 half hour episodes, including commercials, of The Shadow. This was a very long running series. The episodes on this CD are from 1937 to 1942. Some of them star Orson Wells as Lamont Cranston a.k.a. "The Shadow."
- Two MP3 CDs featuring almost 75 hours of vintage radio news broadcasts from the 1937 Hindenburg disaster to the assassination of JFK. The vast majority of the broadcasts focus on the 1938 - 1945 years with coverage of the events that led up to World War II, on-the-scene reports from the London Blitz, breaking coverage of Pearl Harbor, the various battles on both fronts of the war, D-Day and the death of FDR. Broadcasts are from all of the era's major networks, NBC, CBS, Mutual, the BBC and, on the later broadcasts, ABC.
- An MP3 CD of between 32 and 40 hours of various Big Band era remote broadcasts, mostly from hotel ballrooms. Bands include Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Phil Harris, Paul Whiteman and a rare complete 1 hour 1933 broadcast of Rudy Vallee's pioneering Fleischman's Yeast Hour
I have tried to put together a variety of items so that there should be at least something of interest for anyone - and if not, they might make nice gifts to someone who is. The winner should give me up to a week to burn and label the CDs and to find a spare moment during business hours to drop them off at the post office.
So, here are the photos. Good luck!
Above is a full view of the building from the front. This store opened in June, 1929. Because of the hot weather, advertisements in the local newspaper announced that that building would have several hundred fans running as well as iced water available for customers. Some of the vintage ceiling fans can still be seen through the front window.
This is the single most important clue as to which chain this building was designed for. Most of this chain's stores had this very beautiful logo. You can see a similar one in downtown Mineral Wells. However, there seem to have been some exceptions as I am aware of one instance of a store building put up by the chain that apparently did not have it.
Detail along building's roofline.
More detail along building's roofline.
Detail on building's front facade.
Looking through the glass at the building's window display area. The original window display areas are pretty much still intact.
Floor tile at store's entry. The store has two front entry ways separated by a display window. Both entries feature this tile
Unfortunately, I was unable to get any decent photos of the interior. However, ornate pressed metal ceiling and the mezzanine area is still intact as are some of the vintage ceiling fans. I am not sure exactly when the chain left this particular location but it was, undoubtedly many decades ago. It is amazing to me that the interior was not more significantly altered since then.
Downtown Brownwood is very much depressed with lots of very nice buildings sitting empty and boarded up. So I applaud whoever it is who is apparently putting money into bringing this surprisingly intact little gem back to life.
