Memories at the Intersection of 38th and Speedway (Editor's Note: This fond reminiscence was initially sent to former HPNA (Co-)President Ann Graham, who kindly passed it on to us for wider distribution.) Dear Ann, I am a 66-year old former Hyde Park resident...as a child and later as an adult. I attended both Baker and Robert E. Lee elementary schools. I'm now living in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia in an historic Washington family house that my husband and I restored from a ruin. My husband is former State Senator Don Kennard from Fort Worth. We both have always been interested in preservation of historic properties, and appreciate what the Hyde Park residents have been faced with. By the way we are in the process of moving back to the Austin area....(Buda)....hopefully in January. I recently received your article, "Profile of a Good Neighbor: Mark Fishman". This came to me via email from my Austin daughter, via her best friend, Misti Mukherjee, now an attorney in Washington, D.C., via Misti's father-in-law, Bill Williams, a Hyde Park resident. Whew! That email zig-zagged its way across the country and back. The store at 38th and Speedway played an important role in my life through the years. As a little child during WWII we lived at 3502 Speedway. The block is long and is bordered north and south by 38th Street and 35th Street. Ours was a multi-generational household including my grandparents, my mother and my unmarried uncle. I was the one they sent on errands to the little store at the corner. One item I remember buying was a small loaf of sliced bread...half white and half wheat. But my favorite purchase from the corner store was their grape ice cream, which they dished up in a cone. It was a sort of greyish lavender color with purple specks of grape. I can almost taste it now. I've never seen bread or ice cream like that since.

In 40s there were still vacant lots dotting that area. My grandparents often sat out on the porch of 3502 Speedway in those large Kennedy-type rockers. One of my earliest memories (at age 3) was of a cow staked out on the SE corner of 35th and Speedway. When she would moo loudly I would jump into my Grandfather's lap, hug him tightly and say, "Pop-O, I LOVE you", to which he would reply, "No, you are just afraid of that cow." Speedway, despite its name, did not have very much traffic at that time. In an era when almost every family had at least one car, I do remember an old African-American man regularly driving his mule and wagon up Speedway. What a handy location that was. The bus to downtown stopped at 35th. I was later allowed to ride it to 6th and Congress with my dollar to buy something exciting at Woolworth, like Tangee lipstick...which was practically colorless. Years later, when I was a young mother, my former husband, Grady Williams, and I wanted to start our own business. We were renting a house nearby on Texas Avenue, just across Duval. We noticed a for-rent sign on the store at 38th and Speedway. The building had large showroom windows facing both streets at that time. My husband had always wanted to start an interior design business. He had studied interior design and architecture at U.T. He was disenchanted with advertising, which is what he ultimately got his degree in. Some of our friends were horrified that he planned to do some of the upholstering himself in the evening, while holding down a full time job with the Steck Co.'s advertising department. He was chided for "wasting his degree". This was when the "Do your own thing" movement was seriously frowned upon by the mainstream....It was the early 60s. Continued on page 4

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