The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  When Martin and Charlotte Weiss opened their shop, the Blue Front Restaurant—established in 1877—already had been in business for 34 years. When W.G. Schliepake bought the restaurant in 1929, it was open to men only.

  During the Great Depression, however, Mr. Schliepake laid off his waiters and brought in his family to help him—first his wife, Anna, in 1932, and later his son, Willie, and his daughters, Lena, Annie, Frances, Pauline, Louise, Josephine and Eva Kathryn. “Mama helped turn it into a family restaurant,” said Louise LeCour, who, with her sisters Eva Kathryn LaCoke and Josephine Wellbaum, still runs the place. “She made women and their kids feel at home.”

  Willie, Frances and Annie are dead. Pauline lives in Shawnee, Okla., and hasn’t worked at the Blue Front for many years. Lena is retired, after working for 63 years. She’s 88 years old now. “Nobody leaves here until they just cannot work anymore,” Mrs. LeCour said.

  When Louise, Josephine and Eva Kathryn were young, they used to sing as a trio called the Swingettes. They traveled about the country on a bus with the Durwood Klein Orchestra, and sometimes they would sing for the diners at the Blue Front. “Mama used to say, ‘Sing, children,’ until we were up in our 40s,” Mrs. LeCour said, “and everybody loved it.”

  The Blue Front’s original building at 1105 Elm St. was torn down to make way for the First International Building, which became InterFirst II, which became Renaissance Tower during the years of Dallas’ Incredible Disappearing Banks.

  “Then we were at Field and Commerce, under Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club for two years—I went up there one time, before I was married—and then to the Underground in 1973,” said Mrs. LeCour, referring to downtown’s system of tunnels connecting office buildings. The restaurant’s official address is 1310 Elm St., just two blocks from its place of origin. “Everybody that’s anybody in Dallas has eaten at the Blue Front. The newspaper people. The judges. The lawyers. When they walked into the Blue Front, they were just folks. We knew everybody. There was hardly a stranger came in. We introduced them to each other and sat them down together.”

  The Blue Front opens at 6:30 every morning for breakfast. “Men like to come in and have their coffee and read their papers,” Mrs. LeCour said. “They all sit at the same tables every morning.” It used to stay open until 8 p.m., but several years ago, “when downtown became nothing but office space,” Mrs. LeCour said, the sisters began closing the doors around four.

  They shortened their extensive German menu, too, but there’s still no lack of the basics: wiener schnitzel, bratwurst, Hungarian goulash, Irish stew, Polish sausage, sauerkraut, boiled potatoes… “We don’t sell as much smoked tongue and pig knuckles as we used to,” she said. “They were considered delicacies in the old days. People don’t know much about them anymore.” But they’re still available.

  When Robert Folsom was mayor, he proclaimed Oct. 22, 1977, to be Blue Front Day in Dallas, in honor of the restaurant’s centennial, and Mrs. LeCour believes the photographs of the Schliepake family and their old restaurant at 1105 Elm will be hanging on the wall for a considerable time yet to come. “We’re doing as well as anybody else downtown,” she said. “We’ll be around as long as you need us and one of us can make it down here.”

  “Used to be,” Bob Walker said, sounding the theme again, “every block had two or three barbecue stands, and everybody was real busy. Then they started putting snack bars inside the buildings to keep the people from taking a lot of time on breaks. We used to sell 700 to 800 cups of coffee a day. But that’s all gone now.”

  Mr. Walker’s father-in-law, J.T. Bell, opened Bell’s Barbecue 56 years ago. Thirty-six years ago, Mr. Walker started working for him, and two years later married both Mr. Bell’s daughter and his business. In 1958 they moved their wood-burning barbecue pit to 1215 Jackson St., where it has been ever since.

  “When we first opened here,” Mr. Walker said, “WFAA was just across the street, and they had the Early Bird Show. They had live musicians, and they would come in here in the morning and lay down their guitars and bass fiddles and drums, and when it was time for them to go on, they would go across the street and play, and I could hear them on the radio.”

  The block used to be in the midst of Dallas’ garment district, which moved years ago out to Stemmons Expressway, and Bell’s was next to the back door of the Carousel Club. From time to time, the strip joint’s not-yet-famous owner, Jack Ruby, would come in for a sandwich.

  “He never did sit down,” Mr. Walker said. “He would just walk around and eat barbecue and talk.”

  Today the barbecue stand occupies the ground floor of a parking garage between Bell Plaza and the rear of the Earle Cabell Federal Building. Its metal chimney rises past six stories of cars to spread its aroma over the neighborhood like a blessing. On the other side of the block, residents of the Manor House—one of the few buildings downtown in which people live—open their windows to catch whiffs of the smoke. “We get quite a bit of business from over there,” Mr. Walker said. “And we’re lucky enough to be sandwiched in between the telephone company and the federal government. They look to be fairly stable. At least the telephone company does.”

  Over at 108 North Akard St., at The Oyster House, Lucille Mathews remembers Jack Ruby, too. She started waiting tables downtown in 1954, first at the Royal Grill, then at Club 22, beneath the Carousel, then for 21 years at Sol’s Turf Bar.

  The building that Club 22 and the Carousel occupied was torn down, along with the Baker Hotel, and replaced with Bell Plaza. Sol’s and the Commerce Street News Stand next door—both were old downtown institutions—fell a few years later to make room for more Neiman Marcus parking.

  “In the 1950s, there were nightclubs all along Akard Street and Commerce Street,” Ms. Mathews said. “The people would be all dressed up and going to the clubs and having a time. Downtown was the place for night life then. Downtown was Dallas then, and the entire city was busy at night.”

  “Yeah, it’s so different than it used to be,” said Rusty Montgomery, who bought The Oyster House from Charlie Gambolis’ wife, Sandy, 2½ years ago.

  It opened on Main Street in 1924 as the Eat Well Restaurant. It was moved to its present location and named The Oyster House in 1965. A plaque on the wall, presented that same year by Dallas Power & Light, certifies that it occupies one of the first all-electric buildings in Dallas. Many years earlier, its spot was the coffee shop of A. Harris & Co., predecessor of Sanger-Harris, predecessor of Foley’s.

  Mr. Montgomery has added barbecue and a few other items to the old seafood menu, and Ms. Mathews continues to serve up the two-ounce drinks that have been an Oyster House attraction for 25 years. Mr. Montgomery said business has doubled since he bought the place.

  “We’re in the center of what is left of the financial district—the banks, the insurance companies, the oil companies,” he said. “Lunch is mostly suit-and-tie, but the evenings are working people—the maintenance people, the security guards, the telephone operators. Crazy Ray, the Cowboys’ mascot, drops in about three times a week and blows up balloons for the customers. And on Friday nights, when we’re open till two and all the other places downtown close at eight or nine, all the waiters and waitresses congregate here and tote up the score, what all’s been happening that day. Lucille loves it. Waiters and waitresses are very good tippers.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ms. Mathews says.

  At the Greeks’ Basil Sideris was talking to Mr. Foster. “The old tradition used to be, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss,’” he said. “But now only a rolling stone gathers moss, which is money. You hear what I’m saying? You have to be where the people are to make money.”

  Mr. Foster nodded. “And the people left,” he said.

  “And we should have followed them,” Mr. Sideris said. “Years ago.”

  March 1991

  THE YEAR OF RECONCILIATION

  To many Americans, the Indians are figures of the past, a brave and colorful race who impeded the conquest of the con
tinent by the whites for a while, were finally defeated and have faded into history. But of course they haven’t really faded. In many places the native cultures remain strong, and the ancient pride of the nations remains intact. Neither are the Indians’ old troubles with the whites all dead. Long after the last sad bloodletting hundreds of quarrels and disputes between Indian nations and their conquerers remain. In 1989 and 1990, when several Great Plains states were celebrating the centennial of their entrance into the Union, one governor thought his people should think about making peace as well.

  SEVERT YOUNG BEAR’S AUNT WAS STILL A BABY WHEN SHE DIED. THE .45-caliber bullet ripped through her body and lodged in the shoulder of her mother, who was carrying the child on her back.

  “Until 1926, my grandmother carried that bullet in her shoulder,” Mr. Young Bear said, “the bullet that killed her baby.”

  Almost a century has passed since the baby died. The wounded grandmother, whose name was Smoke, has been dead for 43 years now. Her grandson is 56. But his voice was heavy with sadness as he told the awful story of the baby and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

  “It is a very sad place,” Mr. Young Bear said. “It is full of spirit.”

  Nearly 500 soldiers—including troops of the 7th Cavalry, the ill-fated unit led by Gen. George Armstrong Custer against the Sioux and the Cheyenne at Little Big Horn in 1876—massacred more than 150 Indians on the bloody morning of Dec. 29, 1890.

  It was the last significant clash of arms between Indians and the U.S. Army. And it established a legacy of racial mistrust and fear in the new state of South Dakota that has endured for a century.

  Now, during the centennial year of the massacre, Gov. George Mickelson is trying to set South Dakota residents on a different track. Earlier this year, as South Dakota’s celebration of its first century of statehood wound to a close, Mr. Mickelson called together the heads of the state’s nine Indian tribes, smoked the pipe with them in the Capitol rotunda and proclaimed a “Year of Reconciliation” between South Dakota’s 50,000 Indians and 665,000 whites.

  It marked the first time that a South Dakota governor officially had recognized the pain of the Indians’ past and tried to heal the rift between the two races.

  “It’s my guess that 70 percent of the white people in South Dakota have never been on an Indian reservation, and I would like for them to go take a look,” said Mr. Mickelson, whose father struggled with the same tensions when he was governor 40 years ago.

  The proclamation, which also was signed by the tribal chairmen, called on South Dakotans “to look for every opportunity to lay aside our fears and mistrust, to build friendships, to join together and take part in shared cultural activities, to learn about one another, to have fun with one another and to begin a process of mutual respect and understanding that will continue to grow into South Dakota’s second hundred years.”

  Although the massacre remains an emotional issue—particularly among full-blood Sioux and the elderly who remember survivors—“reconciliation” has become an often-used word in public ceremonies and celebrations.

  Mr. Mickelson has spoken frequently to white and Indian audiences about racial harmony. He appointed a Council on Reconciliation, composed of religious and civic leaders of both races, to promote local Year of Reconciliation events and projects around the state.

  “Wounded Knee was in our first year of statehood,” the governor said in an interview. “The death of Sitting Bull was in our first year of statehood. I believe as governor I have a responsibility to do something to start our second century better than our first. I hope the result of this Year of Reconciliation will be a change in the attitudes of the two races toward each other.”

  There are encouraging signs. The hospital at Fort Meade, which was a cavalry post at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre, has installed a stained-glass “Year of Reconciliation” window in its chapel, depicting a cavalryman and a Sioux warrior at peace with each other. The residents of Mitchell and the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation have established a “sister city” relationship.

  Oglala Sioux Tribal Chairman Harold Dean Salway, addressing the annual Black Hills Powwow in Rapid City urged the Indians and whites in the audience to “put the past behind us and look toward the future.”

  “And let’s face it together,” he said.

  Tim Giago, publisher of the weekly Indian newspaper, Lakota Times and a critic of government Indian policy and white racial attitudes, told the same audience, “I’ve seen changes between Indians and non-Indians in South Dakota that I thought I would never see in my lifetime.”

  But there are cynics and skeptics in both groups. In their 1990 election-year platform, South Dakota Democrats criticized Mr. Mickelson, a Republican who is running for a second term, saying he had a “shallow, hypocritical commitment” to reconciliation. They offered no race-relations program of their own. Many whites in the state simply do not like Indians.

  “I see a lot of prejudice,” said Duane Brewer, a member of the Oglala Tribal Council on the Pine Ridge Reservation. “People really hate the Indian…. When an Indian applies for a job, they look at your resume, and the first thing they ask you is, ‘Do you have a drinking problem?’”

  Mr. Brewer said many Indians think that the governor committed political suicide with the proclamation. But, he said, “There are a lot of Indians who have been waiting for this, for an attitude change on the part of the non-Indians…. Our Sioux religion teaches that you don’t carry hatred in your heart, that you treat other people with respect.”

  Ironically, it was religion that precipitated the Wounded Knee tragedy. In 1889 in Nevada, a Paiute Indian named Wovoka declared himself the Messiah. He had come to the Indians this time, he said, because the whites had rejected and killed him. If the Indians would constantly dance a ritual that he called the “Ghost Dance,” he soon would make whites disappear from the earth, resurrect the Indians who had died, restore the vast buffalo herds and remake the world into an Indian paradise.

  The new religion won an enthusiastic following on the Sioux reservations and the approval of the most famous Sioux leader, Sitting Bull. The Ghost Dance inspired a hysterical fear among the Indian agents and white settlers, who mistakenly thought the Sioux were preparing for an uprising. The Army was sent to stop the dancing, and one military blunder led to another until Sitting Bull had been murdered in his home and the Wounded Knee massacre had been committed.

  When the shooting stopped, the bodies of 146 Indians lay near Wounded Knee Creek. Of them, 44 were women and 18 were children. Most of the 84 dead Indian men were unarmed. An unknown number of Indians who tried to escape were wounded and died elsewhere. Twenty-five soldiers died, too, some of them victims of their own comrades’ fire.

  The soldiers herded the survivors to the Indian agency at Pine Ridge. That night, a blizzard struck, preventing the return of a burial party to Wounded Knee for four days.

  When they returned, the troopers dug a long trench on the hill where the artillery had been and unceremoniously dumped the Indian bodies into it, along with the corpses of several horses and mules.

  “The massacre was a planned thing,” said Verlene Ice, Severt Young Bear’s cousin, who lives a few hundred yards from the massacre site. “The soldiers wanted to kill us to get revenge for Custer.”

  Ms. Ice and Mr. Young Bear are among those at Pine Ridge who remain suspicious of whites claiming to be friends of the Indian. “It’s just words,” Mr. Young Bear said of the governor’s Year of Reconciliation. “He has gone around the state smoking the pipe with all the chiefs. The pipe is sacred to us…. It isn’t something you do lightly. But I think the governor is doing it lightly, for politics.”

  Mr. Young Bear acknowledges that his views sometimes are considered controversial, even on the reservation. “They call me a militant and a troublemaker,” he said.

  It was he who invited the militant American Indian Movement to Pine Ridge in 1973 to protest the murder of Mr. Young Bear’s uncle, Yellow Thu
nder, just across the Nebraska line from the reservation, and the alleged reluctance of Nebraska officials to investigate the killing.

  AIM turned the protest into a general denunciation of federal Indian policy.

  Members of AIM and some local Indians, including Mr. Young Bear, invaded and took over the community of Wounded Knee and held off an army of U.S. marshals and FBI agents for 70 days before agreeing to a cease-fire. By the end of the siege, a number of Wounded Knee homes had been vandalized, a store and a church had been burned, two Indians had been killed, an FBI agent had been paralyzed and the tribe was deeply divided.

  Mr. Brewer, the tribal councilman, was a lieutenant in the Indian police at the time. “I was hated,” he said. “The AIM people called us ‘goons.’ We said ‘goon’ stood for ‘Guardians of Our Oglala Nation.’ I didn’t think I would ever be accepted by my people again.”

  Many Indians say the AIM occupation and the attention that it received in the news media did more harm than good for the Indians.

  “I’ve heard tourists in stores and restaurants ask for directions to the reservation, and the local people would tell them: ‘Hey, don’t go over there. They’ll strip your car. They’ll steal all your belongings. They’ll kill you.’” Mr. Brewer said, “That’s the reputation that we’re going to have to overcome.”

  He believes that the tribe has some reconciling of its own to do, as well.

  “There’s a lot of tension between the full-bloods and the half-breeds. The full-bloods think the half-breeds are nothing,” said Mr. Brewer, who is part white.

  Frank Means, the head of a mineral studies program aimed at developing the tribe’s mineral resources on the Pine Ridge reservation, believes that the Indians are partly to blame for white people’s negative image of them.