Thorough, Practical, and Refined
As I wrote in a recent post, my great-grandfather Frank Barnhart was an oil driller who worked the North Texas oil boom. At the time, my grandmother Dorothy Barnhart was 11 years old, ready to start 6th grade, and Frank and his wife felt that an oil boom town wasn’t the best place for her to get an education. They decided to send her to boarding school at Our Lady of Victory Academy, a Catholic girls’ school in Ft. Worth, Texas.
Drilling Rigs and Boomtowns
When I was in high school, I went on a summer program to England. That was during the era of the television show Dallas, and as a Texan, I got the usual questions about horses, cowboys, and oil wells, none of which I knew much about. The funny thing is that my family, like many others in the state, actually does have a strong connection to the Texas oil industry. In fact, my Barnhart great-grandparents would never have come to Texas if it hadn’t been for the lure of “black gold.”
Jack Dempsey’s Rolex
When I was a child, my parents always received a cheesecake from Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Restaurant at Christmas. I didn’t really understand who Jack Dempsey was or why he sent us a cheesecake every year, but the cheesecake was delicious. As I got older, I came to understand that my grandfather had at one point served as Dempsey’s attorney, and my grandparents had become friends with Dempsey and his fourth wife Deanna. Sadly, however, Dempsey’s restaurant closed in 1974, marking the end of an era for my family.
The Erisman Grocery Company
Growing up in Ft. Worth, Texas, I was vaguely aware that my great-great-grandfather, Richard Y. Erisman, had once run a grocery store in the city. As a child, I supposed it was like the grocery stores I knew, where you navigated aisles of food and other products with a grocery cart and took your purchases to the cashier for checkout.