Growing Up in Fort Worth (1950 thru 1966)

SMELLS AND AROMAS THAT WILL TAKE YOU HOME

Everyone has memories of their childhood and growing up places and times. Often a smell or an aroma will waft by my nose that will suddenly place me in a place and time of Remember When. Most of these aromas stoke very fond memories, where there are some smells that speak of an age of times gone by.

Several days ago, while at the grocery store, a clerk was cleaning up an ammonia spill on Aisle #16. The distinct smell of ammonia abruptly caught my attention and reminded me of the smell of growing up in Fort Worth. If you are one of my age group peers, you would think it smelled like a diaper pale. If you are 39 years old or younger, you don’t even know what a diaper pale is. The smell is unmistakably the smell of a rendering plant, Uh...yes, that's it!

It was the Swift & Company Meat Packing Plant in North Fort Worth by the Stockyards, where they were rendering fat and making anything from lye soap, lard and dog food to fertilizer. I must say, that this process was evident more than often, and it really stunk! I haven't smelled that in visits to Fort Worth in years. In 1971 Swift closed its Fort Worth meatpacking plant. Two fires in the mid-1970s destroyed the plant, leaving only the firm's administrative offices, which later housed the Old Spaghetti Warehouse Restaurant. So much for the history of the "Stinky Smell of the Swift & Co. Meatpacking Plant ".

There was another very familiar smell, and I will try to get these out of the way quickly. It was the North Fort Worth Stockyards. I say it was stinky, but actually, it was very endearing to all people who lived in that vicinity. We were and are proud of the North Fort Worth Stockyards. There is nothing like ambling through the shopping area or the Exchange Building and smelling the distinct smell of horses, cattle and leather. This is not unlike wandering through the exhibit booths at the Livestock Show and Rodeo. It's just a wonderful reminder of what used to be, and what really made Fort Worth grow. Cattlemen found hot meals, saloons, gambling halls and bordellos. Because Cowtown was in the middle of the Chisholm Trail, Fort Worth prospered as a leader in the cattle business. To quote Dad (almost)… the history of Fort Worth is “richer’n 2 feet up a bull’s uh…rear-end”. Ok, I said almost a quote. Dad was a bit more graphic in his discription.

There were so many familiar smells. I'll start with waking up in Fort Worth. The aroma of the sheets still smelled like sunshine and fresh air. No one hangs sheets out to dry any more. Homeowners Society will see that you get fined if they catch you hanging sheets out to dry. There just aren't any softeners or dryer sheets that can duplicate the smell of sheets just taken off the line. There was definitely the smell of dew in the mornings, and on many mornings, the aroma of freshly mowed hay or grass. It went nicely with the sounds of owls, mourning doves, meadowlarks and whippoorwills. And, later on in the morning, you could almost smell the heat of the day when the locusts would start rattling their song.

You could smell the first blue norther of the year just before you could see it in the northern sky. Soon after that, you could feel it. This was a ceremonious ritual. We'd start talking about it as soon as we could smell it. We'd go out in the front yard to play (in our shorts) to watch it come in. It was truly a steel blue sky. As soon as it hit, we'd run in the house to help mom get all the wool blankets out and start putting them on the beds............The old wool, olive drab Marine Corps blankets............USMC was emblazoned across one end of the dark olive drab blankets. The whole house smelled of mothballs for a couple of days. Well, I liked the smell. There was yet another smell that falls in this category. That would be the smell of an electrical storm. We could go out and stand on "The Wall", which was a stone retaining wall above the hillside to Jacksboro Highway. You stand up there and feel the wind and watch the electrical storm come in. It was a real display to watch.............aaaaannnnd, you could smell it!

There were many, many aromas that come to mind, but one particular one was Mrs. Baird's Bakery in Downtown Fort Worth. That alone could make a person start drooling as you walked outside the door. As we got older, we'd snag a stick of butter from the refrigerator and get our dates to drive the back door of the Mrs. Baird's Bakery, where we could get a free loaf bread, fresh out of the oven. We'd drive down to Forest Park and sit there and slather the butter on and just eat the whole loaf right then and there. Couldn't do that now, for a lot of reasons.

As I said, there are many more memory stoking the smells and aromas of Fort Worth in the 50's and 60's. I'll just mention one more. It can't be helped. At the end of a day, my little brothers would come in from a hard day of "playing over the hill"; sweat and dirt streaming down the sides of their little faces. They would have been playing a number of games; army, cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, or just hanging out...building a fort with the bamboo cane that grew in abundance "over the hill". Okay... here it is. They always smelled like little goats! We couldn't wait to get them in the bath tub, if we could catch them before they fell asleep on the floor in front of the television or in their own beds to dream of more forts to build.