Here’s a set of vintage snapshot photos I purchased severalmonths back. Taken in Austin, Texas in April 1967, they depict famed pop stars Sonnyand Cher on a bandstand in front of a Dillard’s department store. The photosare a bit overlit and fuzzy (not unusual for outdoor shots from an inexpensiveKodak 126 Instamatic – like millions of others in those days, most of mychildhood photos were taken on this exact type of camera), but you can tellthat Sonny and Cher seem to be having a good time and the crowd is excited.
When I first saw these photos I was intrigued, and twoquestions came to mind: What brought these entertainers, L.A. denizens to thecore, to Texas? And what prompted a personal appearance at Dillard’s, thenamong the smallest specks on America’s department store landscape? (We’ll getto that in a minute.) Through a bit of research I found a satisfactory answerto first question and reached a fairly obvious conclusion about the second.
It turns out that Sonny and Cher were in town for a moviepremiere. On April 11, 1967, the world premiere for the movie “Good Times”, thefirst picture to feature the couple in starring roles, was held in Austin. The premierewas part of a weeklong promotional Texas trek that, according to an April 29Billboard magazine article, included stops in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston,Abilene and El Paso. (“A cowboy’s work is never done”, they say.) My guess is afashion show at Dillard’s was added at some point to the duo’s itinerary.
The “rock and roll movie” was a fixture of American cultureby 1967, and if an artist had a few hits under their belt (Sonny and Cher hadscored a number one smash with “I Got You Babe” in 1965, one of five Top 20 hitsfor the pair in just a little over a year), some personality and a unique presence(Cher’s dusky voice and exotic looks, Sonny’s fur vests and bowl haircut), amovie offer was usually a solid bet. These movies varied wildly in quality, andmore often than not were “star vehicles” with minimal, hackneyed plots. “GoodTimes” featured the rock and roll singers in a movie about…well, rock and roll singers becoming movie stars. (Viewing it today, it’s a fun, much better thanaverage sixties romp. And the styles were incredible, topped off by GeorgeBarris-designed his-and-her Mustangs specially built for the film. Long clipscan be found on YouTube, but you didn’t read that here!)
History shows that 1967 was the start of a long dry spellfor Sonny and Cher. “Good Times” bombed at the box office, and “The Beat GoesOn”, a number 6 pop hit, would provide the Bonos’ last Billboard chart actionfor a very long time. So they headed for Las Vegas.
Audiences loved it, and in 1971 CBS came forward with anoffer for an hour-long summer replacement series. “The Sonny and Cher ComedyHour” quickly became a national sensation, a Top 10 show for several seasons ina row, and a weekly fixture of millions of TV viewers’ homes, mine included.
When the couple announced their divorce in 1974, it was apalpable shock. Their lives took very different courses over the ensuingdecades, with Sonny eventually entering Republican politics, winning the officeof Mayor of Palm Springs, California then a seat as a U.S. congressman. In1998, he died in a tragic skiing accident. Cher, no last name necessary,remains an entertainment icon, with at least number one hit in each decadesince her first emergence on the scene. I still think of her 1999 hit “Believe”as “the inescapable song”, because unless you stayed in your house all yearwith a supply of food, windows and doors duct-taped shut and the lights turnedoff, you couldn’t escape it. We took a family vacation to California that yearand heard it at least once every 15 minutes, including while standing in linefor the mine train at Calico. Somehow it made perfect sense.
All right. Lest you think this site has turned into “RetroEntertainment Tonight”, I figure it’s about time I said something about that statelystructure behind our Hollywood heroes. That, my friends, is the first “real”Dillard’s store, which opened in February 1964 in Austin’s Hancock Shopping Center.
It was a far cry from the first store opened by William T.Dillard in Nashville, Arkansas, a rural town southwest of Hot Springs, in thelate 1930’s. Born in 1914, Dillard grew up in the tiny town of Mineral Springs,Arkansas, where his father owned a dry goods store. His early years weretypified by hard work at the family store and a desire to learn the retailingbusiness inside and out, the quintessential American story of a young mandiligently following in his father’s footsteps.
By his mid-twenties, however, Dillard had earned adistinction that set him apart from most American young men of the day,certainly those from rural Arkansas. In 1938, he earned a masters’ degree inbusiness from New York’s prestigious Columbia University, where he attended ona scholarship. Valuable as a Columbiaeducation was, however, Dillard’s exposure to the Big Apple’s legendarydepartment stores – Macy’s, Gimbels and John Wanamaker (Dillard worked at theirManhattan branch while in school there) – arguably did as much to shape hisfuture career.
Leaving New York, Dillard pursued management trainee jobswith Sears, Roebuck and Co. and J.C. Penney, and received offers from both. Penneyoffered Dillard positions in Walla Walla, Washington, of all places, and themuch closer to home Topeka, Kansas. Dillard took Sears’ offer, which was closerstill –a Tulsa, Oklahoma store. He stayed there only seven months beforeleaving to open his own store, in Nashville, Arkansas, as mentioned.
The store did well, but over time Dillard grew restless. Mostof all, he was eager to avoid his father’s mistake of “wast(ing) many of hisabilities because he was confined to a small town”, according to author LeonJoseph Rosenfeld in his brief but excellent 1988 book “Dillard’s: The FirstFifty Years”. In 1948, Dillard purchased a 40 percent in Wooten’s departmentstore in Texarkana, -- miles to the southwest on the Texas border, a muchlarger market with a population of 55,000. The following year, he bought theremaining interest in the Texarkana store (by then called “Wooten &Dillard”) and sold off the Nashville business. Within five years it became the leading storein Texarkana, and Dillard, who had relocated his family there, was one thearea’s prominent citizens.
Interestingly, Dillard reversed course in a sense when hebought back into a small market with the March 1955 purchase of adepartment store in Magnolia, Arkansasfrom a friend. It was back to bigger things the following year, however, whenthe opportunity arose to acquire a well-respected East Texas department store. For years, Dillard hadadmired Mayer & Schmidt, the leading store in Tyler, Texas, a town with apopulation similar to that of Texarkana.
Mayer & Schmidt, founded in 1899, was a well run storewith a fine reputation, drawing customers from a radius well beyond the city ofTyler. In 1956, however, they were in trouble. The previous year, Mayer &Schmidt opened a second store in town “to capitalize on its prosperity”, but thenew location turned out to be a flop, and “within a year it was closed anddeeply in debt”, according to Rosenberg. Based on his success in Texarkana,Dillard was able to line up financing, and in April 1956, acquired a majoritystake in the Mayer & Schmidt store. Dillard immediately embarked on acomplete remodeling and expansion of the store, adding furniture, appliance,jewelry, records and hi-fi departments along with leased shoe, book and fur operations.The revamped Mayer & Schmidt debuted on September 17, 1956, and would proveto be a great success under Dillard’s ownership.
In 1959, a banker friend of Dillard’s informed him of anotherwell-regarded department store recently befallen by rocky times. Brown-Dunkin Companywas Tulsa, Oklahoma’s largest department store (more than twice as large anenterprise as Mayer & Schmidt), founded in 1924 by brothers-in-law John H.Dunkin and John A. Brown, and “occup(ied) the first nine floors of thefifteen-story Hunt building at Fourth and Main streets, the city’s busiestcorner”, Rosenberg states, and “had become a household word in northeastOklahoma”.
Brown-Dunkin’s problem was one of succession. Dunkin hadpassed away in 1958 and Brown some years before that, and the store went intodecline under the management left in place by the founders’ widows. Intrigued bythe challenge of running a well-known store and the chance “to prove hisabilities before a national audience” as Rosenberg put it, Dillard set off onan arduous seven-month process of negotiations with the Brown and Dunkin widowsand numerous banks. Ultimately, he was required to put up the Mayer &Schmidt store as security for the transaction. Knowing he could fall back onthe Texarkana and Magnolia stores should things go awry, Dillard pressedforward confidently. On the last day of February 1960, Dillard took control ofthe Brown-Dunkin store.
Initially there were headaches – after the ownership changewas publicized, picketers from the local Building Services Union showed up onthe sidewalks outside the Brown-Dunkin store. Unbeknownst to Dillard, theprevious ownership had recently dismissed the store’s cleaning ladies and elevatoroperators, contracting out those functions to outside firms. Dillard refused toreopen the issue and eventually the picketing stopped. Then there was thematter of $150,000 worth of unpaid invoices discovered in a drawer, whichforced Dillard to obtain an additional line of credit.
On top of these hassles was one more that ended up turninginto a considerable plus. In sharp contrast to today, mid-20th century America was dotted with department store companies that ranged in sizefrom single-store outfits to 20-plus-unit multi-regional chains, with mostfalling somewhere in between. To increase their negotiating power with clothingmanufacturers and other suppliers, many department store firms signed up with(usually New York-based) buying cooperative agencies. These agencies strove torepresent one department store chain in each major city, while doing their bestto avoid any competitive overlap between clients. When Brown-Dunkin’s buyingagency, Mutual, caught wind of the buyout, they figured Dillard wasn’t capableof pulling the potatoes out of the proverbial fire and dumped Brown-Dunkin infavor of Vandever’s, another Tulsa department store.
Not long afterward, Dillard joined up with the FrederickAtkins Company, “one of the more prestigious buying houses in the country”, asRosenberg put it. The Atkins firm represented a host of marquee names includingJohn Wanamaker (Philadelphia), B. Altman (New York), Hochschild-Kohn(Baltimore), Miller & Rhoads (Richmond), Ivey’s (the Carolinas and Florida), Pizitz(awesomely-named, Birmingham), Chas. A. Stevens (Chicago – did you really thinkI’d leave that out?) and The Broadway (of latent “Mad Men” fame, Los Angeles),among many others. When he signed on with Atkins in 1962, Dillard was theirsmallest client. By the early 1980’s, he was their largest.
Two years on and these problems behind him, Dillard waseager to expand. Dillard had “recognizedthe shift of the population to the suburbs and the need to provide stores closeto them” as far back as his brief tenure with Sears, Rosenberg noted, and he“had wanted to open a unit in a mall for some time to see if it would work”. For this exciting new venture he partneredwith Homart, a recently created mall development subsidiary of Sears, thenferociously active in the Southwest. Dillard initially considered Homart’s first mall project, the just openedSeminary South Shopping Center in Fort Worth, Texas. (Many years later, in1987, Dillard finally put in a store there.) Also in the running was Homart’s still-in-developmentCoronado Center in Albuquerque.
Instead, he chose a third Homart project, the HancockShopping Center, to be located in Austin and co-anchored, of course, by Sears(second photo here). Dillard’s methodology behind this choice was novel, to putit mildly. From Rosenberg’s book: “Dillard had been visiting in the city(Austin) and was waiting for his flight to Albuquerque when he happened tothumb through a telephone book. He noticed there were more Lutheran churches inAustin than any other denomination and associated the churches with Germans,who had always impressed him with their work ethic and honesty. On that basis,he decided that Austin would be an excellent place for his store.” (And here I always thought the Methodistswere the benchmark for retail site selection. Shows you what I know.)
Obviously the Lutherans and a great many others likedDillard’s store. It was an unqualified success, resetting the template for allof the company’s future growth. From that point forward, Dillard “took everyopportunity in subsequent years to co-anchor new malls with Sears or Penney’s”,Rosenberg wrote, “…he was not in direct competition with either store, and theyboth made good mall partners for him”.
Importantly, the store was the first to carry Dillard’s ownname, not counting his early dry goods stores in southwest Arkansas. (As a sidenote, Dillard sold the Texarkana and Magnolia stores in 1962 to Aldens, aChicago-based catalog retailer then seeking a piece of the brick-and-mortarside of the business. Aldens had recently bought out Shoppers World, and woulditself be absorbed by Gamble-Skogmo in 1964.) Although he would continue to puthis own name on stores in markets that were new to the company (Austin, forexample), for years he maintained the names of acquired companies in theirrespective markets, such as Mayer & Schmidt and Brown-Dunkin, even whenadding new mall-based stores in their areas.
As mentioned, the Austin, Texas Dillard’s store opened inFebruary 1964. Later that year saw the return of Dillard and his family (fromTulsa) to Arkansas, this time to Little Rock, the state capital, where he had recentlyassembled a considerable retail enterprise. Over the previous year, Dillardbought out the Gus Blass Company and Pfiefer’s, two of the three largestdepartment stores in the area, the other being M.M. Cohn. The buyouts werecarried out with the help of funds from the Mayer & Schmidt stockholdersand $1.5 million kicked in from Sperry & Hutchinson, who invested on thecondition that Dillard hand out their S&H Green Stamps in his stores. BothBlass and Pfeifer’s were large downtown stores with one branch apiece – Blassin Pine Bluff and Pfeifer’s in Hot Springs. In 1965 a mall-based Blass storewas opened at Park Plaza in Little Rock, and two years after that, another atthe then new (and just recently torn down, except for Sears) Indian Mall inJonesboro. Starting in 1967, Dillard’s Little Rock-based operations werecombined under the name of Pfeifer-Blass, although I don’t know for surewhether this change was extended to store signage.
The late 60’s and early 70’s were a furious period of growthfor Dillard’s companies, and virtually all of it took place at the malls. 1965saw a Brown-Dunkin store at Southland Shopping Mall in Tulsa, followed byanother at the Northland Shopping center the following year. In Oklahoma City,he opened a “Dillard’s Brown-Dunkin” store at the Sheppard Mall, “a first stepin phasing in his own name for all his stores”, according to Rosenberg’s book.In 1968, two Dillard’s stores were opened in San Antonio, at Central Park Malland what is now known as South Park Mall. And the growth continued from there –the first Missouri location, at Springfield’s Battlefield Mall was added in1970, as was the first Louisiana location at Shreveport’s Shreve City Center.
In 1974, the various Dillard-controlled stores all took onthe “Dillard’s” name, reflecting the incorporation of Dillard’s enterprisesunder one financial umbrella. More importantly, it provided a consistent brandimage for marketing purposes. While many (including me) lament the passing ofso many great department store nameplates in recent decades, it has proven to bean unstoppable, irreversible trend. It’sinteresting to note, however, that even Macy’s, the proverbial poster child”for department store rebranding, owned Davison’s (Atlanta) for 61 years beforeconverting them to Macy’s in 1986 and Bamberger’s (“New Jersey’s greateststore, and one of America’s finest”) for 57 years before finally hanging the red star onits front door that same year.
When William T. Dillard passed away at age 87 in 2002, hisnamesake company that began so humbly was America’s third largest departmentstore chain, according to his New York Times obituary. Today, among “luxury” departmentstores (i.e.: not including Sears, Kohl’s and J.C. Penney), they remain numberthree, behind Macy’s and Nordstrom and ahead of Neiman Marcus and Belk, perStores Magazine’s latest rankings. Today, Dillard’s boasts over 300 stores in acoast-to-coast empire. And the beat goes on.
Below, a 1972 newspaper ad hailing the new Dillard’s storeat the Northwest Arkansas Plaza, as reproduced in the Rosenberg book - anenjoyable hodgepodge of names and architectural styles if there ever was one.
