BellaireGuy

The police department scene was definitely shot at the Beechnut substation. I watched this when I was a kid and was thrilled when they showed the car leaving the station and in the background you could see end of Mimosa Street in Bellaire which was one street over from me. DVR ALERT:  This episode is scheduled to be shown in the wee hours of Monday, May 6 on ME TV, which in Houston is on Digital Channel 57.4. It's also on Channel 136 on U-verse. I haven't seen it since it was first shown in prime time and I'm looking forward to it. You can also watch the whole episode on YouTube.

There's a great site with a treasure trove of Alex Bennett KILT airchecks at http://vasthead.com/Radio/bennett.html

Jax was beer. They used to have some really funny animated commercials. I tried to find them on youtube, but no luck.

This is a little off-topic now, but here are examples of two of the Jax beer commercials that used to run on Channel 2 News every night in the early '60s, featuring the voices of Mike Nichols and Elaine May:

Another one I remember (and can't find on YouTube) had a woman on the roof of her house after a flood. A man came rowing by, yelling "Red Cross! Red Cross," and the woman yelled back, "My husband gave already at the office!" At least I think it was for Jax. How they tied joke that back to beer, I don't know.

That was actualy a "Sage Drugs" which was an off-shoot of the Sage stores. Sage was the orignal "big box" store/mass merchandiser. It was the precursor in Houston to K-Mart and Walmart. Sage Drugs were smaller stores and were more in-line like a Walgreens.

There was a "Globe" at Bellaire Blvd. and Hilcroft (it became a Fiesta store later). There was a Sage at 610 and Beechnut and a Builder's Square (now closed??) came to occupy that space later.

That particular Builders' Square, which occupied the old Sage building, closed a few years ago and was torn down. Then a Lowe's was built there in its place (at Beechnut and Loop 610).

Hi, my name is Art and this is my dog Storm and I am going to sell you a car.

We used to laugh like crazy and always hoped that he would slap a fender and it would fall off.

The one with his dog Storm was Ralph Williams. Art Grindle was a few years before him. The Firesign Theater did a takeoff on Ralph Williams, "here in the city of emphysema."

I thought Art Grindle went to prison. I remember his commercials on Saturday afternoons on (I think) Channel 2 in between old movies like Johnny Weismuller in Tarzan or the Marx Brothers.

Has anyone mentioned Dugan's Drugs? They were all over town. The one in Bellaire was roughly where the Walgreen's is now, at Bellaire and Rice. The building was torn down about eight or 10 years ago. It had a GREAT grill and fountain in its heyday. Mading's merged with them, and for awhile there were Mading-Dugan stores. Then Eckerd swallowed that up.

What about Sight & Sound, the stereo shop? Sterling Electronics when it was a retail store on the SW Freeway?

Lew's Record Shop in Meyerland! What a record store.

I grew up in Bellaire in the '50s and '60s mostly, and frequented the Bellaire Theater quite a bit. When "The Alamo" came out, I saw it three times, one time from the projection booth because my next-door neighbor's dad was a projectionist there.

Does anyone remember the ball field and youth center that was on Bellaire Boulevard just across the tracks, about where the apartments and the bowling alley are today? More or less across from the old Southwest YMCA, which is now a West University rec center or something.

The Bellaire Texan folded in the late '80s, I believe. It had been sold to a chain, which eventually ceased its publication for awhile. Then the daughter of founding publisher Jack Gurwell, who died in the early '80s, revived it for a few years. If you go to the Bellaire library, be sure to look at the volumes of the old Southwestern Times, too. It was published from the late '40s until (I think) the early '50s.

My mom still lives in the house where I grew up, a little 2-1-1 that was actually the model home for that floor plan when the subdivision was built in 1949-50. Then I lived in Bellaire again from 1991 to 2003, and it was interesting. A lot of good people still live there. But the McMansions are mostly bringing in self-absorbed yuppies who shut their doors and rarely speak to their neighbors. Not all, but too many of them send their kids to overrated private schools and swim at The Houstonian instead of Evergreen. The Bellaire City Council encourages this by allowing oversized home construction which attracts these folks. Very short-sighted on their part.