Pictured is the infamous “Dope Farm” in Fort Worth, Texas. A facility built to house drug addicts and high-profile bad guys. If you grew up in Fort Worth in the 1950s, chances are good that your parents used this place as a threat to keep you in line.
My neighborhood buddies and I were a bit on the bad side; nothing severe, just minor kid things like blowing up mailboxes with cherry bombs, setting garages on fire, raiding the milkman’s truck while he was taking the bottles of milk to a doorstep, dropping firecrackers down rooftop vents, fun little things like that.
These minor infractions usually ended with one or all of us getting a butt whooping with a belt, flyswatter, Mimosa tree switch, a tennis shoe, or a Tupperware cake pan. The Tupperware hurt more than any of the other weapons our mothers could find. When our hijinx got to be too much, our mothers would pull out the dreaded threat of “Okay, that’s it, either straighten up or I’m sending you to the Dope Farm.” That’s all it took to turn us into practicing angels for a few days. All the kids knew about this place. The narcotics users, gangsters, and local children who misbehaved went there. None of us actually knew anyone who had been incarcerated within those walls, but the thought of going there scared the liver out of us.
In the late 1950s, a cousin of mine turned into a genuine hoodlum, robbing a grocery store dressed up like Mr. Greenjeans from the Captain Kangaroo show. Greased back hair, black work boots, dirty Levis, and a white tee-shirt with a pack of Camels rolled into the sleeve, and he rode a junked-out motorcycle. When my mother spoke of him, she crossed herself. My poor cousin was added to the ever-present threat because he spent a year of his teenage life at The Dope Farm, living in a small cell, eating Wonder Bread and Bologna samwithches, and watching the old movie “Boys Town” every Saturday night. There wasn’t a Father Flannigan on the premises, only guards with guns and a Baptist preacher.
I was pretty good for a year while my cousin was locked up. We received a Christmas card with a picture of him dressed in his striped pajamas, slicked-back hair, and a Camel dangling from his snarly mouth. All this while perched on Santa’s knee. It was a nice little card, similar to the ones we made in school from construction paper and paste. Some bad words and threats were written below the photo, but my mother wouldn’t let me read them. She cut the bad word part off and taped the card on the ice-box, so every time I opened it, the threat was there, and it worked.
The only kid, other than my hoodlum cousin, who was dragged off to the place was our baseball team center fielder, Billy Roy. Billy started hanging out with our nemesis across the track, The Hard Guys, and became a regular James Cagney by the fourth grade, robbing a local convenience store with a Mattel Fanner 50 cap pistol. You guessed it, he went to the Dope Farm for six months. He learned some good stuff there because when he came out, he went directly into a lucrative life of hoodlummanity and crime. Last I heard, he was in Sing Sing.
Notes From The Cactus Patch 