If You Graduated SMU in the 1950s, We May Have Found Your Other Diploma

While we wait on some return calls, here's yet another intriguing bit of local ephemera presently for sale on eBay suggested by Friend of Unfair Park PeterK: a Guzzling Diploma from Mac's College Inn. It was on the stretch of Mockingbird presently occupied by the strip center that includes Premiere...

By Robert Wilonsky

January 20, 2011

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While we wait on some return calls, here's yet another intriguing bit of local ephemera presently for sale on eBay suggested by Friend of Unfair Park PeterK: a Guzzling Diploma from Mac's College Inn. It was on the stretch of Mockingbird presently occupied by the strip center that includes Premiere Video, Jason's Deli and the Pocket Sandwich Theater, and it was clearly a Hilltop hang-out.

Information about the joint is hard to come by; as one long-timer told me, he remembers it ... but just barely. Which is why, yet again, I turned to the great Rachel Howell, assistant manager of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division in the central library, for more info. This is what she found:

There's not much information about Mac's College Inn. It appears in the Dallas city directories for the first time in 1951, with J.W. McGall (or McCall - which is how it appeared in the Morning News) as manager. It was listed as a restaurant.

In 1952, McGall was found guilty of failing to buy a gambling stamp that would have allowed him to sell football lottery tickets legally. He was fined $500.00. (Dallas Morning News September 16, 1952, section 3, page 3).

Mac's College Inn appears for the last time in the directory of 1958. By the time the 1959 directory information was gathered, the bar was called The Westerner.

Robert Wilonsky

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