Mott’s: The Five-and-Dime of a Simpler Time

Before the advent of malls, before the advent of big-box discount stores, before the advent of dollar stores, Americans shopped at five-and-dime stores: S. H. Kress, Woolworth, W. T. Grant, TG&Y.

And Mott’s.

The big five-and-dime stores were located downtown. But the Mott’s stores were, like the corner grocery stores, the embodiment of neighborhood shopping.

Poly, like many neighborhoods in the middle of the twentieth century, was largely self-sustaining, especially for us kids. We could satisfy most of our shopping and entertainment needs at neighborhood businesses and parks. Most of those were located along two streets: East Rosedale Street and Vaughn Boulevard.

In the 1950s East Rosedale was the prime meridian of Poly, and in the middle of the 3000 block were three businesses that were kid-centric: Ashburn’s ice cream parlor next to Mott’s five-and-dime store next to the Varsity Theater.

This composite shows East Rosedale Street’s Kids Central: Ashburn’s ice cream parlor building (now a Subway), the Mott’s building (now TWU’s bookstore), and a 1940 photo of the Varsity Theater.

Today the site of the Varsity Theater is a parking lot. The theater closed in December 1965.

A kid could easily spend a Saturday afternoon—and an allowance—in those three establishments.

I remember Mott’s best of the three.

Sure, Kress and Woolworth—and, of course, Leonard’s—downtown had a better selection than Mott’s had of everything a kid could want. But downtown was five miles away from my home. To a kid that would mean riding a bus. The city transit system was intimidating to this ten-year-old. The Kingston Trio had a big hit recording in 1959 with “Charlie on the MTA,” and I was convinced that if I tried to ride a city bus to downtown by myself I’d
“ride forever ’round the streets of Cowtown.
He’s the kid who never returned.”

As for the buses themselves, that churning, clattering, coin-chewing fare box contraption beside the bus driver sounded as if it had skipped breakfast and might fancy a fourth-grader for brunch.

On the other hand, Mott’s on East Rosedale was just one mile from my home. And a mile was nothing to kids with boundless energy in an era when it was safe to get out of sight of your parents. We kids walked or rode our bike, perhaps stopping halfway to spelunk the storm-drain tunnel in the bend of Vaughn Boulevard.

Three elements made Mott’s memorable.

Toys and Turtles

Mott’s stores were small, maybe five or six thousand square feet. The East Rosedale store was narrow and long, partitioned by maybe five aisles. I doubt that I ever walked down four of those aisles. We kids were concerned with just one: the westernmost aisle.

That was the toys aisle: AMF model car kits, Revell model airplane kits, friction cars, balsa-wood gliders, pick-up sticks, Duncan yoyos, toy dinosaurs, paddle balls, slide puzzles, cap pistols, water pistols, jacks sets, water rockets, colored chalk for drawing hopscotch courts on sidewalks, modeling clay, Silly Putty, dolls, board games, baseballs that went lopsided with the first solid whack from a bat, and brave, unblinking green plastic Army men who never, ever divulged military secrets no matter how much they were tortured by a boy with a magnifying glass under a Texas summer sun.

The rest of the store, I am told, was stocked with boring adult stuff: wooden clothes pins, bobby pins, sewing notions, underwear, greeting cards, picture frames, glue, nails, face cream, aftershave and perfume, antiseptic, weather stripping, piece goods, kitchenware, contact paper, thumbtacks, bathroom plungers, ad yawneam.

Yes, Mott’s was part toy store, part hardware store, part department store.

Even part pet store: Near the checkout counter was the ultimate seducer, the irresistible magnet for a kid’s nickels and dimes: an aquarium of baby turtles. They were red-ear sliders, their shells painted. Forty-nine cents. To complement your purchase you could buy a plastic oval turtle habitat. In the center of the habitat was a ramp up out of the water to an island sprinkled with painted gravel and topped by a snap-together plastic palm tree.

Mott’s also sold Hartz Mountain pasteboard shaker cans of high-protein turtle food: unidentifiable bits of dried insects.

I mowed many a lawn, sold many a pop bottle to finance my pet turtle habit. Mott’s was my “pusher,” feeding my addiction until I began to recruit my own pet turtles from Sycamore Creek.

The Floor

The early Mott’s stores—such as the store on East Rosedale—were built on pier-and-beam foundations. With time the foundation became uneven, causing the hardwood flooring to warp, becoming higher here, lower there. As a result, negotiating your way across the creaking, uneven floor was a bit like a landlubber walking on a ship’s deck during rough seas.

That Smell

A Mott’s store had its own smell: an amalgam of the store’s diverse and concentrated stock. Evening in Paris and Vicks VapoRub, Old Spice and Testors glue, Aqua Net and Air Wick, Brylcreem and 3-in-One Oil, Stopette, Prell, Noxema, dental powder, face powder, baby powder, bar soaps, candles, candy, cough drops, depilatories, baseball card gum, bubble bath, moth balls—and, yes, Hartz Mountain dried bug bits—combined to form a distinctive potpourri.

Eau de Mott’s.

You could be blindfolded and led door to door along the shops of East Rosedale Street and know instantly when you had entered the wonderland that was Mott’s.

And whom did we kids have to thank for that wondrous toys aisle and that storm-tossed floor and that unique five-and-dime-store smell?

Esters B. Mott was born in Lufkin in 1907 to parents with all-American names: George Washington and Martha Mott. George Washington Mott was a dry goods merchant, so Esters was exposed to retailing early on.

Esters Mott began his five-and-dime-store career at age twelve as a part-time employee of the Perry brothers’ variety stores in Lufkin. He worked before and after school. Mott left school when he was sixteen to work full-time for the Perrys as manager of warehouse operations.

By 1940 he had become vice president and merchandising manager of the company.

Later in 1940 Mott moved to Dallas and opened his first Mott’s store on Greenville Avenue.

Also that year he opened three Mott’s stores in Fort Worth. The store on Camp Bowie Boulevard was first. The store on East Rosedale was third. And note that Esters Mott was not afraid to open a store just one block from another variety store: Pickard’s.

The Hemphill Street store was opposite the White Theater (now the vacant Berry Theater).

The building that housed Fort Worth’s first Mott’s at 3923 Camp Bowie Boulevard still stands. An A&P grocery store had opened in the building in 1930.

Esters B. Mott died at the age of forty-four in 1951—before many of us ever set a sea leg on one of his wavy floors.

But his company lived on and prospered.

By 1952 the Mott’s company had seven stores in Fort Worth, opening one in the new Fair Oaks shopping center at River Oaks Boulevard and Jacksboro Highway.

In November 1953 Fort Worth’s eighth Mott’s store opened in the new Fair East shopping center in the 4700 block of East Lancaster Avenue. Note that the grand opening was giving away a “new” 1953 Ford just days before the 1954 models were introduced. (MSRP of a 1953 Ford Customline was about $1,800 [$17,000 today].)

In 1955 the seventeenth Mott’s store in Fort Worth opened with Cox’s Berry Street Center on West Berry across from the Cox department store.

As you can see, the Mott’s company at first opened stores in the inner city and then in big “suburban” shopping centers like Fair Oaks and Fair East.

But in 1956 Mott’s began to think small—and far out.

Some back story: Postwar Fort Worth was booming in the 1950s. Between 1950 and 1960 Fort Worth’s population increased from 278,000 to 356,000. Case in point: This aerial photo of 1952 shows that in southwest Fort Worth much of the land south of Gambrell Street and west of the Santa Fe track was farmland occupied by one isolated farmhouse (F on the aerial photo). Southwest of the farmhouse was a meandering creek. Note that Odessa Street extended only two blocks south of Seminary Drive and Cockrell Avenue only one block. Seminary Drive did not extend east to the Santa Fe track. The seminary (S on the aerial photo) is in the upper right. Kellis Park (K on the aerial photo) was barely in the city limits in 1952.

In January 1953 the farmhouse was still standing. But in September the school board announced that South Hills Elementary School would be built at the intersection of Cockrell Avenue and Bilglade Road—just east of the farmhouse. Soon the farmhouse was gone, Cockrell Avenue was extended south, and the farmhouse’s long driveway became Bilglade Road. An intersection was born.
The school opened in 1954, the year my house was built one block away.

Fast-forward two years. By 1956, quicker’n you can say “building boom,” the big farm was gone, replaced by the sprawling South Hills housing addition. Odessa Street also had been extended south, and where the farmhouse had stood (F on the aerial photo) was a shopping center in the 4800 block of Odessa Street.

Unlike Fair Oaks and Fair East, South Hills Center was small, only four stores: Mott’s (M on aerial photo), a Worth food market, a Moreland’s Rexall drugstore, and a beauty shop. (The Worth food market later became a Leonard’s supermarket.) To the immediate east of the shopping center was South Hills Elementary School (SHES on aerial photo).
The creek that had meandered through the farmland in 1952 had been channeled down the median of Westcreek Drive.

The new Mott’s store was the eighteenth in Fort Worth, the thirty-third in the chain.

In 1991 the private Hill School (HS on the satellite photo) would convert the shopping center buildings into its new home.

The Mott’s company reached its peak in the 1950s with seventy-three stores, most of them in the Metroplex and west Texas.

By 1986 the Mott’s company had twenty-nine stores in Tarrant County. But the company had always operated with a narrow profit margin, relying on low rents secured by long leases. Now changing consumer tastes and big-box discount stores were killing off five-and-dime stores one by one.

In 1988 the Mott’s company announced plans to close the East Rosedale store. More than five hundred people signed a petition asking that the store be kept open. The Mott’s store was regarded as an anchor of East Rosedale Street retail as the city and TWU worked to rejuvenate the neighborhood. Many of the petition signers were older people who were unable to drive to a store farther away but could walk a few blocks to Mott’s for many of their needs.

But the company stood firm. Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy captured the Mott’s experience in this brief farewell.

By 1998 all the painted baby turtles in the world could not save Mott’s, and after fifty-eight years the company closed its remaining twenty-three stores.

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