Dallas

Dallas is a major city in the U.S. state of Texas. It is the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the fourth most populous metropolitan area in the United States. The city's population ranks ninth in the U.S. and third in Texas after Houston and San Antonio. The city's prominence arose from its historical importance as a center for the oil and cotton industries, and its position along numerous railroad lines. The bulk of the city is in Dallas County, of which it is the county seat; however, sections of the city are located in Collin, Denton, Kaufman, and Rockwall counties. According to the 2010 United States Census, the city had a population of 1,197,816. The United States Census Bureau's estimate for the city's population increased to 1,317,929 as of July 1, 2016.

Links To Peel
Peel first arrived in Dallas in the spring of 1960 after his father shipped him off to Texas from Liverpool to learn the family business, where he had business friends living in the city. He first wound up in Houston, stayed only a night or so, then came to Dallas to work at the Cotton Exchange, which was not to be his lot in life, as mentioned in his autobiography Margrave Of The Marshes.

"'The boss of the company -- I can't for the life of me remember his name or that of the company -- didn't seem as interested in me as I had hoped or expected. He didn't seem to know much about my dad or Strauss and Co., the family business, either. And this was not the full extent of his ignorance. 'Hey, John. Where you from?' he asked when I was shown into his office. 'England,' I replied, modestly but accurately. 'England,' he repeated. 'Is that in France?' I met a lot of this sort of thing in Texas. Folks, even those who appeared educated, even sophisticated, had very little idea what went on outside Texas, even across the border in Louisiana.'"Peel wound up living at the downtown YMCA, where he befriended "the first two black men to whom I had ever spoken." They spent their free time drinking Country Club Malt Liquor at a barbecue joint near the Cotton Exchange. Peel wound up moving out of the YMCA after "a fellow resident attempted a sort of rather half-hearted rape" in a shower and took a place on Gaston Avenue, in an "inexpensive boarding house...presided over by a magnificent old gal named Miss (pronounced Mizz) Smith." There, he met a "guitar-playing son-of-a-gun" from Waco named Edgar Wortham, who would take Peel to a bar near a drugstore close to their residence. Peel turned 21 in Dallas -- an occasion he marked by "watching Peter Sellers in Two-Way Stretch on my own in a cinema attached to Southern Methodist University." In 1961, he met John F. Kennedy during a trip the candidate made through downtown Dallas; there are two pictures Peel took of JFK in Dallas that appear in the book, proof of their brief encounter.

Eventually Peel left the Cotton Exchange and, through an friend, hooked up with a man from Highland Park who got him a job "as office boy with the K.T. Martin Insurance Company [that] dealt exclusively with crop-hail insurance." He also became a Deep Ellum regular visitor to the area, Peel writes, finding a secondhand record store there specializing in seven-inch singles. And he became obsessed with Kat's Karavan on WRR and KBOX -- WRR, especially.

"'Kat's Karavan was something else. The DJs were wry, well informed -- although not so well informed that you couldn't occasionally pick them up on some small detail in the life of, say, John Lee Hooker -- and the effect of hearing [Lightin'] Hopkins, Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, interspersed with comedy tracks from Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart or Brother Dave Gardner (a big local favourite), booming out of the car radio as you cruised with your mates to Garland or Mesquite or Richardson to try you luck with the girls at a different drive-in, was galvanising.'"There are pages and pages in the book about Peel's days in Dallas -- his memories of Nancy Bowling from Bryan Adams High School he used to screw "on the shores of White Rock Lake," his fondness for a "Dr Pepper Icy," his nights spent listening to Russ Knight, the "Weird Beard" of KLIF. But he never quite finished his Dallas chapter. Instead, that comes later in the book courtesy of his wife Sheila, who, using John's diaries and recollections, pieces together what happened to him in Dallas -- "the site of one of his brushes with the law, which, through infrequent, left him a whiff of the outlaw.", where he was sent to Dallas County Jail for a few hours in 1963 for traffic violations across the city. Sheila writes about John's co-creation of the Dallas County Cricket Club, which is still around today; a photo of his membership card can be found in the book. While there's no mention in the book of Peel's first radio job -- according to Wikipedia and other sources, Peel deejayed the second hour of "Kat's Karavan" on WRR for free -- it does detail how he came to be KLIF's resident Beatles expert.

"'After John made a call to KLIF, to correct Russ Knight, more commonly known as the Weird Beard, on some point of fact about Liverpool, Knight -- or should that be Mr Beard? -- hired him as the show's official Beatles Correspondent... In his capacity as KLIF's voice of the Beatles, John would be called upon to answer whichever enquiries about the Fab Four the young Dallas audience saw fit to send his way, though there would typically be a record played between question and answer, to give John time to find out the name of Paul's pet marmoset, or how many sugars Ringo's Auntie Beryl took in her coffee.'"John wrote in his own diaries about how his house on Potomac Avenue became "a little hive of carnal activity" when female Beatles fans found out KLIF's Beatle boy lives there.

"'If they were anxious to sacrifice their virginity to a Man From Liverpool it was churlish, even unpatriotic, of me to refuse to cooperate.'"And it goes on -- with one story after another in Dallas, told by the man himself about the seven years he spent in the States, most in Dallas but a few in Oklahoma City.