Photography by Sylvia Elzafon.
The property at the intersection of Paulus Avenue and Junius Street where the Lakewood Branch Library sits is a gathering place for the community. But for Teresa Musgrove Judd, it couldn’t be more personal.
Her grandparents, Terrell and Marie Musgrove, bought the property from relatives in the 1920s. The initial owners had wanted to build something similar to the nearby Parks Estate at Worth and Paulus. They never got around to it, so they sold it to the Musgroves.
In 1974, after the house was demolished, Teresa Musgrove was standing on the property, performing with the J.L. Long Middle School band at a ribbon-cutting for the Abrams Road bypass.
Some may not know the history of the library property, but Judd hasn’t forgotten.
“I just have this feeling of familiarity every time I go in there,” she says. “I can’t explain it.”
Judd’s father, Terrell Musgrove Jr., was born at Baylor Hospital in 1930, and he grew up in that house. As an adult, working for over 30 years at the Western Electric warehouse on Mockingbird Lane, he stayed in the neighborhood.
Because of that, Judd also grew up in Lakewood, though her previous homes on Coronado and Casa Loma aren’t there anymore.
The roads have changed, businesses have come and gone, and development continues to alter the look of the neighborhood. But for 100 years, Lakewood has kept drawing people in.
This is Judd’s lived experience.
She and her father, both born at Baylor, attended the same Dallas ISD neighborhood schools — Lipscomb Elementary, J.L. Long Middle School and Woodrow Wilson High School. Judd says she loved hearing her father’s stories about school and his childhood.
One of the most memorable was the tale of the construction of the Lakewood Theater. Her father, 8 at the time, watched the local landmark be built. It’s where he and his friends spent Saturdays watching cartoons, comedies and serials. Decades later, Judd saw Batman and Disney movies there.
“This was his home, and I don’t think he ever wanted to live anywhere else,” Judd says of her father, who died in 2005.
Judd graduated from Woodrow in 1977 as the class valedictorian, having participated in band and the Sweethearts Drill Team. After high school, she earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Texas at Austin. Though she worked in the capital for a while, she always wanted to come home to East Dallas. And that’s what she did.
After her father died, Judd got serious about chronicling stories of Lakewood. She initially decided to dive into the first 50 years of Lakewood Shopping Center, which her father and grandparents had seen develop. But a friend convinced her to expand her range to 60 years, to include the Abrams bypass, an infrastructural change meant to ease traffic near the shopping center.
Judd’s book will be formatted like an encyclopedia, with business listings alphabetized. This is a project she’s been working on for years — as of publication, she’s made it to the “R” businesses — but she says she hopes to have it finished by 2025, in time for the centennial of the shopping center.
Her research began at the library Downtown, where she consulted city directories to find businesses located in Lakewood, starting from the 1920s. She also used archives from The Dallas Morning News to find important events — robberies and murders included — that happened at the shopping center, and she has conducted interviews with Lakewood residents and shopping center employees.
“It’s a huge undertaking, and sometimes I wonder why I did it, but I haven’t stopped,” Judd says. “I just feel like this is something I’m supposed to do. So I’m going to keep at it until I finish.”
Even though three generations of her family have lived in the neighborhood, she has still come across information she didn’t know. Abrams Road, a central corridor connecting Lakewood to other parts of Dallas, used to be called Greenville Road. It was renamed in the 1930s because of confusion with similar addresses on nearby Greenville Avenue — a postal worker’s nightmare.
In her younger years, Judd used to shop at a dress store at Lakewood Shopping Center called Margie’s, which carried discounted designer labels. It was badly damaged in a fire in the early 1970s, and Judd says she didn’t think it would reopen. But the business was saved in part by a loan from Lakewood Bank, which was led by president Don Wright, the father of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright.
“I’ve seen other areas of Dallas where the shopping centers have kind of gotten bedraggled or even have been bulldozed,” Judd says. “But Lakewood maintains itself and continues on, and that’s a real tribute to its neighbors and its customers and supporters.”
