San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Kit Kat had dining, dancing for ‘Mr. Average’
I have some of the love letters my father wrote to my mother from wherever he was stationed during World War II between 1942 and 1945. In his letters, my father often mentioned the Kit Kat Club (in San Antonio). He would say things like “I went to a club here, but it wasn’t as nice as the Kit Kat.” Or he might reminisce about their wonderful times together at the Kit Kat. I was wondering where the Kit Kat was located in the late 1930s and early 1940s and what else you know about it. I’m pretty sure they had live bands for dancing since dancing was mentioned in some of the letters. I don’t know if you have done a story about this already.
Your parents probably had great memories of the Kit Kat Club because they were young and in love when they went there. In their time, it was pretty standard fare, raising medium expectations by advertising as “One of San Antonio’s Nicer Dinner Clubs.”
It opened May 30, 1939, on the site of a previously successful roadhouse, the Blue Willow Inn.
From 1925 to 1938, “San Antonio’s Most Pleasant Resort” had everything other area nightclubs had: chicken and steak dinners, dancing to live orchestras from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. and a little gambling (dice and bookmaking) in the upstairs rooms, periodically addressed with catch-and-release raids by the Bexar County Sheriff’s Department and the Texas Rangers.
When downtown clubs were closed down, manager Earl Ramsey — formerly of Shadowland ( covered here Sept. 26) and famous gambler and state legislator Virgil “Red” Berry’s Turf Club ran a Blue Willow Special bus out to “the most convenient pleasure palace, just a few minutes out the Fredericksburg Road.”
Outside the city limits at what became 3600 Fredericksburg Road (later 3518 after street renumbering), the Blue Willow closed in 1936, and the next owner bought it for $6,250 the following year. That was Richard Jefferson “Dick” Jones, a young entrepreneur who attended Brackenridge High School but didn’t graduate.
Jones lived with his single mother, a department store salesperson, and her mother on the near South Side. As of the 1930 U.S. census, Jones, 18, was working as a timekeeper for a contractor; from then on, he was
self-employed at a variety of enterprises — flower shop, trampoline factory, Jonesville trailer park — with the Kit Kat being the most successful.
(About spelling: Although the name sometimes was presented as the Kit Kat Klub, on Jones’ World War II-era draft registration, he hand-wrote “Kit Kat Klub” as his place of business … and firmly overwrote the K with a C, maybe to avoid association with the Ku Klux Klan or KKK.)
The Kit Kat was a more sophisticated take on the Blue Willow, whose wood frame was covered by white stucco and set about with palm trees. The San Antonio Light, Oct. 29, 1939, reported that “A cocktail lounge has been added on the balcony. The fireplaces, one on each side, throw out an attractive glow on the main dance floor downstairs.” The club had also added private dining rooms, with the same “popular prices” for all the different spaces.
As the new operator of the reborn nightclub, Jones told the Light he had “splurged” $60,000 on the makeover. He enlarged the bandstand, enclosed one of the open-air patios and reconfigured the other as an open-air dance floor, for an enlarged maximum occupancy of 1,000.
The Kit Kat — probably named after a fancy London club that figured in celebrity gossip columns — served lunch and dinner (yep, chicken and steak) and was open nightly for dancing and floor
shows. The cover charge was 25 cents on weeknights and 40 cents Saturday — no cover for dinner guests. Compared with the $1 cover at Shadowland and other swankier spots, the Kit Kat was a good deal for young couples and a shorter drive during the years of gas rationing.
As was not unusual then, the floor-show performers were typical of the tail end of vaudeville, featuring magicians, mentalists (mind-reading acts, often female) and ventriloquists as well as singers and dancers.
Although Jones booked swing great saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford and his orchestra within a few months of opening the Kit Kat, bandleaders weren’t usually household names. Besides locally familiar musicians like Jimmie Klein, they were more often famous by association — Emilio Caceres, formerly with Paul Whiteman, and Paul Anderson, who had played with Jack Teagarden.
It might have been a few years after your parents frequented the Kit Kat, but sometime in the ’40s, Jones installed animal-print upholstery and renamed one of the rooms the Zebra Lounge, perhaps to evoke a similar motif at El Morocco, a fancy New York nitery. The stage was in the main room, and the décor throughout didn’t change much through the years, maybe to keep costs down. Jones told the San Antonio Express, Feb. 14, 1952, that “a club owner can build and expand and make his establishment plush
and luxurious until he’s only hurting his own business, if he caters to middle-class people … until Mr. Average Man feels that he’ll spend too much money going there.”
As was industry standard then, the Kit Kat underwent the obligatory raids for throwing dice and betting on horses. While Jones got pulled in, the resulting injunctions didn’t close the club, just restrained him from gambling there. “It has been said,” he told the Light, Aug. 8, 1941, “that a dinner club cannot be profitable without the revenue from gambling. I am going to try to prove that statement is wrong.” Either he did or he just got better at evading detection.
The Kit Kat made a shift to a more family-style establishment in the ’50s, with the baby boom in full swing. A previous column (Dec. 26, 2004) discussed this version, sometimes known as the Kit Kat Swim Club, with the addition of a pool, teen dances to records and a countryclub atmosphere.
Jones and his wife, Gladys, lived farther out on Fredericksburg. It needs to be noted that the couple had four children, one of whom was former pediatric nurse Genene Jones, who was convicted of murdering children in her care.
The Kit Kat Club — said by sources quoted in the 2004 column to have deteriorated in the ’60s — closed in 1965. “(The) onetime mecca for San Antonio’s after-dark drinking set sold to American Legion Post No. 2 early in 1966,” said the Light May 14, 1966, and the organizations made renovations worth $35,000.
Jones died Jan. 3, 1966, of metastasizing cancer, at only 56. On his death certificate, his occupation was listed as “billboards and advertising.”
GHOSTLY DOUBLE: Longago school bus crash, fateful railroad crossing, tragic loss of young lives, haunted intersection, baby powder, ghostly handprints “pushing” parked cars across the tracks — sounds familiar, right? If you grew up in San Antonio, you probably visited the so-called “ghost tracks” at the intersection of Villamain and Shane roads to try out the fabled phenomenon.
Well, if you grew up in the area around the villages of Wayne and Bartlett, Ill., you would have gone out to the tracks on Munger Road to do exactly the same thing.
According to a story that aired Thursday on WBEZ radio, Chicago’s public radio station, “A school bus full of kids was crossing over the train tracks and it stalled. Before the driver could get the bus off the tracks, a train came along and hit the bus. No one survived the crash.
The legend says the ghosts of the children are still there … and claims that if you drive your car onto the tracks, put it in neutral and sprinkle some baby powder on your car bumper, the children are going to push your car off the tracks so that you don’t get hit. And then if you go and investigate the bumper, you’ll see fingerprints from the baby powder.”
WBEZ producer Joe De Ceault — who found no evidence of any such accident in that area of Illinois — contacted this column, which tackled our ghost tracks in 2003, thanks to a tip from Matt De Waelsche, librarian and archivist at the San Antonio Public Library.
While helping a caller, De Waelsche discovered that a train really did hit a stalled school bus in 1938 — in Utah. The accident, which claimed the lives of 26 passengers, was front-page news in all of San Antonio’s daily papers and made the Chicago Tribune as well, as De Ceault discovered.
To hear the full story of the twin tracks, in which De Waelsche is quoted, go to www.wbez.org and search for “Munger Road.”