In February 1940, a teenage girl from Houston named Josephine Powell appeared on the cover of Life magazine. She was wearing a drum majorette outfit with very short shorts, a plumed hat, and boots. She was holding a tray. She was a carhop at a drive-in restaurant called Sivils, and after that issue hit newsstands, Louise Sivils started receiving letters from young women all over the country asking for a job.
Four months later, J.D. and Louise Sivils brought their operation to Dallas.
They opened at the triangle where West Davis Street meets Fort Worth Avenue in Oak Cliff in June 1940, and what they built there was unlike anything the city had seen. Three acres of parking. Five hundred spaces. A uniformed general stationed in a tower on the roof, tracking every car that pulled in and directing traffic through a PA system. One hundred and five carhops in majorette outfits that Louise had designed herself after watching a high school halftime show. Three scooter-riding cigarette girls working the lot. The menu ran around the clock — burgers, fried chicken, barbecue, steaks, trout sandwiches, and cold Carta Blanca beer. Sivils never closed.
The carhops earned $3 a day in combined wages and tips — good money for 1940, when a nickel bus ride took you to work and a dime was a respectable tip. On a busy Friday night with a full lot, a popular carhop could do considerably better than that. But the $3 was never guaranteed. There was no base salary, no floor, no protection on a slow Tuesday when the tips dried up. So in 1940, the carhops voted to unionize. Their demands were modest — $3 a week in guaranteed wages, one meal per shift, and free uniforms. J.D. Sivils rejected the vote without negotiation. The women kept working.
Meanwhile, Dallas had opinions about the outfits. Church groups and civic organizations launched a public campaign against the shorts, arguing that the carhops were an affront to decency. The Texas Restaurant Association weighed in officially, declaring that bare skin was a violation of the state’s sanitary laws — a creative interpretation of public health that has not been widely adopted since. Letters to the Dallas newspapers flew in both directions. One writer demanded that if owners needed to rely on what she called cheap chorus comedy cavortings, the girls should be paid show house wages. Another suggested that male carhops should also be put in short shorts and boots to see how the public liked that. A few roadside operations reportedly tried it. Mobs of women showed up to look.
By 1942, under sustained pressure, the Sivils agreed to replace the shorts with knee-length skirts and waist-length jackets. The crowds kept coming anyway. The food was good, the beer was cold, and the general in the tower kept the lot running like a machine.
Sivils ran in Oak Cliff for nearly three decades. What ended it was not scandal or failure but simple geography. Oak Cliff went dry in the 1950s, which took the beer off the menu and a significant portion of the appeal with it. Then Interstate 30 opened and pulled the traffic away from West Davis entirely. By 1967 the lot was quiet and Sivils closed for good. The spot where five hundred cars once waited for a carhop in a majorette outfit is now a gas station.
Louise Sivils died in 2006. J.D. had gone twenty years before her. In the early 1970s an SMU film professor named Pat Korman tracked J.D. down and put him in a short documentary about Dallas carhop culture. In the film, an old man by then, J.D. explains his hiring philosophy with the casual confidence of someone who built something and knew it. The girls had to be real pretty, he says. The prettiest girls we could find. We had the pick of the field.
Josephine Powell, the girl on the Life cover, presumably got the job.
