Recent reminders of the Scott Theatre's uncertain footing as developers and city planners vie over plans for its future had me thinking about Joseph Pelich, the theater’s architect who during a prolific career left his fingerprints all across the city and state.
Perhaps his best-known and most impactful structure still standing is the Robert Carr Chapel on the TCU campus, a venue where brides and grooms by the hundreds or thousands have chosen to begin life as man and wife. Thousands more have graduated from Polytechnic High School, a Georgian Revival built in 1938. Or Eastern Hills High School, constructed in 1959.
His legacy, however, is far larger.
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Jack White Photo Collection
Robert Carr Chapel
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection
Polytechnic High School
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A rendering of the Greater Fort Worth International Airport.
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The former KTVT building on the West Freeway.
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The 1939 downtown Fort Worth Public Library.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection
The original 1936 Casa Manana.
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US Army McCloskey General Hospital, today the Veterans Administration Hospital in Temple, named for former Congressman Tiger Teague. At the time of its construction in the early 1940s, McCloskey was the largest Army hospital in the country.
Pelich designed the original outdoor Casa Manana for the Texas Frontier Centennial in 1936. He designed a number of other buildings on TCU’s campus, including Daniel-Meyer Coliseum, which has been renovated and renamed Schollmaier Arena. He also designed the tower addition of St. Joseph’s Hospital, whose 12 floors were added in two phases in the late 1950s and middle 1960s.
Pelich teamed with Preston Geren Sr. on the design of the Greater Fort Worth International Airport, the airport Fort Worth city leaders opened in 1953, just a few miles south of what would one day become Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.
And, yes, there was the Scott Theatre. Pelich paired with Donald Oenslager on the project. What was added to an existing arts center in 1966 was a small intimate theater with 13 rows of seating, European style with no cross aisle. No seat is farther than 65 feet from the stage.
At the three-day gala opening of the theater addition, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Gordan MacRae were among the celebrities who turned out.
Pelich, who was born in Austria but moved with his parents to Ohio as a young boy, attended Sorbonne University in France and graduated from Cornell University in 1916.
He moved here to train with the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. He was said to be said to be sold on making his life here by observing the “expansiveness of Texas from his airplane.”
Vernon Castle, famed stage dancer, was Pelich’s commanding officer. After Castle’s death in a plane crash, Pelich became chief flying instructor at Hicks Field, Barron Field, and Benbrook Field.
After being discharged from service, he opened his office in Fort Worth in 1919.
In 1967, Pelich became the first architect to receive a Texas Restoration Award from the Texas State Historical Survey Committee for his work on restoring the birthplace of President Dwight Eisenhower in Denison. That project was funded largely by Ike admirers Amon Carter, Sid Richardson, and Web Maddox.
In addition to his public projects, which also included the downtown Fort Worth Public Library in 1939, many homes he designed remain standing. Among those is the late Tex Moncrief’s.
Another he designed was the home of Douglas Chandor, a prolific English artist whose commissions included President Herbert Hoover, President Franklin Roosevelt, FDR’s mother, and wife Eleanor, as well as Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was another.
Hoover Vice President Charles Curtis, the only Native American to serve as first-in-line, was yet another. There are prints out there. I looked as I pulled out my wallet.
Chandor was commissioned to paint the "Big Three" -- Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin – to commemorate the historic meeting at Yalta in 1945 to continue postwar planning. However, he was never able to get to Moscow to paint Stalin, who was by then clamping down on pro-Westerners and firming up his buffer zone in Eastern Europe.
Anyway, before all that, Chandor married a Weatherford girl, Ina Hill in 1934. Pelich designed their home there on 3.5 acres, White Shadows Gardens, today called Chandor Gardens and owned and operated by the city of Weatherford.
Pelich died in July 1968 at age 73. He was cremated. The location of his ashes is unknown.
"A Study of Fort Worth's Iconic Landmarks" is an occasional series.
