Former south side kids return to roots, thank community center: ‘This is our home.’
Kids growing up in Hillside in the 1980s knew their place. They knew to be home before the street lights turned on. They knew to help their moms around the house. They knew the importance of their neighborhood.
And every day, dozens of kids would flock after school and on weekends to the Hillside Community Center, 1201 E. Maddox Ave., to play basketball, football and hang out. It defined their growth and kept many of them out of trouble.
More than 40 years later, those kids, now adults with their own children, flocked to the center on Saturday to relive those memories and give thanks for what the center gave to them decades ago. It was a reunion sparked by a man who read a startling statistic about their childhood home.
The Hillside neighborhood is sandwiched between Historic Southside and Morningside, all of which made up a swath of Fort Worth that residents call south side. It’s the same area that has the lowest average life expectancy in Texas, at 66.7 years, according to a 2019 UT Southwestern study.
A Star-Telegram series explored the factors that drive this inequality, including the high cost and limited access to quality healthcare. There are also few grocery stores nearby, but plenty of convenience stores and fast-food restaurants.
When former Hillside resident Marcus Graves heard about the study, it crushed him. How could this neighborhood that offered him so much life decades ago, also be draining its residents of it? It made him nostalgic and he started to contact his old neighborhood friends.
Then, in December, one of those friends — Thomas Dixon — was placed in hospice after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Unable to say goodbye in traditional ways because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Graves organized a parade of friends to drive by Dixon’s home.
It was then that he realized he needed to do more to keep spirits lifted in his old Hillside friends.
“We deserve to see each other when we’re still on the right side of the dirt, and not at a funeral,” Graves said on Saturday.
He organized his own reunion of friends to do just that. More than 30 people cooked out, blared music, danced and wore matching T-shirts that said “Fort Worth Raised, Southside Made. 76104.” Some brought their children, others brought pounds of chicken, ribs and burgers.
And they did it at the spot that brought them together — the Hillside Community Center. Even when most of them were grown, the center stayed a part of their lives as their own children took over the basketball courts.
“I’d like to see us take this place over and start buying stuff and fix it back up,” Sanders said about the neighborhood. “We need to do things for ourselves.”
Sanders doesn’t live in Hillside anymore but plans to return.
“We had a good life here,” he said. “This was our childhood. It wasn’t a violent or hostile childhood. This is where we were born and raised, this is our home.”
Jacques Thomas is also sentimental about the community, despite the changes he’s seen in it.
“I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t grown up here,” he said. “Growing up wasn’t peaches and cream but it was OK. Mrs. Irving, she worked here, she was my mama away from mama. But you look inside and her room is a game room now. But that’s where Mrs. Irving would be.”
Even when the rain began to fall and lightening was seen in the distance, the party didn’t stop. Little by little everyone carried inside their food and drinks to the indoor gym.
Inside, Tami Deckard, quietly stood by the bleachers and took in her surroundings.
“This is like our heritage, where we started,” she said. “It means a lot to us to get back together and see everybody. And the community center was a big part of growing up here.”
This story was originally published May 23, 2021 at 2:42 PM.
