Pages 2 and 3 of The Mrs. Baird's Story

I stumbled upon another researcher of the Baird family and was provided with pages two and three of The Mrs. Baird's Story. I've transcribed those pages here, and have added them to the original post of The Mrs. Baird's Story.

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sidered going back in the restaurant business. He decided this one was a good buy. It might also be good business, he reasoned, to buy "run down" restaurants, fix them up, operate them, and then sell them. So he sold his popcorn machines and bought the restaurant. In those days of slow transportation, you had to live near the place you worked. So the family moved to Rosen Heights.

Santa Fe Restaurant

In 1903, Mr. Baird sold the Exchange Avenue restaurant and began operating the Santa Fe Restaurant across from the Santa Fe Depot. It was here, Dewey Baird often recalled, that as a boy of 12 he stood on a box to help his father make nickel pies. Then he and his father hauled the pies 8 or 10 miles in a lunch wagon to the Swift and Armour packing houses on Fort Worth's North Side. The family lived next door to the restaurant. Later that year, Mr. Baird sold the Santa Fe Restaurant and began operating a bakery on Jennings Avenue. The family moved to Daggett Street. The old Fort Worth (Central) High School was on the next block where the Justin Boot Company is now located.

With Mr. Baird now operating a bakery, his wife could take a short rest from her own baking chores. Usually she baked all the bread for her family and did it very well indeed. She had often helped her husband with the baking back in Tennessee. But now one of the boys could bring bread home each day from the bakery.

Her "vacation" from baking did not last long. The Little Chicago Restaurant, between 10th and 11th Streets, was put up for sale. Mr. Baird sold the bakery and bought the Little Chicago. The family moved to West Broadway. At the Little Chicago in 1904 you could get a full meal for 15 cents. Dewey helped his dad at the restaurant.

512 Hemphill

In the early part of 1905, Mr. Baird sold the Little Chicago Restaurant and began operating a restaurant on 15th Street. Hoyt, who was now 8, picked up the meat for the restaurant early each morning at H. E. Sawyer Grocery on South Main and took it to the restaurant on his bicycle. He started the fire in the stove and made hot cake batter. When his father arrived to start serving breakfasts, Hoyt went on to school.

The family now lived at 512 Hemphill, on the corner of Hemphill and Cochran. Mrs. Baird was once more baking all the bread for her family. She often baked more than she needed and gave the extra loaves to her neighbors. They liked her bread and she soon gained quite a reputation around the neighborhood for baking good bread. In fact, her neighbors urged her to bake enough for them too whenever she baked. And even in those days they referred to her bread as "Mrs Baird's Bread."

Finally, in 1908, Mrs. Baird decided to take her neighbors' suggestion. She would bake bread to sell. Her husband was still operating the restaurant, but his health was not good. He suffered from diabetes, and this was long before the discoveries were made that would mean so much to people with this illness.

Mrs. Baird started baking in her small four-burner wood-fired kitchen range. At first the boys delivered the freshly baked bread on foot after school. They carried the loaves in baskets. The baskets had hinged tops, which raised at each end, much like modern picnic baskets. Mrs. Baird put a clean flour sack in the bottom, put in the loaves of still hot bread, and then covered them with another clean flour sack. Each basket held about 6 one-pound loaves of bread. Later the boys used a bicycle to make deliveries.

As more people wanted to buy her
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