H I S T O R Y I N D A L L A S M E D I C I N E PART: 1
Naval Officer, Ophthalmologist, and Man Who Slept
in the Same House with Bonnie Parker
In the summer of 2015, while dining
at a deli in Duncanville, Texas, one
of the employees who knew me well
approached my table with a piece
of note paper, saying she had a
message for me. Puzzled, I studied
the paper, which contained the name “Dr.
A.D. Campbell,” and read that he had
contacted the deli and asked them to give
me his number. He wanted to talk to me
about writing his life story. (The deli carried
the two books I had co-written, and Dr.
Campbell thought that would be the best
way to reach me.)
The name “Allen Campbell” seemed fairly
familiar, as my late parents often spoke of
a Betty and A.D. Campbell, although I had
never met either one of these friends. Later
that day I called the number on the note
and was surprised to learn that Dr. Campbell
was indeed one of my late dad’s golfing
partners, and that he and his wife were the
Betty and A.D. that I had heard of so often.
After a lengthy telephone conversation, I
agreed to compile and edit Dr. Campbell’s
autobiography, which began as a selfrecorded
cassette tape of his memories
followed by numerous in-person interviews,
additional phone calls, many late nights of
independent researching, and some back
and forth hard copy editing. The interviewing
and such all took place in 2015 while
Dr. Campbell was still residing in his Cedar
8 DALLAS MEDICAL JOURNAL • June 2020
Hill home. What I slowly discovered along
the way was that the life and times of Dr.
Allen Dwyer Campbell Jr. is quite a story—
a crazy combination of Andy Hardy, Forrest
Gump, and the naval camaraderie in the
movie Ensign Pulver—with the helicopters
from M.A.S.H. Surprisingly enough, all the
following is true.
I was born July 17, 1923, in Dallas,
Texas, in a two-bedroom house located at
1222 S. Oak Cliff Blvd., just south of Clarendon
Blvd.—then called Jimtown Road.
My parents, Allen D. Campbell Sr. and Eva
Coffee Campbell, didn’t have much money,
but they managed to borrow enough to purchase
this house where we all lived happily
for about eight years. Although small, it
was a nice place, and with my mother’s
great homemaking skills, my young years
were full of enjoyable childhood memories.
We had chickens and ducks, and we had
a cow, and we had some horses, and I rode
my pony. I took piano lessons from a woman
named Ruth Hoesek, a woman who later
became a very well-known amateur golfer
at Stevens Park Golf Course in Oak Cliff. I
went to Lida Hooe Elementary School.
My daddy, who was a house painter at
the time—and who also worked for the
post office for 20 years on the night shift,
decided to obtain a funeral director license
and then go into business for himself. After
Dad advertised for a partner, a man named
Tom McKamy—who was then the mayor of
Richardson, Texas, and who also owned a
variety store that sold caskets—agreed to
join in the business venture. The two men
purchased a beautiful old home in South
Dallas where they opened the McKamy-
Campbell Funeral home at 1921 Forest
Avenue, now MLK Blvd. My family moved
to the upstairs apartments at the funeral
home and I began school at Colonial Hills
elementary school. The year was 1931.
At the time my dad opened the funeral
home, all the funeral directors had their
own emergency ambulances. The City
of Dallas did not. Whenever a tragic
event occurred around the city, one that
required an ambulance, one of the city’s
many funeral homes had to be called.
Dad smartly spent quite a bit of time
making friends around town, to assure that
McKamy-Campbell got many of those calls.
McKamy-Campbell Funeral Home calendars
and stickers were amply distributed
to many Dallas drug stores and filling
stations, and any other relevant places. In
those days the funeral business was pretty
cut throat. All the ambulance services
were in competition with each other and
would get into fights over the wrecks.
When an accident occurred, it wasn’t
unusual at all for numerous funeral homes
to send their emergency ambulances to
the scene, because the police would call
from somewhere close to the accident
or crime scene and the word would go
out. My father told the people in all the
service stations and drug stores and other
places to call him if an accident happened,
many of which happened at the corner of
Buckner Blvd. and Garland Road.
Dad sought out good relationships with
all the pastors and preachers around the
city, even the prominent ones, many times
giving them money for suggesting the
family use Dad’s funeral home. Dad made
a lot of friends, and those relationships
paid off. At some point, the city divided
Dallas into sections and assigned
emergency ambulances to each section,
which made the process a bit more
workable.
Some of our employees lived in a
house that my parents owned, a house
next door to the funeral home. With staff
members being right there, we could keep
someone on call 24 hours a day, and there
was always someone to drive one of the
ambulances.
My parents also offered “invalid coach”
services. When someone needed to
be taken to a hospital or needed to be
returned home from a serious hospital
stay…or possibly a woman who just had
a baby…one of our invalid coaches would
provide transportation. Our emergency
ambulances and invalid coaches went to
all the Dallas hospitals.
During the early years of the funeral
home’s business, Bonnie Parker and Clyde
Barrow were two of the most famous
outlaws of the day, and…they were “local
kids.” Several of our employees were
friends with Bonnie’s brother, Hubert
“Buster” Parker. Buster never worked for
us, and he was never on the payroll, but
he liked to hang around the funeral home.
And, when he was there, he always enjoyed
going out with the emergency ambulance
calls…just going along for the ride.
Bonnie and Clyde spent most of their
growing up days in Eagle Ford/Cement
City/West Dallas—a then unincorporated
The Life Story of
Dr. Allen Campbell Jr.
As told to and edited by
Gayla Brooks
“My daddy, who was a
house painter at the
time—and who also
worked for the post office
for 20 years on the
night shift, decided to
obtain a funeral director
license and then go into
business for himself.”