THEY CAN’T TAKE AWAY OUR OUTSIDER SPIRIT

So many things changed in Oak Cliff over the past decade that it feels like a totally different neighborhood. But every now and then, there’s something to remind you of how things were. From taxidermy lions to Selena shrines and hand-painted houses, Oak Cliff is more than just a bridge apart from Dallas.

LG’s 24 Hour Pawn

The first thing to note about LG’s 24 Hour Pawn is that it closes at 8 p.m. It was the only pawnshop in Texas open 24 hours a day, and the name is a throwback to the days before ATMs, when there was no way to get money if the banks were closed. The family that owns the shop fought state regulators for years to stay open through the night — they eventually lost, but the name remains.

The store’s history dates back about 45 years in Oak Cliff, when L.G. Mosley and his daughter Tammy Mosley Hollingsworth opened a pawnshop in what is now the Bishop Arts District. Later they moved to Jefferson Boulevard, first in a space across the street from Charco Broiler, then to the old Roland Ellis department store space in Jefferson Tower. LG’s moved to its current space, at 407 W. Jefferson Blvd., next to Charco Broiler, in 1979.

The second thing about LG’s is the authentic taxidermy polar bear. L.G. Mosley, a 79-year-old West Dallas native who says he could pull as much cotton as a full-grown man by the time he was 6, traded the bear and a stuffed African lion that’s also on display, plus a Learjet, for a house his son had built in North Dallas but couldn’t manage to sell.

“Later he was mad at me,” L.G. says. “He wanted to buy it back, but I wouldn’t sell it. He said, ‘I killed that bear, and I want it.’”

L.G. can tell stories ’til the cows come home. He went from picking cotton to roofing houses, running his own crew at the age
of 13. When work was slow, teenage L.G. had the ingenuity to find disaster areas as far away as Hawaii, where insurance companies would pay out for roofing jobs.

After he figured out how to undercut lumberyards by importing shakes and shingles from Canada, he went into building houses, trading horses and, like
a good ol’ self-made Texan, hitting oil. As a side hustle, he’d begun hauling saddles and electronics from Mexico to sell at flea markets. He and his wife started out carrying things across the border in their ’39 Ford and eventually had about 45 vendor spaces with truckloads of inventory at Traders Village Grand Prairie, before NAFTA put a stop to that.

He started the pawnshop for daughter Tammy, who married as a young teen and ran off to live in the country. Her dad needed a way to lure her and husband, Bill Hollingsworth Jr., back to Dallas. One day, while she was fishing at the creek with her infant son, Tammy says L.G. pulled up on the bridge above and said, “Come on, we’re starting a pawn shop. Let’s go hitch up your trailer house.”

The mural house at 110 Bishop Ave.

Juan Manuel Campos started his art career as a kid growing up in Mexico, photographing wedding portraits on black-and- white film and then developing the photos and hand coloring them with acrylic paint.

It was a painstaking craft that required needlelike brushes and a high degree of skill. He moved to Dallas in 1981, and you’ve seen the little house he shares with wife, Rosa. It’s the one painted teal and orange, with portraits of Selena, John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor outside.

The Camposes bought the house in 1989. Rosa says her relatives asked at the time, “Why would you buy a house in the ghetto?”

But she opened her hair salon in the front room, and they still live happily in a few hundred square feet at the back.

Now the former hair salon is an art studio, where 83-year-old Juan Manual Campos paints every day, “almost all day,” his wife says.

Soft guitar music plays as he shows some of his work: A two-sided wood cutout of Frida Kahlo, a charcoal portrait of   Emiliano Zapata, James Dean as Jett Rink in black- and-white acrylic. Jesus, head in hands, looming large over sepia-toned immigrants at the barbed- wire border.

A friend recently replaced their water heater, but Campos kept the old one, and he’s copying vintage comic book panels onto it in oil paint.

If not for his wife, he couldn’t do this, he says. She’s always tolerated him turning on the lights in the middle of the night to sketch something and then paint all night.

“I said, ‘All I want is to paint, and you can do whatever you want,’” he says. “I paint because it’s in my blood.”

He’s always made a living with wage- earning jobs and gigs such as painting murals in supermarkets and the shop windows on Jefferson Boulevard.

In the ’80s and ’90s, Campos was part of an art collective simply called Artistas, with Alfonso Estrada, Vincent Morin, Filberto Chapa, Anita Cisneros and a few others. He’s the only one still living.

In the summertime, he paints the front steps of their little house in bright colors, and he adds to or updates the weathering collection of outdoor board paintings. He has dreams of turning their adjacent vacant lot into a sculpture garden.

These days, the Camposes are solicited many times a day with offers on their coveted double-lot property in Bishop Arts, all low-ball offers, Rosa says. But they have no intention of moving, anyway.

“As long as we’re healthy, God willing,” Rosa says.

Country Burger

Maybe they should rename it Tejano Burger. The burgers and tots at Country Burger are reliably good. But the restaurant, open since the 1980s, is known for its reverence of Selena.

Everywhere you look, there is some tribute to the Queen of Tejano. Her photos are embedded in the napkin holders and framed on the walls, along with newspaper clippings and posters. There are Barbie-type Selena dolls, original artwork, and the latest piece, a sequined replica of the purple costume Selena wore for her last concert in San Antonio. It’s like the more time passes since the death of Selena on March 31, 1991, the greater the monument at Country Burger becomes.