Toys, subway rides, Santa and wonder: When a Texas superstore thrilled kids at Christmas

Bud Kennedy
·3 min read
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The memories of subway rides and Christmas shopping in Leonards Toyland will never go away.

But they do move.

The Leonards Museum, a lovingly kept collection of keepsakes from a 20th-century downtown Fort Worth supercenter, is about to roll into a new home in the Fort Worth Museum of Science & History.

“Next to Macy’s, it was considered the best Christmas toy department in the country, and that’s not something I am making up,” said Marty Leonard, daughter of store co-founder Marvin Leonard.

For now, the remnants of Leonards Department Store and its 40-year M&O Subway trolley line remain on display until summer at 200 Carroll St.

This Leonards Department Store wagon sold for $2.99 during the Christmas season of 1936.
This Leonards Department Store wagon sold for $2.99 during the Christmas season of 1936.

The Leonards Museum is open daily except Mondays, along with the M&O Station Grill and bar next door.

Next year, the exhibits from Leonards’ 10,000-square-foot Toyland and subway transit shuttle will leave the restaurant and move to the history museum, 1600 Gendy St.

The museum has been open year-round. But more visitors come in December, when the aroma of fresh popcorn fills the museum and a “Leonards Santa” welcomes children on a trip into toy nostalgia.

An exhibit about Leonards at Christmastime inside the Leonards Department Store Museum, 200 Carroll St.
An exhibit about Leonards at Christmastime inside the Leonards Department Store Museum, 200 Carroll St.

The museum has dolls, wagons, an electric train set and almost everything that would have been under a baby-boom child’s Christmas tree in the 1960s.

Until Leonards was sold to Dillard’s in 1975, the store was a child’s wonderland of toys, games, sports equipment and anything a little boy or girl might want for Christmas.

If you wanted a certain doll or model airplane kit, you couldn’t order it off Amazon.com. You had to go to Leonards. It had every toy you wanted and more to discover.

Leonards was a popular 1950s and 1960s Christmas shopping stop for children. Here, Kenny and Stanley Bennett of Arlington ride “Santa’s Rocket Express” monorail in the Toyland shop.
Leonards was a popular 1950s and 1960s Christmas shopping stop for children. Here, Kenny and Stanley Bennett of Arlington ride “Santa’s Rocket Express” monorail in the Toyland shop.

“It was just a magical time,” Marty Leonard said. “It was the early days of shopping when there weren’t any malls. Everybody came downtown.”

Leonards’ front door was at 200 Houston St.., now the west wing of the Worthington Hotel, but the store covered seven city blocks west to Burnett Street.

Marvin Leonard opened a downtown grocery in 1918, and brother Obie joined him to build a regional retail giant that Arkansas retailer Sam Walton scouted to get ideas for Walmart.

In 1963, Time magazine featured Leonards Department Store’s M&O Subway, a mile-long trolley and subway line from a remote parking lot.
In 1963, Time magazine featured Leonards Department Store’s M&O Subway, a mile-long trolley and subway line from a remote parking lot.

Besides owning a train, Leonards:

▪ printed its own money during the Depression;

▪ installed the city’s first escalator, ridden by 40,000 customers in one day;

▪ welcomed Black customers equally, offered everyone credit and cashed everyone’s paycheck;

▪ and, in February 1960, became the first local store and one of the first in Texas to completely desegregate lounges and public facilities.

The light-rail “subway” was built in 1963, connecting a basement station beneath Taylor Street and what is now City Place with a large free parking lot along the Trinity River. Some stations still stand in the parking near today’s Panther Island.

Until 2002, the old streetcars bought from Washington, D.C., made regular runs, at first carrying hundreds of shoppers and later transporting downtown office workers and courthouse jurors to and from parking.

We went shopping on Saturday nights.

Often, the subway was so full we had to wait for the next car.

Deep inside the Leonards M&O Subway tunnel in Fort Worth in 2015.
Deep inside the Leonards M&O Subway tunnel in Fort Worth in 2015.

“The thing people remember most is that smell of popcorn first thing when you got to the store,” Marty Leonard said.

“There was just nothing else like it. It was the only store like it in the world.”

The last Leonards Toyland was stocked nearly 50 years ago. The subway hasn’t rolled in two decades.

Yet every Fort Worth child remembers.