On Oct. 31, 1918, Dallas Mayor Lawther announced the step-wise lifting of closure orders due to influenza, allowing schools to reopen the next day. With extremely short notice, schools reopened the next morning so that students could receive assignments.

To appease clergy, Lawther gave special permission to the city’s Catholic and Episcopal churches to hold All Saints’ Day services. Then, on Saturday, November 2, Dallas’s places of amusement reopened for business. Dallasites flocked downtown to have fun.

“The city is alive with enthusiasm and prosperity is reflected on every side,” one reporter wrote of the scene. Some went shopping to be among the crowds, while others went to The Old Mill to see Douglass Fairbanks in He Comes Up Smiling or Harold Lockwood–who had died of influenza in New York only two weeks earlier–in Pals First at the Queen