1–25
From dinosaurs roaming the Paluxy in Glen Rose to Lance Armstrong joining his first cycling team in Richardson
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10 | Tex Schramm and Lamar Hunt invent the Super Bowl
8008 Cedar Springs Road, Dallas | April 4, 1966
Perhaps you think that history’s most important parking garage conversation took place in 1972, when Mark Felt (a.k.a. Deep Throat) divulged the secrets of the Nixon administration to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. Hardly. Six years earlier, in a parking garage at Love Field, Tex Schramm and Lamar Hunt had hatched the idea for the world’s greatest sporting event. Schramm, the blustery general manager of the National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys, met Hunt, the son of Texas oil giant H. L. Hunt and the head of the rival American Football League, in front of the twelve-foot-tall Texas Ranger statue inside the terminal. Having been rebuffed by the NFL in his bid for an expansion franchise, Hunt had formed the AFL in 1959, with his own Dallas Texans as a charter member. Schramm’s success with the Cowboys had driven Hunt to Kansas City, where he renamed his team the Chiefs, but now, at the direction of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, Schramm had been ordered to cut a deal with Hunt. Fearing they would be recognized, the two men headed to Schramm’s car in the dark, two-story parking garage, and the conversation began. The NFL-AFL merger was completed four years later, featuring a championship game between the top team from each league. After watching his kids play with a Wham-O SuperBall, Hunt even came up with the name for the game: the Super Bowl. —SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH
11 | “One Riot, One Ranger” is etched in Stone
8008 Cedar Springs Road, Dallas | 1961
Texas Ranger captain Bill McDonald liked to tell stories of his heroic exploits. One of them, from 1896, was about his arrival in Dallas by train to disperse an angry crowd of spectators and bettors who had gathered to watch an illegal prize fight. He stepped off the train unaccompanied, and his anxious greeters asked him where the rest of his Ranger company was. Captain McDonald responded, “Well, you ain’t got but one mob, have you?” This idea, sharpened in the retelling, caught on, and although Captain McDonald never said “one riot, one Ranger,” many people believe he did. Including sculptor Waldine Amanda Tauch, who finished a heroic Ranger statue in 1961 that would impress generations of travelers passing through the main terminal of Love Field and contribute, as much as anything, to the myth. —H. W. BRANDS
AP/Pat Sullivan
12 | Clayton Williams refuses to shake Ann Richards’s hand
2201 Stemmons Freeway, Dallas | October 11, 1990
From opposite sides of the Chantilly Ballroom, the candidates advanced toward the stage: a giant cowboy hat and an enormous white bouffant. It was just weeks before voters would choose their next governor, and Clayton Williams, a Republican oilman, and Ann Richards, the Democratic state treasurer, had arrived at a Greater Dallas Crime Commission luncheon at the Loews Anatole hotel (now the Hilton Anatole) for a final face-to-face meeting. Despite leading in the race, Williams was angry—a few days earlier, Richards had publicly suggested that his Midland bank was laundering drug money—and so when they reached the stage and Richards extended her hand, he stiffly refused to shake it. The gesture, or nongesture, instantly caused a ruckus. Williams, who had survived making a joke about rape, was decried for being ungentlemanly and went from being twelve points up to four points down in the polls. Then he lost the election, 49 percent to 47 percent. Richards was catapulted to the Governor’s Mansion, where four years later she would face an underdog challenger herself, George W. Bush. —KATHARYN RODEMANN
AP
13 | Bonnie and Clyde meet
105 Herbert, Dallas | January 1930
Clyde Barrow was a funny-looking kid from Dallas with an interest in safecracking and robbery. In 1930 he and a close friend, Clarence Clay, dropped in at Clay’s parents’ house on the west side of town. Clay’s sister was there, with her husband and sister-in-law, a pretty, headstrong girl named Bonnie Parker. When the boys came in, Parker was in the kitchen making hot chocolate. By all accounts, the pair, who would go on to become the most infamous outlaw lovers the world has ever known, were immediately smitten. Though Barrow went to prison for a two-year stint shortly thereafter, he remembered Parker when he was paroled, in 1932, and the two quickly joined forces to embark on one of the most legendary robbery and murder sprees in U.S. history. The original house two blocks south of Singleton no longer exists, though a few pilings for the pier and beam foundation remain at that address beyond a barricade on the dead-end street, a derelict monument to the spark of passion that ignited a homicidal romance. —KV
Courtesy of Neiman Marcus
14 | Neiman Marcus opens
1200 block of main, Dallas | September 10, 1907
Opening a luxury store in a cotton-and-cattle town of 84,000 was a bold idea, especially since in Texas the majority of high-end women’s clothing was still custom-made, procured from ateliers in Europe or New York. But Herbert Marcus, his younger sister Carrie Marcus Neiman, and her husband, Al Neiman, were convinced that local women were ready for a sophisticated salon. (The story goes that one suddenly oil-rich woman from Electra came in barefoot and left wearing heels and a fur coat.) Dallas women were so drawn to the elegant confines of Neiman Marcus that within a few weeks the stock was depleted and head buyer Moira Cullen had to hastily schedule a purchasing trip to New York. Less than six years later, the original store—a grand corner building in the then-popular Renaissance Revival style—burned down, though the flagship store that was constructed the following year ably carries on the tradition of hedonistic luxury to this day. —JB
15 | Abraham Zapruder films the Kennedy assassination
The pergola at Dealey Plaza, Dallas | November 22, 1963
Nearly fifty years after shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository Building (or the grassy knoll or the triple overpass, depending on your version of events), the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains the most important moment in Dallas history. On that tragic day, Abraham Zapruder walked from the Dal-Tex Building, opposite the depository, on Houston Street, with his 8mm camera to claim a spot on top of the far western column in front of the pergola on the grassy knoll. A cinematographer couldn’t have picked a better location—the ground sloped gently toward Elm Street, providing Zapruder with a clear view of the scene. As the president’s car drove past, Zapruder’s Bell and Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414-PD silently captured everything. Though the country had already suffered through three public assassinations of presidents, never before had the public been able to watch it in Kodachrome. The column where Zapruder recorded the country’s most infamous 26.6 seconds of film provides a chilling reminder of how a soft-spoken dressmaker crossed paths with history. —BDS
Watch a video about Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
Corbis
16 | Jack Ruby opens the Carousel Club
1312 1/2 Commerce, Dallas | 1960
Jack Ruby was running out of time and money, and his partner in the Sovereign Club, a second-floor establishment above Commerce Street, wanted out. Ruby had envisioned the place as a high-class “private membership” joint where patrons could order liquor. But the clientele never developed, the rent was coming due, and hard feelings were taking shape. So Ruby approached an old friend, Ralph Paul, for enough cash to keep things afloat. Paul had another idea, one that he believed could make money for both of them: Turn the Sovereign into “an open place” where men could drink beer, toast champagne, eat pizza, listen to a four- or five-piece orchestra, and, most important, watch strippers perform on three short runways. And so was born the Carousel Club, which soon became a spot for businessmen, journalists, and police officers. (Today the building has been replaced by the headquarters of AT&T.) Ruby’s dreams of running a successful business were within reach. Finally he had a chance to make his mark on Dallas for good. —BDS
17 | Robert Johnson records his final songs
508 Park Avenue, Dallas | June 20, 1937
Robert Johnson, “the most important blues musician who ever lived” (according to Eric Clapton), spent most of his life in Mississippi. But his only two recording sessions took place in Texas. The first, when he was 25 years old, was in November 1936 in room 414 at the Gunter Hotel, in San Antonio, where Brunswick Records had set up a temporary studio. The second and final session took place over two days the following year in Brunswick’s offices, on Park Avenue, in Dallas (Johnson would die a year later). Among the songs Johnson played on the second day, a Sunday, were “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” But just where in the building did he record? All the producer, Don Law, has written was that it was in a “makeshift studio in our own branch office.” Most likely, Johnson would have recorded on the fourth floor, facing the corner of the room. Perhaps some future musician can weigh in: The historic art deco building has been locked and abandoned for more than twenty years, but the First Presbyterian Church, located across the street, has the property under contract and plans to restore it. —KV
18 | UT Longhorns win their first football game
Parry Avenue at Fair Park, Dallas | November 30, 1893
Just before midnight on the eve of Thanksgiving, the varsity team boarded a train from Austin to Dallas. The fifteen young men had played together for only a few practices, but the University of Texas football team was in high spirits as they left the station, chanting, “Halla-ba-loo, hooray, hooray; halla-ba-loo, hooray, hooray; hooray, hooray, varsity, varsity, UTA.” Such optimism may not have been warranted, for the Longhorns had traveled to play the meanest, baddest team around: the undefeated and self-titled “champions of Texas,” the Dallas Foot Ball Club. Varsity had made a date to meet its foe at the fairgrounds on a verdureless plot of land that was converted into a cattle arena in 1895. What transpired in the ninety-minute contest would be unrecognizable to the modern enthusiast, as football back then looked more like rugby. But no matter: When all was said and done, the score read 18—16 in favor of UT, leaving one dejected Dallasite to proclaim, “Our name is pants and our glory has departed,” a sentiment that has been felt by other teams 849 times since that Thanksgiving Day. —STACY HOLLISTER
19 | Billy Graham holds a revival
The Cotton Bowl, Dallas | June 1953
Courtesy of Dallas Morning News
In the midst of a summer heat wave, more than half a million people attended Billy Graham’s monthlong revival at the Cotton Bowl. Each night a 1,500-voice choir sang to the record crowds who came to hear the evangelist speak. “The blond young North Carolina preacher’s melodious baritone made the soaring roar of the roller coaster and other Midway sound effects seem far away,” wrote the Dallas Morning News. “He shucked off his cream-colored linen coat and stood there on the fifty-yard line and opened his service with prayer. He quoted Scripture lovingly and with consummate theatrical effect.” On the final night of the revival—with more than 75,000 faithful in attendance—each person was given a match. Graham asked that the stadium lights be extinguished, then announced to the crowd, “I’m going to strike a match, which is only a small gleam of light. When all of you strike your matches, the light will become stronger, like the light of faith.” The Cotton Bowl was soon illuminated. —PC
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