1–25
From dinosaurs roaming the Paluxy in Glen Rose to Lance Armstrong joining his first cycling team in Richardson
1 | Dinosaurs Roam the Paluxy
On the Northwest side of the Paluxy River, Glen Rose | 113 million years ago
Life is relatively bucolic out west of Glen Rose these days; most creatures do not spend their time stalking or being stalked. But this was not the case 113 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the balmy coastline around what is now the Paluxy River. Bipedal carnivores called acrocanthosaurs preyed on quadrupedal herbivores known as paluxysaurs, leaving behind more than a thousand tracks in the calcium-rich mud. Today, if you find yourself approximately one mile north of FM 205 and Park Road 59, in Dinosaur Valley State Park, there’s no need to watch your back—though you should watch your step. —KATY VINE
2 | John Graves launches his canoe
Texas Highway 16 at the Brazos River | November 1957
Wittliff Collections/Texas State University
On the gray day in the fall of 1957 when John Graves pushed off from the banks of the Brazos River and paddled his canoe downstream, both he and the river were at a crossroads. Graves was taking care of his sick father and had yet to definitively make his mark as a writer; the Brazos was in danger of being diverted with a series of lakes and dams from Possum Kingdom to Lake Whitney. So Graves’s trip, which began one mile downstream from the Morris Sheppard Dam at the 1942 masonry arch bridge, was intended as a farewell. But as he pushed away from shore, “into the bubble-hiss of the rapids,” he couldn’t have known that the trip would end up changing the course of his own life and the river’s. The book that came out of it, Goodbye to a River, helped prevent the Brazos River Authority from carrying through with its plan. As a result, today you can glide down the same river and cast your mind back to his thoughts on that overcast day—which were probably “Let’s get to camp and build a fire.” —KV
3 | Mary Martin Opens a Dance Studio
West Oak, Weatherford | 1933
Long before she became a Broadway legend, Mary Martin taught dance in Weatherford in her uncle Luke’s cleaned-out grain storage loft. But hoping to expand her limited curriculum, Martin headed west to study at the Fanchon and Marco School of the Theatre, in Hollywood. When she returned to her hometown in 1933, her parents surprised her with a new dance studio on Oak Street, a block from their home. Elaine Vandagriff, whose father helped with the construction, remembers a cozy studio with a sitting room and three large windows on the east side. Martin led dance classes there until she returned to Hollywood, in 1935, and it remains there to this day, the site where so many local boys and girls had their first dance. —ALISON FINNEY
4 | Gunman kills two at Cullen Davis mansion
4100 Stonegate Boulevard, Fort Worth | August 2, 1976
The gunman was dressed in black and wearing a woman’s wig when he appeared at the 19,000-square-foot mansion belonging to Cullen Davis, the oil tycoon whose net worth was pegged north of $250 million. When the shooting spree ended, Davis’s estranged wife, Priscilla, known for wearing a diamond necklace that said “Rich Bitch,” lay wounded. His twelve-year-old stepdaughter, Andrea, and Priscilla’s live-in lover, Stan Farr, a former TCU basketball player, lay dead. Most shocking of all was that Davis himself became the crime’s main suspect. He was thought to have been the richest person in America ever charged with murder, though he was eventually acquitted in a circus of a trial in Amarillo, only to be subsequently charged with trying to hire a hit man to kill Priscilla and the judge in their divorce case, where he was acquitted a second time. Today Davis lives in Colleyville with a new wife. As for the mansion where it all began, it has since served as a restaurant, a gallery, and even a church; now it is an event center that is rented out to the public, though viewings are by appointment only. —BRIAN D. SWEANY
5 | KAP writes a society column
1627 College Avenue, Fort Worth | September 15, 1917
Like most aspiring authors in their twenties, Katherine Anne Porter was having trouble getting a job. After the Dallas Morning News rebuffed her, the Indian Creek native turned to her Fort Worth friends J. Garfield and Kitty Barry Crawford, founders of the Fort Worth Critic newspaper, who not only gave her a job as a society columnist but allowed her to move in with them. It was in the Crawfords’ home that KAP wrote her first column. The future Pulitzer Prize winner was introduced to readers as a person who “likes things which many people consider frivolous and of no consequence—society and the many small factors which go toward making life pleasant and interesting are among her hobbies.” —KV
6 | Ornette Coleman is kicked out of high school band
1411 I. M. Terrell Circle, Fort Worth | 1947
Ornette Coleman’s landmark album The Shape of Jazz to Come shocked listeners in 1959 with its unfettered improvisation and its lack of chord progressions. And in the years that followed, it lived up to its title, opening the door for the free jazz movement and upending traditional notions about composition, instrumentation, tone, and, well, just about everything. But the shape of jazz to come had been taking shape for a long time. The Fort Worth native attended the then-segregated I. M. Terrell High School, where future jazzmen like King Curtis Ousley, Charles Moffett, and William Lawsha (a.k.a. Prince Lasha) were his classmates. Coleman played sax in the marching band and would often improvise parts and riffs. One day in 1947, during a rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “The Washington Post March,” he and Lawsha were accused of being “jazz hounds” and kicked out of the band. Since Lawsha also went on to become a free jazz pioneer, it’s safe to say that both players learned the best lesson of all: Ignore the critics. The original band rehearsal room on the south side of the building—which is now an elementary school—has since been remodeled, but the auditorium where the band performed remains intact. —KV
7 | Kenneth McDuff abducts his first victims
Oak Grove-Shelby Road and Dan Meyer Drive, Everman | August 6, 1966
The backstop of the old baseball field at Everman High School still stands at the edge of campus. There, one Saturday evening, a twenty-year-old reprobate named Kenneth McDuff encountered three teens, Edna Louise Sullivan, Robert Brand, and Marcus Dunnam, whiling away the warm summer night. At gunpoint he forced them into the trunk of their car, then drove them around the countryside. Eventually he killed the two boys with point-blank pistol shots, then raped the girl repeatedly and strangled her with a broomstick.
There’s no way to know if those were the first people McDuff killed; he’d already bragged about others. But it’s certain that if the justice system had worked, they would have been his last. He was sentenced to death, but through a series of events—the U.S. Supreme Court’s brief ban on the death penalty in the seventies, the state prison overcrowding crisis of the eighties—McDuff walked free in October 1989. For the next two and a half years he would continually break the peace, get arrested, and slip through the cracks before authorities finally realized he’d resumed raping and killing. After a nationwide manhunt, he was arrested in Missouri in May 1992. Eventually he was convicted of murdering Melissa Northrup, a Waco convenience store clerk, and Colleen Reed, an Austin accountant. By the time he was finally executed, in November 1998, three more victims had been confirmed. The actual number of dead may never be determined. —JOHN SPONG
8 | Nolan Ryan pummels Robin Ventura
1000 Ballpark Way, Arlington | August 4, 1993
Linda Kaye/AP
It was the most infamous bench-clearer in Texas Rangers history: After a 46-year-old Nolan Ryan plunked 26-year-old Chicago White Sox third baseman Robin Ventura, the youngster thought—ever so briefly—about trotting to first base before he charged the pitcher’s mound at Arlington Stadium instead. Talk about youthful ignorance. Ryan swiftly put him in a headlock and delivered eight or nine sharp uppercuts before catcher Ivan Rodriguez and a scrum of players from both teams pulled them to the ground. Ryan retired at the end of the season, and the incident cemented the all-time strikeout leader’s legacy as one of the toughest Texans ever. That year also marked the end of the old Arlington Stadium, which was razed to make way for parking lots around the new Ballpark in Arlington. But if you walk to the southwest corner of Lot I, you’ll be standing near the site of the old mound, where Ventura learned a painful lesson about respecting one’s elders. —JORDAN BREAL
9 | First auditions for Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are held
2401 East Airport Freeway, Irving | 1972
Courtesy of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders
In the early summer of 1972, scores of young women came to Texas Stadium to try out for the Dallas Cowboys’ brand-new cheerleading squad. “They were looking for wholesome, all-American girls—girls who loved the Cowboys and loved to dance,” remembers Dixie Smith Luque (back row, center), who was eighteen at the time. She and the hundred or so other prospects brought their own eight-track tapes and danced for the judges in an empty banquet room on the stadium’s second floor. “I wanted to be picked more than life itself,” she says. After Luque aced a few questions about the Cowboys, she was called back to a second round of auditions. “I opened my mail one day and found a handwritten note that said, ‘Congratulations—you’ve been chosen to be one of the new Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders!’ ” That September, Luque and the squad’s six other members made a lasting impression on the American psyche when they walked onto the field at Texas Stadium in front of 55,850 spectators, wearing go-go boots, hot pants, and satin blouses tied high above the midriff—and sex became forever associated with the sidelines. The stadium with the famous hole in the roof was demolished in 2010; now the high kicks are featured in Arlington, at the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium. —PAMELA COLLOFF
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