26–50
From Candy Montgomery and Allan Gore beginning their affair in Richardson to Robert Rauschenberg, Janis Joplin, and Jimmy Johnson graduating from high school in Port Arthur
26 | Candy Montgomery and Allan Gore begin their affair
721 South Central Expressway, Richardson | December 1978
Candy Montgomery and Allan Gore became acquainted in 1978 while playing volleyball at their small church in Lucas. Bored by their marriages, they met for trysts during Allan’s lunch breaks at the Como Motel, where they carried on a torrid affair over the next ten months. The room cost $23.50 plus a $2 deposit for the key (all in cash, all in advance). In Evidence of Love, Jim Atkinson and John Bloom capture the Como’s mood: “The sleaziness of the place was what made it so illicit—and so much fun. The room was little more than a cubicle, ten by ten at the most, done in a tattered harvest gold. The curtains were drooping and frayed. The shag carpet was matted like dirty hair.” Less than two years after the affair began, Candy killed Betty Gore, who was not only Allan’s wife but had become Candy’s friend, by striking her 41 times with an ax in the utility room of her home. Candy then steadied herself, drove home, cleaned up, and promptly left again—it was her turn to pick up her and Betty’s children from the church day care. When the crime was discovered and she was ultimately charged with murder, the jury found her not guilty by reason of self-defense. Today the area has boomed with a wave of new residents who don’t even know the story. The Como appears frozen in time, though a room now costs $45, which presumably includes the use of the empty pool. —BDS
27 | J. R. Duncan builds Southfork Ranch
3700 Hogge Road, Parker | 1970
The most recognizable residence in Texas is a white Colonial-style house that two J.R.s built. Constructed by wealthy homebuilder J. R. Duncan in 1970, the 5,500-square-foot Collin County manse, originally known as Duncan Acres, was just a quiet rancher’s retreat when a producer scouting locations for a new television show called Dallas knocked on the door. In 1978 another J.R.—of the fictional Ewing clan, America’s favorite boozy, greedy, love-to-hate TV family—moved in. Even though the palatial property was only used for exterior scenes (most of Dallas was shot in studios in California), hundreds of thousands of fans mobbed the Duncans’s homestead. Rechristened Southfork Ranch, it soon became the most visited destination in the city. Duncan and his family, fed up with the stampede of tourists, moved out in 1984. It’s been almost twenty years since the soapy melodrama came to an end, but Southfork, which is now an event and conference center, still draws 350,000 visitors each year. —JB
28 | First episode of Barney is taped
200 East Bethany Drive, Allen | October 1991
In a small, plain studio, Sheryl Leach watched as a grown man, dressed in a purple-and-green dinosaur costume, danced before a television camera and sang, “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family.” It was the taping of a new show called Barney & Friends. A few years earlier, Leach, a former elementary school teacher and marketing executive from the Dallas area, had decided to make home videos for preschoolers, using a snuggly teddy bear as the star—until she realized her son loved dinosaurs. So she and her partners, Kathy Parker and Dennis DeShazer, created Barney. A Connecticut public television employee rented one of their videos for his daughter and was so impressed that he arranged for the video to be turned into a TV series. Barney & Friends debuted on April 6, 1992, and to just about everyone’s disbelief, it wasn’t long before Barney became Elvis for toddlers—with a slight touch of Mr. Rogers. —S. HOLLANDSWORTH
29 | Larry McMurtry begins Horseman, Pass By
West Hickory between Avenue B and Avenue A, Denton | May 26, 1958
Long before Larry McMurtry became Texas’s foremost novelist, he was just a struggling young writer roaming the halls of the English department at North Texas State College, in Denton. During his senior year, the Archer City native destroyed 52 short stories he’d penned over the previous two years. Though frustrated, he wasn’t deterred. On May 26, 1958, the 21-year-old McMurtry started writing again before returning home for the summer to work on his father’s ranch. Building upon two short stories that he had saved—one about a herd of infected cattle, the other about the death of an old rancher—McMurtry began crafting the iconic narrative that would eventually become his first novel, Horseman, Pass By. McMurtry’s alma mater is now known as the University of North Texas, but the English department is still housed in the Auditorium Building. —JB
30 | Union Sympathizers are killed in the Great Hanging
East bank of Pecan Creek, Gainesville | October 1, 1862
The Civil War revealed the divisions in late-nineteenth-century Texas politics. Many Texans wanted nothing to do with the Confederate cause, but they were shouted down by slaveholders and secessionists. In parts of North Texas, the region closest to the Union lines, the commencement of Confederate conscription in the spring of 1862 prompted a backlash. There was talk of resisting the draft. The commander of the local militia responded by rounding up dozens of the agitators. An ad hoc jury tried and convicted seven, who were quickly hanged in a field by Pecan Creek, between Main and California streets, and the executions inspired a mob to hang fourteen other prisoners. Nineteen more were hanged the following week. The “Great Hanging” was accompanied by extrajudicial killings in nearby communities, which suppressed displays of Union sentiment but did little to remedy the underlying rifts. —HWB
31 | First Confederate monument is erected in Texas
110 West Houston, Sherman | April 13, 1896
“Sacred to the memory of our Confederate dead, true patriots, they fought for home and country, for the holy principles of self government—the only true liberty. Their sublime self sacrifices and unsurpassed valor will teach future generations the lesson of high born patriotism, of devotion to duty, of exalted courage, of Southern chivalry.” Those are the words engraved on the first Confederate monument erected in Texas. On the day it was unveiled, a massive crowd filled the grounds around the Grayson County Courthouse, where the statue stands. Carriages paraded across the square, and second graders from the Washington School, on South Travis Street, brought a homemade wreath decorated with locust blossoms. The soldier, with his broad hat and rifle, has stood at his post ever since. He has witnessed the destruction of the courthouse in 1930 (it was rebuilt six years later), and he’s even survived a daring raid by some local college students in the late forties or early fifties who had come to take his bayonet. There’s no doubt how residents feel about him today, considering the lines that were added to his base on his one hundredth birthday: “Fighting for the preservation of family, homeland and rights is never a lost cause. So great the valor, so supreme the sacrifice, so red the rose . . .” —BDS
32 | Sam Rayburn is buried in Willow Wild Cemetery
1220 West Seventh, Bonham | November 18, 1961
AP
Any list of iconic Texas politicians ought to include Sam Rayburn—known to one and all as Mr. Sam—who emerged from Bonham to dominate the U.S. House, serving from 1913 to 1961, including seventeen years as Speaker, the longest tenure in history. If there was any doubt about his status, consider his funeral, for which Bonham swelled by 30,000 people, including 105 House colleagues and 4 past, present, and future presidents: Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and LBJ. Dee J. Kelly, one of the last surviving aides to Rayburn, recalls that, after the burial, at Willow Wild Cemetery, Eisenhower couldn’t find where he parked his car. Fifty years later, Rayburn remains peacefully at rest in section A, block 2, lot 3NW, along with eleven of his family members, all of them watched over by a water tower across the road that says “Bonham, Home of the Fighting Purple Warriors.” —BDS
33 | Don Meredith beats the Winnsboro Red Raiders 47—8
1 Tiger Drive, Mount Vernon | October 8, 1954
AP/NFL Photos
Don Meredith’s legend was born on a Friday night in 1954 when, as a sixteen-year-old junior at Mount Vernon, he ran for two touchdowns, passed for three more, kicked three of the extra points, and intercepted a pass as the Tigers beat the Winnsboro Red Raiders 47—8 at Tiger Stadium. Meredith would go on to become a two-time all-American quarterback at Southern Methodist University and then lead the Dallas Cowboys to the 1966 and 1967 NFL Championship games before settling into a memorable stint on the broadcasting team of Monday Night Football, where millions tuned in to hear him rhapsodize about his parents, Jeff and Hazel, and the town he grew up in (up to his death, this past December, he still wore his high school class ring). And the stadium where he turned in one of the greatest individual performances in high school football history? It’s been torn down, rebuilt, and renamed—Don Meredith Stadium. —S. HOLLANDSWORTH
34 | The Phantom Killer attacks
Richmond and Cowhorn Creek roads, Texarkana | February 22, 1946
Sixty-five years ago, this spot along Richmond Road was perfect for a pair of young lovers looking for privacy. Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey had parked on the shoulder, when, at about midnight, a man appeared out of the darkness, wearing a hood with the eyes cut out and brandishing a pistol. He forced his way into the car and knocked Hollis unconscious. Larey was assaulted but escaped. And so began a string of terrifying attacks. One month later a couple turned up dead in their car. A few weeks after that, another pair were killed in Spring Lake Park. A final attack occurred on May 3 at a house about ten miles outside town, where a husband was killed and his wife was seriously injured. All the while, the so-called Phantom Killer—who was the subject of the 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown—remained at large, stumping local detectives (pictured above). Today Richmond Road runs through a residential neighborhood just south of Central Mall, but locals who pass by know it’s where the most notorious unsolved crime spree in Texarkana’s history began. —BDS
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