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Wittliff Collections/Texas State University

2 | John Graves launches his canoe
Texas Highway 16 at the Brazos River | November 1957

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

Carousel Club: Corbis

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 (Today the building has been replaced by the headquarters of AT&T.) Ruby’s dreams of running a successful business were within reach.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

Mariano Martinez did not invent the frozen margarita; he just figured out how to produce the drink in quantities large enough to make an entire restaurant tipsy. One May afternoon in 1971, he was tinkering with a soft-serve ice cream machine in the kitchen of Mariano’s, his restaurant in the storied Old Town Shopping Center, when he discovered a new way to stir up the sloshy green drink. Though the original Mariano’s closed about five years ago—today it’s a PetSmart, and the exact location of the old kitchen is in the grooming area—Martinez still operates six restaurants across the Metroplex. As for his original machine, it has found its proper home as part of the collection in the Smithsonian. Any doubts about the significance of this contraption were settled when the museum released its list of the top ten American inventions this past September. Topping the list was, no surprise, Thomas Edison and the lightbulb. And what came in tenth? Martinez’s cool creation. —BDS