Halloween may have come and gone, but magic can always found if you know where to look. The history of Dallas is no exception.

The below photograph, titled The Magic of North Dallas, was taken on August 3, 1982 by Butch Hale Photography. It is one of several images taken as part of the cover design by Unigraphics, Incorporated for the inaugural issue of the North Dallas-focused Parkway Magazine, which was published in October of 1982.

Featured in the photograph series are former Dallas mayors: from left, Bob Folsom, Jack Evans, J. Erik Jonsson, and Wes Wise. Jack Evans was serving as mayor when these photos were taken.

November means mustaches. Thanks to the Movember Foundation, men all over the world this month grow mustaches to raise awareness of men’s health issues, including prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and suicide. Women, too, are invited to participate. Though it’s harder for them.

We at D Magazine are all about awareness. And mustaches. So we turned to The Encyclopedia of Texas, published in 1922, to find Dallasites who might inspire us. For each man, we offer an actual excerpt from the encyclopedia, along with a passage of our invention. See if you can distinguish the real item from the fabrication.

1. Gus Keller

A. He founded his own business, never did work for a salary, and built that business up to a place of leadership in its realm, marketing the choicest and such edible meats that his establishment acquired a city-wide reputation, and he became a city character, universally known and esteemed for his reliability and service.

B. His mustache, sitting all those years under his nose, grew sad. For just inches above it, there was a most pitiful haircut, with a severe part down the middle. And so, at its edges, the mustache drooped.

While sifting through the Dallas Morning News archives to research a page on fancy hotel facelifts, I came across a macabre murder story set in the Adolphus, Dallas’ oldest grand hotel. It made me wonder about the place’s paranormal rumors. The Adolphus, opened in October of 1912, has embraced its haunted reputation in recent years. Get a cocktail at the lobby bar, and a bartender will hand you a menu in a homemade history book that includes several poems about the hotel’s supposed ghosts, the most popular revolving around a jilted bride.  

But those stories—and the one about the Stoneleigh manager’s mistress taking a fatal fall in a secret passageway—seem to have evaded newspaper print. I found nothing in the News’ archives about a dead kept woman or would-be bride. Are those stories just Dallas folklore? Or did the reporters of yesteryear turn their heads when high-profile figures’ skeletons toppled out of their closets? I don’t have those answers, but what I do have is the tenacity to dig through decades of the News’ grainy newspaper clips to find the real reports on people who died on Adolphus property. (OK, it was really a pretty basic search on the library website and I’m sure I missed a few.) 

If your soul is too sensitive to get past the first few minutes of any Six Feet Under episode, now is the time to click on something else. But if you like history, and don’t mind morbidity, read on. And since I’m probably minutes away from getting an angry call from a PR rep, I’ll go ahead and add that all my experiences at the Adolphus—spa treatments, afternoons at the pool, tea at the French Room bar—have been exceptional. Still, next time I step inside the Adolphus walls, I’m definitely taking the stairs.  

The November midterm elections are just around the corner and you have until October 9 to register to vote. Regardless of your political views, exercising your right to vote is an important part of the governmental process in Texas and the United States. But historically, the ability to vote was not equally available to Dallas residents. The voting rights struggle had a big impact on the evolution of Dallas as a city and left an imprint on the Dallas we know today.

The poll tax was used by many Southern states after reconstruction, as a way to disenfranchise voters, particularly black people. Introduced in Texas in 1902, the poll tax did indeed keep large numbers of Texans, including many African Americans, from voting because they often couldn’t afford to pay the tax. The tax remained even after women won the right to vote in 1920, with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment.

In 1964, the 24^th Amendment finally declared the poll tax illegal for national elections. And in 1966, the Texas State Constitution was amended to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that declared state poll taxes illegal in state elections.

The poll tax in Texas had an impact on Dallas – evident in photographs such as this 1955 image of a billboard advertising “Be an active citizen…Pay Your Poll Tax”. The ad was paid for by W.A. Morrison, Presiding Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Working to bring African Americans to voting booths, even with the poll tax in place, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) campaigned to get as many citizens as possible to pay the tax. That effort is depicted in this circa 1965 image taken by prominent African American photographer Marion Butts, titled “Pay Your Poll Tax Here” NAACP Poll Tax Campaign workers with signs from the campaign.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner passed away on September 27, 2017. He was 91 years old. I combed through the D Magazine archives the following day and discovered, in the January 1977 issue, on page 11, a story exploring whether Dallas would be getting a Playboy Club. The publishing brand’s first franchised nightclub had opened in downtown Chicago in 1960, and, according to the article, real estate developer Lenny Licht was awaiting approval to bring the club to Dallas. This was a big operation for Playboy. At its peak, there were clubs in 23 American cities, as well as in Canada, Japan, and Jamaica.

Licht eventually received the green light. This would be the first, and only, location in Texas.

The Dallas Playboy Club opened in 1977 on the second floor of Expressway Tower, at North Central Expressway and what is now SMU Boulevard, in the same building that housed the Dallas Cowboys headquarters. It was a celebrity-studded, members-only playground. And the cocktail waitresses—known as Playboy Bunnies—were a main draw. The women, in satin suits with fluffy white tails and rabbit ears perched atop their maintained locks, were the embodiment of Hugh Hefner’s vision of beauty and charm.

I reached out to a handful of the Bunnies the day after Hef passed away, to hear their stories of what it was like to work within his empire, and more specifically, in the Dallas club. Would their encounters be similar to those in “A Bunny’s Tale,” Gloria Steinem’s 1963 essay for Show magazine in which the journalist worked in the Manhattan club under the alias Marie Catherine Ochs, and exposed what she considered to be a dark foible of the sexual revolution? Would these women feel similarly about their experiences? Would their stories be even more salacious? Not quite.

This month, hundreds of veterans of the Playboy Club will converge on Dallas from all over the world. Here a few share some of their favorite stories from a bygone era.