They were high school sweethearts, Rick Marr and Beverly Sanford Marr, and before that, childhood friends. Beverly remembers it was in the sixth grade when she first singled out her husband-to-be as, "pretty cute,” adding, “we dated in high school and college.”
That was 25 years and three children ago. A lot has changed since then, but one thing that never changed for Rick and Beverly is the neighborhood they call home . . . home with parents and siblings and then married with children.
When Beverly and Rick graduated from Lake Highlands High School in 1974, married as sophomores in college, they soon purchased their first home on Middleknoll. Beverly says they never were tempted to move elsewhere.
“Isn’t that sick?” she laughs.
It’s certainly uncommon. Cultivating deep community roots takes time, with the rewards slow in coming. But staying in one place promotes lasting relationships, and the couple has made many friendships throughout the years they’ve have called Lake Highlands home.
Home these days for Beverly is contained in a rambling, brick contemporary home on Parkford, a long street bordered by green, manicured lawns where the neighborhood feels protected by the canopy of tall trees overhead.
The couple recently served as leaders of the Lake Highlands Booster Club and Young Life organizations when their older children, Brian and Brenda, attended Lake Highlands High School. Today, their daughter is a freshman at Texas A&M, and their son is a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin.
Beverly’s mother reflects upon the time when she and her husband, Bob, were watching their grandchildren’s parents grow up in Old Lake Highlands.
“I remember Rick was a real good linebacker,” Lola Sanford says. “Beverly was on the drill team in high school, and we lived on Clearhurst. But it was on Lanshire,” she says, “where we brought Beverly home from the hospital.”
Lanshire was part of the original “L streets” of Lake Highlands, a five- or six-street planned development not unlike many other subdivisions sprouting up around the country. It was the early 1950s, post World War II. Young men such as Robert Sanford were returning home from the war ready to take advantage of the GI Bill, get married and buy a house. Television was about to come on to the electronic scene, and actor Robert Young of Father Knows Best, a popular television program, convinced us he really did.
Television was a benign source of “family entertainment” when everyone seemed to agree on the definitions of family and entertainment. A 10-inch TV’s test pattern didn’t even start to make its annoying siren-sound until the mid- or late-afternoon. And talk about channels: There was one.
People were used to thinking of ways to stave off boredom. At the Sanford home, horses came to mind.
“Mother rode horses when she was a kid,” Beverly says.
“When my parents moved here from Oklahoma, their first home was on Walnut Hill Lane,” Lola says, “and we would ride all through there. Back then, there was nothing past Walnut Hill.
“Riding horses appeals to most kids,” Lola says, “especially girls. But for some, horseback riding becomes a lifelong love. We’ve been riding with all our grandchildren (which number 10 and range in age from kindergarten to a sophomore in college). Some take to it more than others, but we have a wonderful time as a family, riding together.”
Indeed, it was Beverly, not Doug, who couldn’t stay away from the “White Barn” on White Rock Trail. Her mother tells the story of how her young daughter would pay her teenage friends just so she could brush their horses.
“That’s when we decided to get her a horse,” Lola says.
Merryleggs, named after a horse in the classic novel “Black Beauty,” was “sweet and gentle, just a wonderful riding horse,” Beverly says.
The pasture where the Sanfords kept their five horses was next to the White Rock Nursing Home.
“The people who lived there would always wave to us from their window,” Beverly says. “When the nursing home thought they would expand, which they never did, my parents had to find a place to keep our horses.”
And that’s exactly what Bob and Lola did when they bought property in the Gunter/Van Alsteyne area. They hauled their horses to the much larger pasture north of Dallas, and every weekend, the family would head north to ride their horses. Eventually, they built a home there and settled into a regular commute.
Of course, in a family as tied to the area as this one, their feelings about the holidays and traditions tend to reflect the common experiences of their years together.
When it’s time to start thinking about Thanksgiving, Lola prepares a traditional turkey dinner (to feed about 30). She claims there’s not enough time in that busy day to think about riding horses, but while everyone’s in the kitchen, you might want to look for Beverly in the barn.
“I’ll probably be brushing the horses,” she says.
Some things really never do change.
Sidebar
Head: Sharing History
Families like the Sanfords and the Marrs share a historical link to the early beginnings of Lake Highlands, when it was still in the country and known as the Rodgers’ community. The Dallas suburb of Richardson, formerly the long-forgotten town of Breckenridge, and Lake Highlands have always shared blurred boundaries.
Both communities can claim descendants of the Peters Colony, the first governmental drive to bring settlers to Texas, initially to the Republic, and then to the Lone Star State. A group of investors from Kentucky was granted the right to settle non-Texas families in the region in 1841. This grant expanded in 1843 to include land south of the Red River, through Dallas County, and westward for 160 miles.
The Texas Agricultural, Commercial and Manufacturing Company, whose name some considered too lengthy, became the Texas Emigration and Land Company. Later, it was simply called the Peters Colony for W.S. Peters, its primary financial investor. The company had three years to get the population quotas up to speed or speculators would lose both land and money.
People from all walks-of-life came. Some followed loved ones who wrote letters about the vast prairie, mild winters and plentiful game. Others may have been lured by creative descriptions found in brochures of the day: “In Texas, you will find the winters mild, with the summers pleasant, temperatures always accompanied by a breeze.”
These pioneers of the 19th century have come and gone, but their stories are still with us, often passed from generation to generation by amateur historians. A good example of this type of community effort occurred in the 1970s, when Girl Scout Troop 154 gathered oral histories and copied old newspaper clippings and photos of the community of Lake Highlands and its residents. This black notebook was presented to the Audelia branch of the Dallas Public Library in 1977.
In it, you’ll find first- and second-hand accounts of people who lived those historic times, when families were willing to make an arduous oxen and wagon journey across unknown territory to establish a new home, perhaps a new way of life. These pioneers left family and friends to be part of a noble effort that was gaining a foothold in the American psyche of the time . . . Manifest Destiny. Also, free land holds a magnetic-like pull.
Farmers, or “farm laborers” as many described their occupation in the Dallas census of 1880, came because Texas soil was said to be “good cotton-growing land.” At one time, one-sixth of the world’s cotton was grown within a 150-mile radius of the City.
Most people who came to the low-lying hills and open flat land, land that would one day be the bottom of White Rock Lake, stayed generation after generation, until a sense of “home” developed. Beverly says whenever she visits either her brother, Doug, or sister, Nancy Hinckley, who both live in Plano, she is always “glad to get back home.”
