CITY VIEW ANTIQUE MALL

His gravesite at Sparkman-Hillcrest still draws the occasional fan, who comes to pay respects to one of America’s greatest athletes.

Mary Kay Ash

Long before flashy pink Cadillacs were synonymous with success, Mary Kay Ash was a woman frustrated in a man’s world. Sick of being passed over for promotions that went to her less-qualified male counterparts, she set out to level the playing field on her own terms. Ash launched one of the most successful cosmetics companies of all times and created a way for fellow women to build their own financial future.

Born in 1918, she grew up working class in a Houston suburb and watched her mother put in long hours at a restaurant. Ash was a young Girl Scout pushing cookies when she discovered her knack for sales. She found her way working for home goods stores but was never able to ascend the ranks. Unfulfilled, she left her career in 1963 with plans to write a book to help working women. Instead, at age 45, she wound up with a business plan. The home-sale makeup business wasn’t new, but Ash used a $5,000 loan to build an empire designed to help women establish their own wealth.

She stayed involved in the company until a stroke in 1996 made it difficult for her to work. She was a neighbor with a custombuilt pink mansion at 8915 Douglas Ave., in Old Preston Hollow. When she died Nov. 22, 2001, her company was worth $1.2 billion and had more than 850,000 sales reps in 37 nations across the globe.

Her gravesite at SparkmanHillcrest often is adorned with flowers in her signature color: pink.

H.L. HUNT

For years, he held the title as the richest man in the world. Haroldson

Lafayette “H.L.” Hunt’s oil empire helped put Dallas on the map, while simultaneously serving as a battleground for the many branches of his storied family tree that includes three wives and 15 children.

Hunt was born a lucky man in 1889, a point he proved over and over at gaming tables across the country. The story goes that a hand of five-card stud won him the dollars needed to buy up his first oil field in Arkansas. He later secured the East Texas Oil Field, one of the largest oil deposits in the world, a spring of near-endless fortune.

But like so many stories, great wealth led to a legacy of secrets. He married his first wife, Lyda, and had seven children in a house on the shores of White Rock Lake crafted after George Washington’s Mount Vernon, but then he took another wife and had four children who were tucked away in Florida. He later had another four children with a woman in Louisiana, who he would marry after his first wife’s death.

The story goes that a hand of five-card stud won him the dollars needed to buy up his first oil field in Arkansas.

Despite his bigamous lifestyle, Hunt’s funeral took place at First Baptist Church of Dallas after he succumbed to cancer in November 1974. It sparked the first of many battles over his enormous net worth, a war that is still being fought in federal court today.

But Hunt would live beyond his years on earth, in a way. In the 1980s, the breakout soap opera “Dallas” spun a dramatized version of the Hunt’s family tale, with lead character J.R. Ewing based on the Dallas oil tycoon who also went by his initials. — EMILY CHARRIER