Next to North Park Mall, a storied mid-century shopping center in Dallas — and one that’s still thriving — is the Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park Cemetery. In its way, it too is still thriving.

“The cemetery was created with land donated by William Barr Caruth, an early Dallas settler whose family owned huge tracts of what is now North Dallas,” wrote Moira Muldoon in D magazine in 2010. “Sparkman Hillcrest is officially a Texas historic site now, with graves going back as far as the 1850s, and some of the wending roads through the 88 acres are lovely.”

I saw no graves as old as the 19th century at Sparkman-Hillcrest in late May, but then again I didn’t wander through every part of the cemetery. What I saw was a well-landscaped 20th-century cemetery, marked by upright stones and and a scattering of funerary art, along with many mature trees and bushes.

There’s at least one fountain.
A few graves featured statues, such as these two.

A few stones are unconventional. I didn’t take a picture of one that features a large cube balanced on one of its tips, but I did snap this one.
One section used well-cropped bushes to mark off family plots. I’d never seen an arrangement quite like that.

Or rounded stones quite like these either.
I didn’t go looking for well-known permanent residents of Sparkman-Hillcrest, but I found a few. Ross Perot’s parents, and I assume a sibling who didn’t live long, had their own section featuring a statue of an angel. Someday, presumably, the Dallas billionaire and third-party candidate will repose there as well.

Sen. John Tower, along with one of his daughters, is at Sparkman-Hillcrest.
He earned his place in U.S. political history by being the first Republican Senator from Texas since Reconstruction, first elected to that body in 1961. A harbinger of the end of the old-time Solid South and its evolution into the new Solid South we know today. The elder George Bush wanted him to be his Secretary of Defense in 1989, but the very same U.S. Senate said no — also a remarkable event in Tower’s career. In 1991, he and his daughter Marian and 21 others died in the crash of Atlantic Southeast Airlines 2311 in Georgia.

Another resident of Sparkman-Hillcrest is long-time Cowboys head coach Tom Landry.

Back in 2013, I saw Landry’s cenotaph at the Texas State Cemetery, along with the grave of that other famed Texas football coach, Darrell Royal. Landry’s buried in Dallas, and his ever-present fedora, done in bronze, helps mark his final resting place.