Part 1

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HOUSTON: THE FEAST YEARS

BY GEORGE FUERMANN

_Houston: The Feast Years_ (1962) _Reluctant Empire_ (1957) _Houston: Land of the Big Rich_ (1951)

HOUSTON The Feast Years

An Illustrated Essay By George Fuermann

With Woodcuts by Lowell Collins Modern Photographs by Owen Johnson Historic Photographs and Sketches by Various Hands

_The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city._ Euripides

_If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city._ C. C. Colton

_Urbes constituit: hora dissolvit._ Seneca

1962

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-20819

Copyright © 1962 by George Fuermann Woodcuts Copyright © 1962 by Lowell Collins All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America PREMIER PRINTING COMPANY First Printing

1

Houston, the reporter for the London _Daily Mail_ wrote, “has caused me to lift my ban on the word fabulous.”

The next year, 1956, the London _Times_ speculated that America might “eventually be based on a quadrilateral of great cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston.”

That year, too, the New York _Times_ quoted Lloyd’s of London: “Within 100 years Houston will be the largest city in the world.”

Houston: one of “The 12 Most Exciting Cities of North America,” said _Holiday_ in 1953—one of the dozen, from Quebec in the north to Mexico City in the south, possessing “that rare combination of qualities which has always spelled greatness.”

_Few Houstonians see their city in such remarkable terms. Few understand why their city provokes such estimates by others._

Roughly the size of Warsaw, Stockholm, Singapore, and Naples, of Bucharest and Brussels and Munich, Houston is prosaically listed in the Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia—the Soviet Encyclopedia—of 1957 as a “Railway and airline junction. Important industrial, commercial, and financial center in the South of the USA.” Even an American encyclopedia is hardly expected to describe the city’s festival atmosphere, its spirit of play, which derives in part from a surprising characteristic described by Arthur C. Evans, a man well seasoned in life, who wrote:

“I tried to think of Houston as being masculine. It wouldn’t do. Houston is not a masculine city in the sense that New Orleans or San Francisco is masculine. And so, for me, at any rate, it is _Miss_ Houston, a beguiling, vibrant, radiantly healthy adolescent—and I love her.”

Houston, Promised Land or New Golconda or whatever writers say of it, is a city of great expectations. Ambitious, confident, it moves swiftly, restlessly. Its profile, a transfiguring skyline moored to the flat Gulf plain, vaguely resembles other modern skylines, but Houston resembles nothing in the world except itself. Ever since World War II the city has beguiled observers, who often approach it with preconception, and often leave it with surprise.

“Air conditioned Tower of Babel, anchored on gold, gall and guts,” the author James Street wrote of it. “An adolescent Amazon with a little gland trouble.”

“It is plain Simon-pure American inspiration,” the _American_ Magazine said of it.

It “has a strength and power and rude majesty all its own,” the St. Louis _Post-Dispatch_ said. “In time, perhaps, it will achieve greatness.”

_What arrests the visiting journalist, what does he sense about Houston that residents often fail to feel?_

Let us see.

2

The ship channel, Oil, and Two World Wars made Houston what it is. The second age of discovery may make it what it becomes. As Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Balboa, Magellan, Captain Cook, and others opened the unexplored seas and lands of the earth during the first age of discovery, so the men who are opening the unexplored space of the universe have begun the second age.

In 1961, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to build its Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston, the city began an identity with the old ports of western Europe that played leading roles in the great adventures of two, three, and four centuries ago. Technical direction of America’s effort to put the first man on the moon will come from Houston.

The government is spending well over a hundred million dollars—it may come to far more than that in the end—to build office buildings, laboratories, and massive test communications and control facilities on range land near Clear Lake. The millions of dollars to be invested by industry to serve the center are incalculable. Slowly the character of the city will change as the migration of space scientists merges with Houston and with oil, the city’s mover and shaker for half a century. “It is likely,” the Dallas _News_ said in 1962, “that even many Houstonians have no conception of what is happening and what it may mean to their community.”

When the astronauts moved to Houston in 1962, their presence gave breath to what had seemed a fantasy to many Houstonians, who more than most Americans will experience vicariously the most extraordinary adventure in history. How far Houston has come since two New Yorkers paid $9,428 for a townsite and named it for the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto! The interval between that date and the arrival of the astronauts was but 125 years. What is Houston that it has become so much?

Beginning life three thousand years after Athens and two thousand after London, beginning two centuries after Boston and New York, fifty years after Los Angeles and at nearly the same time as Chicago, Houston suddenly joined the family of metropolises midway in the twentieth century. Its likeness in history, however, is to none of those cities, but to Carthage of North Africa, one of the most famous cities of antiquity, whose beginning preceded Houston’s by twenty-six centuries.

Carthage, like Houston, was above all a commercial city, its people vigorous, practical. At one time Carthage was famous for the great wealth of its leading families; Houston was once known as the Land of the Big Rich. And the sea, or access to it, was the key to the rise of both. As Carthage became the richest city of the western Mediterranean, Houston became the richest of the Gulf of Mexico. Carthage lived for fifteen centuries and died abruptly, disappearing from history.

The largest of twenty-one places named Houston in the United States, not counting Houston City and Houston Junction, both in Pennsylvania, Houston is the seventh American city in population and the second, after Los Angeles, in land area. But to call Houston the seventh city in population, though correct, is unrealistic. The true population of a modern city is shown not by the number of people living within its legal limits but by the number living within its metropolitan area, which for Houston is Harris County. By that measure, Houston ranks sixteenth in population.

Whatever its rank, Houston is often said to be a small town with an enormous population. Such a notion becomes increasingly hard to support except for one aspect, which was shown by B. D. (Mack) McCormick, a collector of folk music. He described the city in a pamphlet accompanying each of two recordings, produced in England in 1960, of the Houston area’s folk music.

_The crowd, the buzz, the murmuring Of this great hive, the city._ Abraham Cowley

Houston is “less a city than it is an amalgam of villages and townships surrounding a cluster of skyscrapers,” he wrote. “Each section of the city tends to reflect the region which it faces, usually being settled by people from that region. Thus the Louisiana French-speaking people are to be found in the northeast of Houston; the East Texas people in the northern fringe, which itself is the beginning of the Piney Woods; the German and Polish people are in the northwest Heights; and so on.... Each area surrounding the city has gathered its own, and each group has in turn established a community within the city.... And so the city, which in itself has no cultural traditions, is rich in those it has acquired.”

McCormick quoted Sam (Lightnin’) Hopkins, a Negro folk singer, who spoke of a Houston unknown to many Houstonians: “The idea of it is that everybody ’round here plays music or makes songs or something. That’s white peoples, colored peoples, that’s them funny French-talking peoples, that’s everybody, what I mean. They all of ’em got music.” McCormick himself has said, “More Englishmen than Houstonians see Houston as a rich source of traditional lore, though otherwise the British think of Houston in clichés.”

Much of the area’s past is deep-etched in folk music. One song was sung by Huddie (Lead Belly) Ledbetter, a Negro convict and perhaps the most famous of colored folk singers. The song, titled “The Midnight Special,” begins:

If you ever go to Houston, You better walk right, You better not stagger, You better not fight.

Sheriff Binford will arrest you, He will carry you down; If the jury finds you guilty You are Sugarland bound.[1]

3

Many “think of Houston as a cluster of mud huts around the Shamrock Hotel, in the cellars of which people hide from the sticky climate, emerging at long intervals to scatter $1000 bills to the four winds,” Gerald Ashford wrote in 1951. Such a fancy formed a dominant theme of Houston appraisals during a brief and a bizarre period. The myth that Houston’s population consisted mainly of the rich was absurd, but the millionaire legend, though arresting to the world, was a liability to Houston. For one thing, it obscured the city’s reality, which was itself exceptional enough.

The Shamrock Hilton Hotel, built by the wildcatter Glenn H. McCarthy at a cost of $21,000,000, opened on St. Patrick’s Day of 1949 with what turned out to be a spectacle. Conrad Hilton took control of the hotel in the spring of 1955. The two dates roughly mark the period of the legend’s vigor.

Still, it was in some ways an exhilarating time, and it left Houston with an extravagant folklore. The goose hung high. The legends die reluctantly: An oilman was said to have offered his daughter $5000 for every pound she lost; a Houston man who sent a new Cadillac to Europe to have a $5000 custom body put on its chassis was said to have told the craftsmen to “Throw the old body away;” wanting to play a joke on a colleague who was traveling in Europe, another Houstonian had a fair-sized roller coaster built in the traveler’s wooded yard.

But the maybe-so stories are less remarkable than many of the authentic ones. A Houston oilman well known for eccentricity and boyish hedonism was staying at a hotel in Los Angeles one night in 1955. He wished to awaken at a certain early hour the next day, so he made a long-distance call to a man on his staff in Houston and told the man to call him in Los Angeles at the specified hour the next morning. In 1957 a Houston high school girl received a graduation gift from her father, an oilman: wrapped and tied in her school colors, it was a map and a legal assignment of the overriding royalties in a lease near Odessa, in West Texas. A memorandum said a geologist expected the lease to produce oil for at least fifty years.

Roy H. Hofheinz, the mayor of Houston in 1953, disclosed at a press conference that he had recently made his first million dollars, though he was unsure of the exact date. “You just don’t notice things like that,” he said. The oilman Robert E. Smith has described newspaper estimates of many fortunes as “paper profits.” But some fortunes were as surprising as they were real. In 1957, when a Houston oilman’s former secretary died at the age of eighty, her estate was found to be worth $790,031.

A query by a New York matron, visiting Houston for the first time, showed America’s credulity in Houston’s millionaire legend. Passing the Rice University campus—three hundred acres of lawn; buildings in Byzantine, Moorish, Italian, and Spanish architectures—she said, “Tell me, who lives there?”

In spite of the lingering legend, Houston is in fact a city of working people. They came en masse during World War II, more than forty thousand to the shipyards alone, and most remained. Unlike the state, whose population has grown mainly from the excess of births over deaths, Houston has grown also from people moving in from the rest of Texas and other states.

The city’s population differs widely from that of most other American urban areas, having proportionately fewer industrial workers and more professional, technical, and white-collar workers. The difference is caused by automation and by the technical nature of the four dominant industries. Processing oil, natural gas, and especially petrochemicals requires fewer but more highly trained workers than many industries, as does the work to be done by concerns allied with the space center. Such workers get comparatively higher pay, which has made Houston a city with more houses and fewer apartments than older American cities of comparable size.

No city is all of a piece, and Houston’s oneness is relieved by the variant peoples merging with it since the beginning.

A Greek kaffeneion, a large room, nearly bare, with a ceiling of ornately stamped tin, is a walk-up reached through the unmarked door of an old downtown building. There the city’s Greeks, and only Greeks, drink the coffee of their homeland—a strong brew, neither sweet nor bitter, of a strange, nearly syrupy consistency.

The oriental mysteries of the shrine room of the On Leong tong—the word tong is shunned now, and they call it a Chinese Merchants Association—is on the second floor of the tong’s modern building on the northeastern fringe of the skyscrapers. The first Chinese, three hundred of them, came in 1870. Two thousand now live in Houston—two thousand of the city’s most exemplary citizens.

The Houston Turn-Verein, founded in 1854, is one of the oldest organizations in the city. The Germans, immigrating to Texas in great numbers in the nineteenth century, came early to Houston and were a dominant element in the city from the 1850s until well after Reconstruction. Edward King, a Yankee journalist who visited the city in 1873, wrote that “the Germans, who are very numerous and well to do in the city, have their Volks-fests and beer-absorbings, when the city takes on an absolutely Teutonic air.” Gradually the Germans have merged with all Houston, one loss of which was the virtual extinction of their magnificent singing societies.

Frosttown, Chaneyville, Freedmantown, Chapmanville, and Jourdeville, local names for parts of an older city, have vanished, but a newcomer called Frenchtown still lives. Its street names are lyrics—Deschaumes, Delia, Roland, Adelia, Lelia—and the tiny Creole oasis is seasoned with music and dance rituals unknown in the rest of Houston. Frenchtown’s people, coming from Louisiana during hard times in the early 1920s, settled in a few blocks off Liberty Road, and there they have remained as one family, little altered in forty years by the changing city surrounding them.

Houston’s Mexican group lacks the color and ritual of San Antonio’s, but it is the second largest national group in the city. Western Slavs, mainly Czechs and Poles, have lived in Houston for many decades, especially the Czechs. A few Japanese, most of whom excel as truck farmers and rice growers, live outside the city. Many foreign traders, scientists, and executives have been drawn to Houston by cotton and oil and chemicals.

The state’s largest concentration of Negroes lives in Houston, which ranks ninth in the nation in the proportion of Negroes to the total population. Nearly a quarter of a million Negroes live in the metropolitan area, or roughly one in five persons. In an article about Negro millionaires in Texas, _Ebony_ Magazine said in 1952, “Houston is sometimes called the ‘Bagdad of Negro America.’” It is said also that Houston Negroes have a higher per capita wealth than those of any other American city.

What a change in one century! Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the most important historical figures to have written about Houston, came to the city in 1854. Writing in _The Cotton Kingdom_, he said of Houston: “There is a prominent slavemart in town, which holds a large lot of likely looking negroes, waiting purchasers. In the windows of shops, and on the doors and columns of the hotel, are many written advertisements, headed ‘A likely negro girl for sale.’ 'Two negroes for sale.’ ‘Twenty negro boys for sale,’ etc.”

In his book _The Great South_, Edward King said Negroes “have had something to do with the city government [of Houston] during the reconstruction era, and the supervisor of streets, and some members of the city council, at the time of my sojourn there [in 1873], were negroes.”

Houston has proportionately few native Houstonians. The board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce, where natives might be thought to dominate, reflects the newness of the population. Of the board’s twenty-nine members in 1956, eleven moved to the city after 1945, seven in 1951 or later. Only one of the twenty-nine was born in Houston, only eleven more were born elsewhere in Texas.

Yet a fleck of truth still lingers in what Alexander E. Sweet and J. Armoy Knox wrote of Houston in 1883: “After you have listened to the talk of one of these pioneer veterans for some time, you begin to feel that the creation of the world, the arrangement of the solar system, and all subsequent events, including the discovery of America, were provisions of an all-wise Providence, arranged with a direct view to the advancement of the commercial interests of Houston.”

4

Fifty miles inland, Houston is one of the nation’s principal world ports. Being rich in oil and natural gas, it has come to dominate two mammoth industries, petrochemicals and the sending of natural gas to the nation. For half a century beginning in the early 1900s, Houston belonged to oil. For the next half-century, it may belong to space.

Oil and its big quick profits—little is said of its big quick losses—and the extravagant legends about oil riches did more than anything except the Houston Ship Channel to give Houston its One Million. The city got a foretaste of its oil destiny thirty-five years before the Spindletop gusher roared in when Richard W. Dowling, the Confederate hero of the Battle of Sabine Pass, and John M. Fennerty formed a company in 1866 for “Mechanical operations in mining and boring for oil....” Their project was ridiculed, and its outcome is unknown.

The historian Andrew Forest Muir has shown that two critical periods in the growth of Houston were the half-decade from 1857 to 1861, when it became the rail center of Texas, and the decade beginning with the Spindletop gusher in 1901. Two others are the decade after the Houston Ship Channel was opened late in 1914—a period further stimulated by World War I—and the fifteen years beginning just before World War II. The inception of the federal space laboratory begins a fifth cycle of growth.

Houston’s quick growth between 1940 and 1960, when its population rose from twenty-first to seventh place among American cities, owed to the linking of three benefits: the ship channel, which gave the city access to the world; immense resources of oil, natural gas, sulphur, lime, salt, and water; and the fact that the product of one chemical plant is often the raw material of another. This combination created on the banks of the ship channel one of the world’s greatest concentrations of petrochemical industries—chemical plants dependent on the by-products of refining oil. The tempo increased in the early 1960s, when the Monsanto Chemical Company began building the world’s largest ethylene plant at a cost of fifty million dollars. Du Pont began building a hydrofluoric acid plant, and an important polypropylene plastic and film plant was being built.

During the 1950s Houston was a leading example of the new urban America caused by the economic impetus of World War II and the increased post-war migration of rural people to cities. No period in the city’s history approaches the importance of World War II and the years after. Before the war Houston was an ambitious small city. A few years afterward, its former hopes lying in the shadows of sudden and preposterous growth, the city was altered in character, aspirations, and appearance.