Part 2

Houston’s formidable roles in the oil and gas industries, in the manufacturing of oil-field equipment, and in the nationwide distribution of gas are widely understood but seldom comprehended. The metropolitan area alone, which has seven oil refineries, produces nearly eighty thousand barrels of oil daily. Two major oil companies, the Humble Oil and Refining Company and the Continental Oil Company, and hundreds of smaller ones have their headquarters in Houston, most of whose downtown skyscrapers were built by or for oil, gas, and banking.

The Tennessee Gas Transmission Company was organized in 1944; twelve years later its assets passed a billion dollars, a speed of growth that may never have been equaled in American business. Paul Kayser, president of the El Paso Natural Gas Company, was asked at a press conference in El Paso why his company, which owns El Paso’s tallest building and supplies West Texas gas to western states, has its headquarters in Houston. He answered that the only place in America to keep in touch with the oil business is Houston.

In 1960 most of the nation’s sulphur deposits, around 6 per cent of its petroleum reserves, and around 10 per cent of its refining capacity were in a nineteen-county area surrounding Houston. An estimated three-quarters of the nation’s petrochemicals production comes from the Texas Gulf Coast area. Shipbuilding, an integrated steel mill, and paper mills are other important aspects of the city’s economy.

It is a paradox that the Houston metropolitan area, which is hundreds of miles from the state’s chief cattle-raising areas, has more cattle than any other county in Texas. Irrigation has made the county a rice producer of importance; within a hundred-mile radius of Houston is grown 28 per cent of the nation’s rice. And Houston, which is the headquarters for Anderson, Clayton & Company, the largest cotton concern in the world, is one of the world’s leading spot cotton markets.

Houston’s gusto in the 1950s was epitomized by “M” Day, as July 3, 1954, was called. When statisticians divined ahead of time that the city’s metropolitan population would reach one million on that date, a festival was planned to welcome the millionth citizen. Houston Bucks were printed in a denomination of $1,000,000. A huge thermometer, its peak registering 1,000,000, was put at the Rice Hotel corner and the reading raised a notch a day. Thousands of auto-bumper signs said “I’m One in a Million—Houston.” Many concerns changed their postage-meter messages to read “Houston’s a Million Strong.”

At a town meeting held in Hermann Park on July 3, Mr. Million was identified as B. C. McCasland, Jr., who moved to the city the day before from Clinton, Mississippi. Aged thirty-six, a geologist, and the father of five children, he typified the city at that moment. Receiving gifts said to be worth $10,000, he was flown to the eleven cities then larger than Houston—to talk about Houston. He moved away some time afterward, but “M” Day may not have been premature. A year and a half later, when the Bureau of the Census estimated the populations of Houston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Washington, the population of Houston was put at 1,077,000.

The history of Houston’s material success is to some extent the history of its port and the bayou it was to make into a ship channel. Buffalo Bayou was once the mouth of the Brazos River, though the Brazos long ago cut its present course to the southwest. A traveler who wrote of the bayou nearly ten years before Houston existed found it an exceptional stream. “... this most enchanting little stream [has] the appearance of an artificial canal in the design and course of which Nature has lent her masterly hand,” J. C. Clopper wrote in 1828. Other early travelers were to comment on Buffalo Bayou’s “strong resemblance to a canal.”

Moreover, Andrew Forest Muir has written, “Buffalo Bayou had another peculiar advantage.... Unlike most significant Texas streams, it flows almost due east and west. With the Brazos [River] extending in a general northerly direction, this meant that the head of navigation on the Bayou was but twenty miles or so from the heart of the fertile agricultural region of the Brazos.”

Indeed, Buffalo Bayou was the principal reason the founders of Houston chose the area for their city. They wanted the most interior point of year-round navigation in Texas. Unable to buy the town of Harrisburg, they went upstream for their site.

A vessel of size first succeeded in reaching a boat-landing at Houston in 1837. It was a former warship, the Constitution, a forty-four-gun frigate in 1797 but then a merchant vessel, whose captain chanced the voyage to win $1000 offered by the new city’s promoters. Within ten years vessels were making daily runs between Houston and Galveston.

The improvement of the bayou channel was begun in 1839 with funds raised by public subscription and lotteries. The Port of Houston was established by city ordinance in 1841. Widening and deepening of the channel was begun in 1869 and continued into the 1960s, by which time the minimum depth of the channel was thirty-six feet and the minimum width was three hundred feet. The port is linked with the Intracoastal Canal. “Probably the greatest, most farseeing project ever consummated in Texas was the deepwater channel to Houston,” the Dallas News said in an editorial in 1955.

One price of the project’s material benefits was the loss of one of the area’s chief natural beauties, a beauty remarked by many travelers in the nineteenth century. “... this most enchanting little stream,” Clopper wrote in 1828. Edward King foresaw in 1873 what was to happen to the lovely bayou.

“The bayou which leads from Houston to Galveston ... is overhung by lofty and graceful magnolias; and in the season of their blossoming, one may sail for miles along the channel with the heavy, passionate fragrance of the queen flower drifting about him,” he wrote nearly a century ago. And then: “This bayou Houston hopes one day to widen and dredge all the way to Galveston; but its prettiness and romance will then be gone.”

So it goes.

5

With a median age of 27.5 years, Houston’s population is the youngest of America’s big cities. The city itself seems younger than it is, for since the 1920s Houston has given the impression of being always new. Few structures stand long enough to become old. When the lovely patina of age does get a chance to form, it is scrubbed away as though it were an embarrassment, or so it was removed in 1962 from the bronze of Sam Houston’s equestrian statue in Hermann Park. Houstonians have shown little compassion for their city’s past.

No structure has been preserved from Houston’s early days except a two-story brick trading post, built in 1848, on Congress Avenue; the Kellum-Noble house, the main part of which was built in 1847; and the Rice-Cherry house, which may date from 1850. The two houses now stand behind the City Hall in the small Sam Houston Park. “What one misses most in Houston are old things,” a Swiss journalist wrote after visiting Houston in 1951. “After a few days one sings the praise of the past.”

Some old things, obscure trifles, evoke a period when Houston was a Main Street town. A city slogan of the early 1900s—“Where the Mock Bird has no sorrow in his song, no winter in his year”—suggests municipal aspirations inconceivable in the Houston of half a century later. Now it is “Space Center, USA.”

And some old things evoke a period when tenacious civic pride fed on delusions that were privately understood but never confessed. Judge an extravagant sentenceful of wishful thinking in the Houston edition of _The Standard Blue Book of Texas_ for 1907: “Nowhere are the flowers fairer, the skies bluer or the trees greener than in the beautiful residence environs of this city, and nowhere in this great and powerful Southland is a more gracious and unbounded hospitality dispensed by more attractive and winsome chatelaines than adorn the handsome homes of Houston.”

But Houston’s past may be suggested by other than old things. The Southwest and the frontier are recalled by the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and its annual prelude, the Salt Grass Trail, on which hundreds of city people ride horseback for three days to retrace a pioneer cattle trail. Silky stalactites of Spanish moss, dripping from oaks and sweet gums, faintly evoke Houston’s role in the old South. But the primitiveness and individualism of the wild west and the relaxation of the Southern mood have been shed. Though Houston was shaped to a large extent by the South and the Southwest, it has come to be lightly marked by those regions.

“It is partly an unconscious romanticism and it is partly a conscious cult that one still thinks of Houston as pre-eminently a Texas city,” Hubert Mewhinney wrote in the Houston _Post_. “But it is not. Houston since the (Second World) war ... has not been so much Texan as generalized American....”

In becoming so, it gained in a way that has been concealed by the city’s more arresting millionaire legend. Slowly, perceptibly, Houston is becoming cosmopolitan. With its interest in music, art, and the theater, with its universities and medical schools, Houston is becoming an important center of culture. But nearly all is new: the organization dates of only the symphony, one art museum, and the universities precede World War II, those of only the symphony and one university precede World War I. No cultural institution dates from the nineteenth century, though a tradition of opera and theater goes far back.

Houston’s musical life has long been centered in its symphony, which gives the city much more than symphony music. From its first and second chairs come most of the musicians in the chamber music groups, which are the most remarkable new development in the city’s cultural life. Sir John Barbirolli succeeded Leopold Stokowski in 1961 as conductor of the symphony, which was organized in 1913.

The Music Guild, organized in 1948, is the oldest of three chamber music groups of distinction, and the J. S. Bach Society, one of the few performing Bach groups in America, gave its first concerts in 1954. The Houston Grand Opera Association was organized in 1955. During the six years Stokowski led the symphony he organized the Contemporary Music Society, which gave its first concert in 1959.

The Alley, one of three Houston theaters operating the year around, is one of the premier theaters of America. Directors, actors, and writers from many countries have come to Houston to study the arena theater’s work. Directed by Nina Vance since it opened in 1947, the Alley has received substantial grants from the Ford Foundation. The Playhouse, whose arena theater was the first in America to be built for professional use, has operated under various managements since it was opened in 1951. Theatre, Inc., occupying the proscenium hall of the old Houston Little Theatre, has mostly produced musicals since it was organized in 1953.

The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, directed by James Johnson Sweeney since 1961, developed into an important art center under the long direction of James Chillman. Growing from an art league organized in 1900, the museum opened in 1924; it was the first art museum in Texas. Two wings were added in 1926, the Blaffer Memorial Wing in 1953, and the beautiful Cullinan Hall—the Big Room—in 1958. The last, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, gave the museum a new entrance and made it one of the city’s architectural distinctions. The museum is strongest in paintings of the European Renaissance. Important collections have been given by Edith A. and Percy S. Straus and Samuel H. Kress, of New York, and the Robert Lee Blaffer family and Miss Ima Hogg, of Houston.

The Contemporary Arts Association, organized in 1948, conducts an exhibitions museum. One of the few American museums devoted solely to the art of the twentieth century, its beneficial effects on the city’s art life have been far out of proportion to its budgets or the size of its exhibition hall, both small.

A notable omission in Houston’s cultural life has always been a satisfactory natural history museum, but one is to be built at last. The Houston Museum of Natural Science and Planetarium is to be built in Hermann Park at a cost of $2,500,000, possibly by 1964.

The principal universities are Rice University, chartered in 1891 but opened for instruction in 1912; the University of Houston, established in 1934; the Baylor University College of Medicine, which opened in Dallas in 1900 but was removed to the Texas Medical Center in Houston in 1943; Texas Southern University, established in 1934 as the Houston College for Negroes; and the newer St. Thomas University, a Roman Catholic school.

The superlative of the city’s exuberance is the Texas Medical Center. But for one hospital the area, lying just south of Hermann Park, was a forest within the city in 1946. A decade later, at a cost of more than $50,000,000, most of it paid by Houston oil and cotton philanthropies, one of the nation’s leading medical research, educational, and hospital centers was well on the way to completion.

Though hospitals and universities and the arts help measure a city’s culture, so do department stores, restaurants, and sports. The last is big business in Houston.

Houston’s years of stars are one reason: Eddie Dyer and Dizzy Dean in baseball, George Blanda and Billy Cannon in professional football, Pete Cawthon, college football player and coach, Jimmy Demaret and Jack Burke in golf, the great hurdler Fred Wolcott, Wilbur Hess in intercollegiate tennis, A. C. Glassell, Jr. in fishing, Grant Ilseng in skeet shooting. But the big reason is the mild climate; Houston sports are a year-round activity.

Golf to yachting, hunting to deep sea fishing, Houstonians can span the calendar as participants. And as spectators they have Southwest Conference and University of Houston sports and the noted track teams of Texas Southern University; they have major league baseball and football—the Houston Colt .45s in the National Baseball League and the Houston Oilers in the American Football League; in tennis they have the nationally famous River Oaks Country Club Tournament and in golf the Houston Classic Invitational Tournament; and they have the annual Pin Oak Charity Horse Show, one of America’s leading horse shows.

6

Houston’s character and personality are by no means revealed merely by ticking off oil, a bewildering chemicals complex, a seaport, and an exaggerated reputation for materialism. Consider some enigma variations on an urban theme:

Metropolitan, urban, big-city Houston—where E. H. Marks has one of the largest herds of Longhorn cattle in the world, where cattle rustling still flourishes, where wolves still thrive and a few mountain lions still roam in the bottoms.

The evangelist Billy Graham, exhorting a crowd of forty thousand in Rice Stadium in 1952, called Houston “a more wicked city than Hollywood.” He said earlier “that less people probably go to church in Houston than in any other city in Texas.” Yet the city has more than twelve hundred churches.

Houston is said to be well planned. Yet it is the largest city in America without zoning and more than three hundred of its streets have duplicate names. Main Street, or so the legend goes, is the longest in the world, sometimes merely the longest in the country. No doubt it is neither; still, from end to end within the city limits, the Main Stem measures 19.1 miles.

In Houston a prudent pedestrian looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. Houstonians, a safe-driving expert said, are the most zealous horn-blowers in the land. In 1961 another expert told the City Council that Houstonians lead all Americans in shunning public transportation to drive their own cars.

In Houston, the U.S. Department of Labor disclosed in 1961, a retired couple could live more cheaply than in any other of twenty big cities. Other years, other distinctions: Houston won two municipal championships in the early 1950s, when it led American cities in murders in 1951 and was chosen the cleanest city in the United States in 1953. It was to learn later that it had held another distinction for decades, being second to none in using the word “chocolate” to name things. “The Houston list is far beyond anything possessed by any other place in the world,” a college professor wrote to Mayor Lewis Cutrer. Small wonder: Chocolate Bay, Chocolate Bayou, Old Chocolate Road, and Chocolate Springs, to list four of ten such names he found. And in Houston, surely _only_ in Houston, the city garbage dump came to smell like a rose—to the city treasurer. Eleven oil wells drilled at the dump in the 1950s paid the city more than $250,000 in royalties before they were shut down.

Houston, where it is against the law to make “Goo Goo Eyes,” to give the title of the ordinance, or for women to wear slacks, though the courts have refused to uphold the last. Where enough coffee comes into the port annually to give every American more than forty-three cupfuls. And where Roman Catholic nuns ride the city buses free, a tradition believed to date from the nuns’ heroic work during a yellow fever epidemic in the nineteenth century.

Houston, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated Al Smith for the presidency in 1928, is said to be dominated by conservatives who give the welfare state no quarter. Yet William S. White, writing in _Harper’s_ in 1959, said Houston “was ... the first large community in the United States to feed the depression hungry with no questions asked, no kind of means test, no social worker’s cross examination, no stigma, and no nonsense.”

Nothing about Houston is more enigmatic than its weather. The weather long ago made Houston the site of one of its principal experiment stations.

W. D. Bedell has written that Houston, more than any other big Texas city, is a crossroads of weather. “Here we can have Dallas weather or Caribbean weather or Colorado weather or Arizona weather,” he wrote. “Houston gets more Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico weather than any other major Texas city. That is the steam bath kind of weather.”

Houston gets more steam bath weather than any other kind. In 1952, when the Prudential Insurance Company transferred scores of employees from New Jersey to its new Southwestern Home Office in Houston, it prepared an immigrant’s guide. The question “How’s the Climate?” was answered: “To be perfectly frank about Houston’s weather, even a Texan wouldn’t brag about it in the summertime. It’s hot and it’s sticky.”

After the St. Louis Cardinals played their first games in Houston in 1962, Stan Musial said the city has only three seasons—“Summer, and then July and August.” Members of the British diplomatic service are paid an extra allowance when they serve in such equatorial places as Aruba, Burma, Indonesia, Panama, the Persian Gulf—and Houston.

Houston’s Christmases, on the other hand, are mostly mild and green, a climate’s benedictions, decorated by nature with holly, yaupon, and roses. Houston nearly got a White Christmas in 1929, when 2.3 inches of snow fell on December 21 and 22, but in fact the last White Christmas appears to have been in 1859. A legend says Houston gets really cold only once every ten years, and many big storms do come in that pattern. Of modern cold spells, the big ice show of 1951 was the most severe. From January 29 to February 3, Houston had 123 hours—more than five days and nights—of below-freezing temperatures. Most of the city’s few freezes last less than a day.