Houston: The Feast Years. An Illustrated Essay

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.

Sometimes it rains and rains. And sometimes you despair that it may never rain again. Rarely does it rain a gentle rain; rarely does it rain just right. The rain in Houston falls mainly all at once. July, August, and September are the months of the hurricane season, but modern warning systems have much diminished the peril of the storms. The most destructive modern storm affecting Houston was Hurricane Carla, which struck the Texas Gulf Coast early in September, 1961.

In late fall, winter, and early spring cold winds blow down across the top of Texas, pushing fast across most of the state, sometimes reaching down into the lower Rio Grande Valley in southernmost Texas. Texans call these cold waves “northers”—blue northers or wet northers or dry northers. What distinguishes a norther from a plain cold wave is the sudden, dramatic drop in temperature, sometimes 20 to 30 degrees in two hours.

Most northers are preceded by heralds: the still, sultry air; the scent of sulphur or burning hay or charcoal; the haze, slowly, ominously obscuring the sun. Birds and beasts almost always know beforehand; often man can tell. Then, suddenly, the temperature falls and sounds break the stillness, first a low soughing of the wind, then bedlam as the fury commands the city.

Arriving in Houston in 1873, Edward King instantly experienced his first norther, “which came raving and tearing over the town.... It was glorious, exhilarating, and—icy.” The infrequent northers are confined, like the oyster, to months with an “r,” but mostly to November, December, and January.

Nothing about Houston is harder to pin down than its weather. A magazine published for employees of the Humble Oil and Refining Company’s Baytown refinery printed a full-page warning in January, 1957: “Although the weather may be warm when you go to work, it’s a good idea to take a top coat along to guard against a sudden drop in temperature.” The simultaneous variety of the state’s weather was shown by a headline on Page 1 of the Houston Post of September 11, 1955:

Cold Wave in N[orth] Texas;
Tropical Storm in Gulf

7

The brothers Augustus C. and John K. Allen, the founders of Houston, were neither heroes of the Texas revolution—they did not fight in the Battle of San Jacinto or in any other—nor were they distinguished in other ways. They were land speculators, New Yorkers who came to Texas in the summer of 1832. Augustus had just turned thirty, John was twenty-six when they bought the land for Houston.

Though the Allens’ town would become one of the leading cities of North America, though it would one day be abashed by a legend of riches, neither profited much for his pains. John Allen died in Houston two years after buying the land. Augustus lived until 1864, but he left Houston in 1850 after signing over to his wife Charlotte most of his remaining interests. Of this trio, only Charlotte was to profit from the Texas city conceived by New Yorkers. Living to a great age, she still owned Houston land when she died at her home, now the site of the Gulf Building, on August 3, 1895.

Augustus Allen lived always on the verge of success. In poor health most of his life, he was early a bookworm, a taste which may have led to his first job, when he was seventeen, as a mathematics teacher in upstate New York. In 1827, when he was twenty-one, he moved to New York City, where he was first a bookkeeper and then a partner in H. and H. Canfield Company. Five years later he and John, who had joined him in New York in 1829, moved to Texas, eventually settling in Nacogdoches. With other speculators, the pair dealt in Mexican land titles. They began their Houston venture soon after Texas won its independence.

Little seems to be known of Augustus’ life during the fifteen years he lived in Houston. No doubt that owes less to mystery than to the prosaic nature of selling real estate. But some mystery does surround his separation from Charlotte in 1850.

The land for Houston had been bought with money Mrs. Allen had inherited from her father, and in time she became dissatisfied with her husband’s management of the property. They separated but did not get a divorce, “both husband and wife pledging to keep the details of their troubles secret,” Amelia W. Williams has written. They seem to have succeeded.

Ill, and surely once more disappointed in his luck, Augustus moved again, this time to Mexico, where he and the Mexican leader Benito Juarez became friends. In 1852 he was appointed United States consul for the Pacific port of Tehuantepec, and in 1858 he was also given the same post at the port of Minatitlan on the Gulf side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. During these years he and a Briton developed what is thought to have been a successful shipping concern.

In 1864, apparently realizing that he was critically ill, he went to Washington to resign his consulships. There he died of pneumonia on June 11, less than a month before his fifty-ninth birthday. He died without ever returning to the city he and his brother conceived. Augustus was buried in Brooklyn; only one of the city’s founders, John Allen, is buried in Houston.

The area now covered by Houston was first settled by Anglo-Americans before 1826, when a townsite was surveyed for John Richardson Harris, who named the place Harrisburg. An upstate New Yorker who was a member of Stephen F. Austin’s first Texas colony, Harris was granted a league of land—4,428 acres—at the junction of Buffalo and Brays Bayous. One of the first steam sawmills in Texas was built at Harrisburg in 1829, and by 1836 the hamlet also had perhaps twenty houses, most of which were log cabins.

Harrisburg might have succeeded, and what was to become one of the principal American cities might have been called Harrisburg rather than Houston, but for at least two events besides the death of Harris in 1829. On April 16, 1836, Santa Anna, in hot pursuit of Sam Houston and the Texas army, rode into the almost deserted hamlet and burned it. The second event, the decision of those other upstate New Yorkers, the Allens, to start a town at the most interior point of year-round navigation in Texas, joined with the first to overcome Harrisburg’s ambitions.

The Allens and others had eyed the Harrisburg area with shrewd expectations. It was early seen that Buffalo Bayou would become important as an exit route for cotton and other crops grown in the rich agricultural lands along the Brazos River. The Allens first tried to buy the Harrisburg property. But its title was involved in fraudulent claims made against Harris’s estate and they chose a site a few miles farther up the bayou. On August 24 and 26, 1836, they bought the bulk of the John Austin survey, paying $5,000 for half a league and $1 an acre for a league.

Thus the original townsite—6,642 acres south of Buffalo Bayou—cost the Allens $9,428. A Main Street corner a few blocks south of the original city was sold in 1940 for $1,150,000; seven years later, or 110 years after the Allens sold the first lots in Houston, Woolworth bought the corner for $3,050,000—or at the rate of $2000 a front inch.

On September 30, 1836, the Allens advertised their nonexistent town in the Telegraph and Texas Register, saying Houston would become “beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas.” In October, when Houston was still but a prairie, John Allen made a proposal to the congress of the Republic of Texas, then meeting at Columbia. Move the government to Houston, he said, and the Allens would build a capitol for it. “Capitalists are interested in this town,” the brothers’ petition to congress said of the vacant land, and congress voted to move the government to Houston temporarily. The Allens, having made their town the capital of the republic before the town existed, began building in fact what had succeeded in fancy.

They had already hired Gail and Thomas Borden, publishers of the Telegraph and Texas Register and also surveyors, to stake out the town. Gail, a notable figure in early Texas history, would later make his fortune by inventing a process for condensing milk. But the Bordens were busy in Columbia, where their newspaper was then published, and most of the surveying was done by Moses Lapham, a young Ohioan who worked for the Bordens. He began staking out the town early in October, 1836. When he finished seven weeks later, the Bordens announced in their newspaper, “We have at length, and almost without the use of mechanical instruments, completed a plan for the City of HOUSTON....”

The historian Joe B. Frantz could find no record of what the Allens paid Lapham or the Bordens for surveying Houston. “From the extant record,” Frantz wrote, “it would appear that Lapham received only a bad case of chills, for which he drank ‘heavy draugts (sic) of black pepper and sassafras tea.’”

Two years later, while surveying near San Antonio for Samuel Maverick, Lapham was scalped by Indians. Like one of the city’s founders, the man who laid out Houston is buried elsewhere, in San Antonio.

The original city was laid out from Buffalo Bayou on the north to, but not including, Texas Avenue on the south, and on the west from the bend in the bayou behind the Music Hall to, but not including, Crawford Street on the east. The east-west streets were laid out roughly parallel with the bayou and thus do not lie on a true east-west line but are many degrees off the compass.

Writing in 1958, Andrew Forest Muir showed that January 19, 1837, marks the beginning of Houston. “With the exception of one lot that had been sold on January 1, 1837, the first purchases were made on January 19, which is probably the most reasonable date to mark the beginning of the city of Houston as such,” he wrote. “Early in January, 1837, the town was so devoid of an existence that Francis Richard Lubbock with a party in a yawl passed the townsite without realizing it.”

Even in the beginning the property was astonishingly valuable, so much so that some land was sold in 12½ foot lots. Indeed, lots are said to have been sold for as much as $10,000, but Muir found nothing during the town’s first six months to substantiate that. Examining all the conveyances of record through June 20, 1837, he found only one lot that sold for $5,000 and another for $3,000. Most of them sold for no more than $500. But $500 was a considerable price for a small piece of virtually unimproved village land in 1837, even in a new republic’s temporary capital.

The government moved to Houston in May, 1837, before the building to house it was finished, and the city was incorporated in June. Houston remained the capital of the republic until January, 1840, and it was again the capital, briefly, in 1842. Muddy and beset by recurring yellow fever epidemics, it grew slowly after the capital was removed to Austin.

One of the best early descriptions of Houston is that of Mary Austin Holley, who saw the town in December, 1837: “The Main street of this city of a year extends from the landing foot of Main Street into the prairie.... On this main street are two large hotels, 2 stories, with galleries (crowded to overflowing) several stores 2 stories—painted white—one block of eleven stores (rent $500 each)—some 2 story dwelling houses—& then the capitol ... painted peach blossom about ¼ mile from the landing. Other streets, parallel, & at right angles, are built on here and there, but chiefly designated by stakes. One story dwellings are scattered in the edge of the timber which forms an amphitheatre round the prairie.”

The early Houston seems to have been distinguished for its wickedness. In January, 1838, the diarist John Hunter Herndon called it “the greatest sink of disipation (sic) and vice that modern times have known.” After living in Houston two and a half months longer, he wrote. “What a den of villains must there not be here?”

Francis C. Sheridan, a young Irishman in the British diplomatic service, saw Houston in 1840, when he wrote: “The most uncivilised place in Texas is I believe Houston the former Capital—I heard and read of more outrage and blackguardism in that town ... than throughout the whole of Texas.”

However all that may have been, the early Houston shared one characteristic with the city of a century and a quarter later. Gustav Dresel, a young German who came to Texas in 1838, wrote in the autumn of 1839: “Nine months only had gone by since I had left Houston, but how different did it all look! I discovered more than twice the number of houses. Whole squares had been added, and I noticed new streets.” The population then numbered between two and three thousand.

Early Houstonians had the good fortune to be spared the Indian raids and massacres that harassed some of frontier Texas. But Indians were no novelty in Houston. On March 18, 1838, Herndon wrote, “Many Indians in town who made much noise. A squaw drunk, the first I ever saw.” Muir has written, “To the best of the writer’s knowledge, there were never any Indian raids, battles or massacres in the Houston area during the time Anglo-Americans have lived here. Certainly there were Indians, however, for as late as 1846 a priest from St. Vincent’s [Roman Catholic] Church baptized a crowd of them.”

The city grew slowly until the Civil War, when Houstonians voted overwhelmingly for the secession of Texas from the United States. During the war Houston was a lair for blockade runners, and on January 1, 1863, using two small vessels fortified with bales of cotton, it mounted a sea attack down Buffalo Bayou and helped recapture Galveston Island from Union forces that had seized the island three months earlier. In the same year Houston became the headquarters for the Confederate district of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The period of Reconstruction lasted from June 20, 1865, when Houston was occupied by Union troops, until January, 1874. The city’s growth between then and World War I owed first to its importance as a railroad center and then to the Texas oil boom.

Each of four wars, and even a fifth catastrophe, served Houston well. Its beginnings arose from the Texans’ victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. Though its people suffered to some extent from the Civil War and much more from Reconstruction, Houston got an economic stimulus from the presence of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi headquarters. The city prospered during Reconstruction because many who abandoned the South moved to Texas. The greatest proportional growth of the city’s population, 111.4 per cent, came in the decade of the 1920s, largely a result of the impetus given by World War I. World War II led to the most successful period in Houston’s history. The city took a decisive lead in its long competition with Galveston after the Galveston flood and tidal wave of September 8, 1900, in which an estimated six thousand lives were lost and half the city was destroyed.

The city’s most effective leaders in the first half of the twentieth century were Jesse H. Jones, a Secretary of Commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Oscar F. Holcombe, mayor of the city for eleven two-year terms between 1920 and 1957. Its most gifted, and anonymous, leader was Will C. Hogg, a son of James Stephen Hogg, the great governor of modern Texas. In 1926, at a personal cost of more than $50,000, Hogg organized the Forum of Civics with these words from Pericles as its motto: “No Athenian should ever confess that he neglected public services for the sake of his private fortune.” Hogg, an altruist and a man of wealth, died too soon to fulfill his dreams for the city.

Four benefactors of indelible importance were William Marsh Rice, who endowed Rice University; George Henry Hermann, an eccentric who was born in Houston in 1843 and later gave the city a great hospital, Hermann Park, and Hermann Square downtown; and M. D. Anderson and Hugh Roy Cullen, the philanthropists.

Houston’s good fortune during its first century and its extraordinary rise afterward have tempted some to call it a city of destiny. But the cliché signifies an irrevocable fate in spite of man’s successes or failures. And man, not fate, decisively controls the fortunes of cities.

How is one city more or less than another? What is Houston compared with such whole or complete cities as Amsterdam and San Francisco? Only a prophet could say, for this hopelessly vigorous city is incomplete, unfinished; it cannot yet be judged as a whole city. Until then, Houstonians possess the rare excitement of living in a city during the springtime of what may become greatness, a city budding and shooting with the extravagance of nature’s annual renewal, a city in its feast years.

A HOUSTON VADE MECUM

Houston, an inland port city of southeastern Texas, on the Gulf Coastal Plain, is joined by the Houston Ship Channel with the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles distant, at Galveston. The ship channel joins the Port of Houston with the Intracoastal Canal.

Houston’s corporate limits of 349.4 square miles, including the 22 square miles of Lake Houston and a canal leading to it, surround fourteen of twenty-eight municipalities in its metropolitan area, Harris County, of which Houston is the county seat. The county’s total area is 1,747 square miles, of which the land area is 1,711 square miles.

The city’s lowest altitude is 25 feet; the highest is 75 feet. The county’s altitude runs from close to sea level to 310 feet near Tomball, on the north.

The annual normal rainfall is 45.3 inches.

The annual average temperature is 70.0° F.

The excess of births over deaths in the metropolitan area is around 24,000 a year, and each year around 21,000 more persons move to Houston than move away from it. Thus the metropolitan area’s population increases by an estimated 45,000 persons a year—a conservative figure.

Of the 1,243,158 persons living in the metropolitan area at the time of the 1960 census, 634,522 were females and 608,636 were males, giving females a lead of 25,886.

In 1960, 94.5 per cent of the population was urban, 5.5 per cent was rural.

The density of population was 726.6 persons a square mile.

Work in Progress

Five important Houston building projects, in various stages of development late in 1962, totaled a minimum completion cost of $347,500,000. Construction of a sixth, a new City Auditorium to be built on the site of the old one, which was opened in 1910, will begin in 1963 or 1964; money for the new auditorium was given by Houston Endowment, Inc., a foundation created by Jesse H. Jones.

The eventual cost of Cullen Center, which is being built on a six-block site downtown, will be more than $100,000,000. The first two buildings, which were nearing completion late in 1962, are a twenty-five-story office building and the Hotel America. Cullen Center eventually will include an office building of fifty stories or more, two high-rise apartment towers, and other structures.

The other projects, and their estimated final costs, are an air conditioned domed stadium for baseball and football games, $20,000,000; the Houston Intercontinental Airport, called Jetero, $125,000,000; the Manned Spacecraft Center, $100,000,000; and the Houston Museum of Natural Science and Planetarium, $2,500,000.

FOOTNOTES

INDEX

NOTE: Page numbers in boldface type refer to pictures and captions. All other page numbers refer to the text.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Allen, Augustus C., 39-41

Allen, Charlotte, 39, 40

Allen, John K., 39, 41, 42

Alley Theatre, 26

American Magazine, quoted, 3

Anderson, Clayton & Company, 18

Anderson, M. D., 46

Ashford, Gerald, 10

B

Bach Society, J. S., of Houston, 26

Barbirolli, Sir John, 26

Baylor University College of Medicine, 26

Bedell, W. D., 35

Binford, T., 9n.

Blaffer, Robert Lee, family, 26

Blanda, George, 28

Borden, Gail, 42

Borden, Thomas, 42

Buffalo Bayou, 22-23

Burke, Jack, 28

C

Cannon, Billy, 28

Cawthon, Pete, 28

Chillman, James, 26

Clopper, J. C., 22

Contemporary Arts Association, 26

Contemporary Music Society of Houston, 26

Continental Oil Company, 17

Cotton Kingdom, The, quoted, 14

Cullen Center, 48

Cullen, Hugh Roy, 46

Cutrer, Lewis, 34

D

Dali, Salvador, 5

Dallas News, quoted, 6, 23

Dean, Dizzy, 28

Demaret, Jimmy, 28

Dowling, Richard W., 15, 46

Dresel, Gustav, 45

Du Pont (E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company), 17

Dyer, Eddie, 28

E

Ebony Magazine, quoted, 14

El Paso Natural Gas Company, 17

Evans, Arthur C., 3

F

Fennerty, John M., 15

First Methodist Church of Houston, 43

Frantz, Joe B., 42

Frenchtown, 13

G

Glassell, A. C., Jr., 28

Graham, Billy, 30

Great South, The, quoted, 14

H

Harper’s Magazine, quoted, 34

Harris, John Richardson, 41

Harrisburg, 41-42

Hermann, George Henry, 46

Herndon, John Hunter, 45

Hess, Wilbur, 28

Hilton, Conrad, 10

Hofheinz, Roy H., 11

Hogg, Miss Ima, 26

Hogg, James Stephen, 46

Hogg, Will C., 46

Holcombe, Oscar F., 46

Holiday Magazine, quoted, 1

Holley, Mary Austin, 44

Hopkins, Sam (Lightnin’), 8

Houston, aviation, early, 22-23;

character of city, 6-9, 24-25;

Chinese population of, 13;

Civil War and Reconstruction periods, 45;

cycles of growth, 15-16;

domed sports stadium, 48;

economy of, 15-23;

German population of, 13;

history of first years, 39-45;

Indians in, 45;

“M” Day (July 3, 1954), 18-22;

millionaire legend, 10-13;

Negro population of, 14;

place in history, 6;

Port of, 22-23;

Post Office, 16, 17;

proportion of natives in, 14;

sports, 28;

statistics, population and other, 47;

type and composition of population, 13-14;

weather, climate, 35-38

Houston Academy, 29

Houston Classic Invitational Golf Tournament, 28

Houston Colt .45s (National Baseball League), 28

Houston Grand Opera Association, 26

Houston Intercontinental Airport (Jetero), 48

Houston International Airport, 37

Houston Little Theatre, 26

Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, 25

Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 26

Houston Museum of Natural Science and Planetarium, 26, 48

[Houston] Music Guild, 26

Houston Oilers (American Football League), 28

Houston Post, quoted, 25, 38

Houston Ship Channel, 19, 22-23

Houston Symphony Orchestra, 26

Houston Turn-Verein, 13

Houstoun, Matilda Charlotte, 2

Humble Oil and Refining Company, 17,

Hutton, Frank R., Sr., 14

I

Ilseng, Grant, 28

J

Jones, Jesse H., 33, 45, 48

Juarez, Benito, 40

K

Kayser, Paul, 17

Kellum-Noble House, 24

Kennedy, John F., 3

King, Edward, 12, 13, 14, 23

Knox, J. Armoy, 14

Kress, Samuel, 26

L

Lapham, Moses, 42

Ledbetter, Huddie (Lead Belly), 8

London Daily Mail, quoted, 1

London Times, quoted, 1

Lords’ Cycle Club, 11

Lubbock, Francis Richard, 44

M

Manned Spacecraft Center, 3, 4, 48

Marks, E. H., 30, 35

Maverick, Samuel, 42

McCarthy, Glenn H., 10

McCasland, B. C., Jr., 18

McCormick, R. D. (Mack), 6

Mewhinney, Hubert, 25

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 26

Monsanto Chemical Company, 17

Morris, J. R., 31

Muir, Andrew Forest, 15, 23, 42, 44, 45

Musial, Stan, 36

N

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 4

New York Times, quoted, 1

O

Olmsted, Frederick Law, 14

On Leong Chinese Merchants Association, 13

P

Pin Oak Charity Horse Show, 28

Playhouse Theatre, 26

Prudential Insurance Company, 35

R

Rice-Cherry House, 24

Rice Hotel, 33

Rice University, 11, 26, 46

Rice, William Marsh, 46

River Oaks Country Club Tennis Tournament, 28

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 34

S

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, quoted, 3

St. Thomas University, 28

Salt Grass Trail, 8-9, 25

Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de, 41

Satilla, the, 19

Scribner’s Monthly, 12

Shamrock Hilton Hotel, 10

Sheridan, Francis C., 45

Smith, Al, 34

Smith, Robert E., 11

Soviet Encyclopedia, quoted, 1

Standard Blue Book of Texas, The, quoted, 25

Stokowski, Leopold, 26

Straus, Edith A., 26

Straus, Percy S., 26

Street, James, 3

Sweeney and Coombs Opera House, 27

Sweeney, James Johnson, 26

Sweet, Alexander E., 14

T

Telegraph and Texas Register, 42

Tennessee Gas Transmission Company, 17

Texas Medical Center, 26, 28

Texas National Bank Building, 36, 43

Texas Southern University, 26

Theatre, Inc., 26

U

University of Houston, 26

V

Van Alstyne, William, 31

Vance, Nina, 26

Vick’s Park, 34

W

Walker, L. L., 22

Williams, Amelia W., 40

White, William S., 34

Wolcott, Fred, 28