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FilioScotia

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Everything posted by FilioScotia

  1. I've never heard of a heliport in downtown Houston. Tillman Fertitta wanted to have one on the roof of the old fire station #1 he bought and turned into that big aquarium/restaurant, but Houston City Council wouldn't allow it. They said it would be too dangerous to have helicopters coming and going from a heli-pad just a few feet from a busy freeway. One of the few examples of common sense I've seen from the Houston City Council.
  2. In the mid 1950s I was a member of the Houston Youth Symphony Boy's Choir, and we rehearsed every week in the City Auditorium's huge vaulted lobby of the 2nd floor mezzanine. Acoustically it was fantastic. I also wonder if Nena's photo is of the Houston City Auditorium, the one that was at Texas and Louisiana Streets. I was there every week for several years, and I remember when you came in the front doors off Texas Avenue into the main lobby, there were more huge doors opening into the auditorium and facing the stage on the other side of the hall. I see no sign of those lobby doors in that old photo. The second floor mezzanine lobby also had big doors leading to the mezzanine seats, and I see no sign of those doors either. Could this photo be of another large auditorium somewhere? Many cities had big public halls like that one.
  3. The story I heard at the time was that Savitch was arrested when she physically attacked a Brazoria County Deputy Constable who had taken her camera-man's 16mm film camera away from him. She jumped on his back piggy back style. Another deputy constable pulled her down and slapped cuffs on her. She was placed in a nearby police car, but she wasn't taken to jail because all the lawmen there were busy handling crowd control and security around that small airport, and nobody had time to drive Savitch to the jail in Angleton. So they let her go on her promise to behave herself. I was a news anchor for KPRC Radio at the time, and that's the story I heard from one of our reporters who was there.
  4. About five years ago we had an extensive discussion of that old airport here on the HAIF. Here's a link to a great aerial photo. You're looking east along Hwy 90, or South Main. http://houstonfreeways.com/images/sam_houston_airport_1947-11-00_overview_complete.jpg Here's a link to a website devoted to old abandandoned airfields, including the old Sam Houston Airport. http://www.members.tripod.com/airfields_freeman/TX/Airfields_TX_HoustonS.htm#samhouston
  5. I can't remember the address, or the street, but the original and first Memorial Baptist Hospital was torn down in the 70s to make room for several skyscrapers. I THINK it was in the 1100 or 1200 block of Lamar, two or three blocks from city hall. By the 70s, the Memorial Baptist Hospitals were spreading to the outer reaches of Houston. There was NW Memorial, SW Memorial, Southeast Memorial, and the downtown facility, which was old, outdated, and landlocked. It had no room for expansion, so they sold the property to developers. Here's a photo of it. http://mcgovern.library.tmc.edu/data/www/html/texascoll/post/cities/houston/hous_12.htm
  6. They show him in that video. They said he was the "voice" of KHOU, which I assume means he was probably the one that announced the station ID's, etc.. Jerry Dale was indeed "the voice" of KHOU. He had the job known then as "booth announcer." He sat in a small closet-sized booth in the TV control room where he voiced station breaks and other "live" copy. Jerry was also the designated substitute as needed for Sid Lasher, and he often did the weather himself on weekends. I don't think TV stations use a "live" booth announcer anymore. Everything is now computerized, and all the station breaks are prerecorded into sound files which the master computer plays on the air at the programmed time.
  7. Sid Lasher was one of the most popular TV personalities Houston has ever had. He wasn't a meteorologist. Never pretended to be one. He just explained the weather and the forecast in words we ordinary folk could understand. His warm and cordial on-air style endeared him to everybody. He died one night in 1971 between the 6pm and 10pm news. Ron Stone told me an interesting story about the guy who replaced Lasher. Stone was anchoring at KHOU then, and a guy named Jerry Dale was Lasher's backup and weekend weather guy. When Lasher died, Dale was promoted into the full time weather job. Stone told me that Dale really loved Lasher as a friend and father-figure, and he was so grief-stricken by his death he had a "nervous breakdown." Today we call that a "deep depression." Worse, Dale believed with all his heart that Lasher's spirit was still roaming the halls and studios at KHOU. He ended up leaving KHOU not very long after that, and I heard from one source at the time that he went into therapy. But that story has been debunked, so I have no idea where Dale went or what happened to him.
  8. Harry Kalas had a career most radio play-by-play announcers can only dream of. For a long time he was the #2 man on the Houston Astros radio and TV broadcast team, with Gene Elston and Loel Passe. Until 1969. That was the year Astros Publicity Manager Bill Giles moved to Philadelphia for a major move up. Giles' father -- National League President Warren Giles -- was about to retire, but on his way out the door, he persuaded the Phillies to hire his son Bill to be General Manager of the Phillies. Two years later in 1971 Kalas's Astros contract came up for renewal, but Giles made him a better offer and hired him to lead the Phillies broadcast team. The rest is history. Philadelphia is also the home of NFL Films, so Harry was a natural for doing many NFL films voice-over narrations, behind "The Voice of God" John Facenda. Harry moved into the first chair at NFL films when Facenda died in 1984. Yes indeed. Harry was one of the great ones.
  9. This is a reply to my own posting, with more information about Amanda Arnold's ex husband Jimmy Carter. I've learned that he was a fair to middling singer and entertainer, and a working television news reporter and producer. He and Amanda were made for each other.
  10. Wow. That promo is a real "trip" back in time. Incidentally, the guy singing the song and showing up on camera with her was her husband, a small time country singer named Jimmy Carter. Amanda sang with his group for a time in the 70s, and she would often sing with them at some Houston area night spots. I don't know if they're still married or not. I liked Amanda doing the news. She wasn't one of the perky plastic phonies that were taking over TV news, and for me at least, she came across as "real". I liked the little wave she always gave at the end of the newscast. Amanda now makes her living as a TV and media consultant. She has her own consulting firm in Dothan, Alabama, and by all appearances, she's doing very well. http://amandacom.com/ Your posting inspired me to do some digging of my own. Take a look at this promo photo of the nightly news crew at a TV station in Cleveland Ohio. It says it was in 1980, the year before she moved to Houston. There's another familiar face in this photo. http://neohiotvmemories.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/a-scrapbook-of-cleveland-tv-memories-3/doug-adair-amanda-arnold-tom-ryther-sports-al-roker-1980/
  11. What a shame. I am 90 percent sure that this C.W. Abercrombie was the father of Navy Ensign William W. Abercrombie, who was decorated - posthumously - for heroism early in WWII. The Navy immediately put his name on a Destroyer Escort that was under construction at the shipyards in Orange. The USS Abercrombie was launched in 1944, and christened by his mother, Mrs. C.W. Abercrombie. The Abercrombie served in the Pacific theater through the end of the war. In 1946, Abercrombie was decommissioned, and put in the mothball fleet in San Diego. She remained in the inactive mothball fleet until 1968, when she was towed out to sea and used for target practice. Useful to the very end. BTW, I have found no evidence that C.W. Abercrombie had any relation to James Abercrombie, the longtime President of Cameron Iron in Houston.
  12. I agree, it does look newer than 1942. Looks more like mid 50s. Lawyer Oscar Nipper is an old friend who started his legal practice in the mid 1950s. In the late 50s he and a lawyer friend, Jim Knox, formed the firm of Nipper & Knox and moved into that building. I don't know when Knox left and moved on, but Oscar practiced law in that building until he retired sometime in the 1990s. Oscar's wife Bennie Nipper is a retired and legendary HISD speech and drama teacher who taught a number of people who went on to professional acting careers.(She never taught at Bellaire HS, the cradle of a number of well known actors.) She taught at the old San Jacinto High in midtown and at Jones HS on the southeast side. Outside her school work, she has also directed plays and musicals in Houston area community theaters for more than 50 years. Pasadena Little Theatre, Clear Creek Country Theatre, Theatre of the Mainland and some others. In the late 1980s, she and Oscar bought that old boarded-up movie house on Hwy 3 in Dickinson, completely rehabbed it and adapted it into a theatre for live stage plays. They named it the Harbour Playhouse. http://www.harbourplayhouse.com/ Bennie and Oscar are getting on in years, but they're both still actively in charge of it and putting on a season of plays and shows every year. The Playhouse also offers classes for aspiring actors of all ages. And Bennie teaches some of them. They're both old and dear friends and I wish I could see them more often than I do.
  13. You don't remember Big Humphrey's Pizza? It was on that big circle at Park Place and Broadway for many years. It was originally a hamburger joint, but they added pizza in 1960. The pizzas were so good and popular the place became a Pizza parlor. My memory has it on the southwest corner of that circle, on the south side of the freeway. It was owned by one of the most interesting guys Houston has ever had. In the 1930s, pro wrestler Joe Vitale was the model for the Big Humphrey Pennyworth character in the old Joe Palooka comic strip. Big Humphrey proved to be such a popular character that the cartoonist, Ham Fisher, let Vitale use the name Big Humphrey professionally. He was hugely popular on the wrestling circuit, and he made enough money to open five Big Humphrey restaurants around Houston, including the one on Park Place. You can read the whole Joe Vitale/Big Humphrey story on their website http://bighpizza.com/?page_id=17 There's only one Big Humphrey's now, in Pearland, where it is Big Humphrey's Pizza and Italian Restaurant. http://bighpizza.com/ Joe Vitale died in 1977, but his son and granddaughter own and run the Pearland restaurant. Here's what the Houston Press food critic wrote about it. "...Taking in Big Humphrey's King of the Hill ambience, customers might wonder about the food. But all they need to do is sit down and order. Jasper Vitale uses recipes left by his grandmother, who was born and raised in Sicily. They supplement Grandma's Italian dishes with good ol' American and Tex-Mex favorites, as if to concede that truckers do not live by the meatball alone. Those who want wine with their pasta will have to bring it themselves."
  14. The law didn't "bar" adults only complexes. It prohibited discrimination against families, who were, and still are, having a hard time finding decent apartments to rent. It's still hard because apsrtment owners found a loophole in this law, and they used it to keep their complexes pretty much free of people with kids. The law just said the apartments couldn't discriminate against families, but it didn't require complexes to have anything that would make families want to live there. Owners who wanted to continue attracting adults with no kids took out all the amenities. No pool, no play area or common area for recreation of any sort. Nobody with kids wants to live in a complex that has nothing to "enhance the experience" of living there.
  15. This story just won't go away until all the bodies are identified. http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/pasadena/news/article_ad3b368d-11ee-553d-b715-2cb0bff09844.html
  16. As I recall, AppleTree was started in 1988 when some former Safeway executives bought about a hundred greater Houston area Safeway stores to start a new chain of their own. I remember stories that said it was "Employee Owned", and we all remember how "successful" it was. The owners filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992 and started selling off its stores to various competitors. The last Houston AppleTree store closed in 1997. The last of ALL the AppleTree stores were in Bryan and they were sold in 2009.
  17. Yes they are the same family. The Weingarten supermarket chain started with one store in 1901, and by the 1980s it had grown to more than a hundred stores in Texas and four neighboring states. In 1948, the family founded a commercial real estate enterprise they named Weingarten Markets Realty to acquire property for its supermarkets. It later became Weingarten Realty Investment - WRI - and it expanded to developing shopping centers. In 1980, the family divested its supermarkets to focus on its relationships with retailers, including other supermarkets, drug stores, value-oriented stores and others. At least one member of the Weingarten family has been very much in the news in recent years. Lea Weingarten Fastow, the wife of former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow, went to federal prison for her role in the financial shenanigans that caused Enron's downfall.
  18. Not quite, but almost. James Bond was just one of the personalities created by a talented DJ named Ben Schwartzman. It was of course inspired by the extreme popularity of the James Bond movie series which was in high gear with one hit film after another. Schwartzman's "English" accent wasn't very good, but it was passable for Houston. The "Bond" show lasted until late 1966. When "Bond" left, KILT used fill-in DJ's for a time. Then a new DJ named Alex Bennett showed up in the morning slot, and he was completely different from "Bond". They were in fact the same guy - Ben Schwartzman, finally getting the chance to be himself. Alex Bennett was and still is a damn good DJ. So good he left KILT about a year later in '67 to look for greener pastures. He's still at it today, doing his show on Sirius and XM Satellite Radio. Here's a link to his website: http://www.radiofreejack.com/ When Bennett left, station owner Gordon Maclendon KILT GM Dickie Rosenfeld decided to install a two-man morning show. So they hired Mack Hudson from a Beaumont station, and teamed him with Paul Menard from KLIF in Dallas, named them Hudson and Harrigan and sent them to KILT. The original pair held down the morning show till the early 70s. After they took the last train to the coast in the mid 70s, Mark Stevens and Jim Pruett became H&H.
  19. It would be worth it to ask the local TV stations for permission to use video of some of their news coverage. They might allow it IF, as you say, it's for educational and non-commercial purposes. At most, they would only ask that you identify where the video came from. Give it a shot. It's worth a try.
  20. Yes that is another possibility. I think we agree there is a "myth" about a Civil War battle somewhere in west or north Harris County. Like most myths, there's a kernel of truth somewhere in it. And I also think we agree that in all probability, it was a minor neighborhood fight between one or more unreconstructed rebels and one or more unionists. In the telling and retelling over the decades, it grew into a full scale Civil War battle.
  21. I'm with you, but, it's worthwhile to remember that the surrender at Appomattox only ended the fighting between the Union and Confederate armies. For months, even years, after April of 1865, the war continued all over the south on an "unofficial" basis between scattered Unionists and scattered Seceshes. They didn't stop hating and killing each other just because Lee and Grant agreed to end it. In Texas, there were any number of people who never supported Secession. In fact I'm proud to say I live in an East Texas County that voted overwhelmingly against it. Where is all this going? We know there are no records of an actual battle in Harris County. But I believe it's probable that at some point after 1865, there might have been a noteworthy feud and gunfight between some unregenerate unreconstructed Confederates and some Unionists. We know a large number of German immigrants lived in the area now known as Bear Creek and the Addicks Reservoir, and they never supported Secession. I'm theorizing that a drunk former Confederate picked a fight with one of those Germans one night. It led to shooting, and one or more people were killed. Over time as the story spread, and was told and retold, and amplified, it became a full scale Civil War battle. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
  22. For those who're wondering where the mural is going, it will be either the Wyeth-Hurd Museum in Santa Fe New Mexico, or the Hurd La Rinconada Gallery and Guest Ranch in San Patricio New Mexico. The Hurd and Wyeth families control both. Here's a link to the Museum: http://wyethhurd.com/index.html Homes at the guest ranch are open to the public for short term rentals. And yes they are pricey. But it's an incredibly beautiful place to spend a few days, or a week, or two or three. http://www.wyethartists.com/guest-homes/guest-homes.htm
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