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Retama

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Everything posted by Retama

  1. Yeah, I think you're right about that, I think it was Charlie's. We used to go there before going to football games at Rice Stadium. Thanks for the correction. For some reason, the names of places I used to go to escape me.
  2. The house in the first photo you posted is my favorite, Amsterdam. I first saw it in a book about Houston (I think it was one of those Ray Miller books) and happened to pass by it one day while doubling back one afternoon.
  3. I started going to the Village in the 1970s when I could drive. I remember the Village Theater (though I never saw a movie there) and the crazy toy store that was next door. We used to eat hamburgers at Miller's Café, anyone remember that place? Loved to park on the roof. Did Miller's Café move to Clear Lake (Bay Area Blvd. and Space Center)? I remember the American Legion Post. Back in the 1980s there was a great dance club on Kirby just around the corner from the Half Price Books where my wife and I used to go. It had Go-Go dancers in cages (what was the name of that place?). For awhile there was a theater next door to the hobby shop where I saw a few plays. They had a good group of actors. The Village has really gone upscale since I used to knock around down there. I kinda miss the old place.
  4. Woah, I used to go to Record Rack all the time in the 1980s. I had no idea the place had been there since 1957. There was another great record shop on Westheimer across the street from the little Antiques Mall near Lanier Middle School. Does anyone remember what that place was called?
  5. Found this photo of the Poe Elementary blast: Is this the playground next to the school?
  6. Ah, you're right, FilioScotia, I confused Notre Dame's 1913 trip to Texas with their 1915 trip. Back in those days the football field was divided into a grid because you had to be five yards behind the line of scrimmage to pass and you could not run or scramble to throw. That's where we get the term 'gridiron' from. On the subject, does anyone know when the first football game was played in Houston? More specifically, when was the first high school game played here? Football was introduced to Texas in Galveston, so there should have been some early teams here.
  7. In those days UT and A&M played twice a season one of the games being in Houston. The 1911 Texas-TexasA&M game at West End Park resulted in a melee between students. UT students paraded at halftime with brooms meant to symbolize a "sweep" of the Farmers. The cadets thought they were mocking their military traditions and took out after them. A UT student was stabbed in the head. Texas won 24-8. UT wanted to end the series with A&M after that. The games in Houston tended to have a lot of violence and drunkeness around them that fueled what was already a nasty rivalry. In 1911 Varsity (the Longhorns) beat A&M 6-0 and a riot ensued. According to Lou Maysel's book, Here Come the Texas Longhorns, gangs of angry Aggies roamed downtown Houston looking for people wearing orange to beat up. UT broke off athletic relations with A&M after that. Likely it was because Aggie coach Charley Moran used ringers. They didn't play again until 1915 when both were in the brand new Southwest Conference. The SWC was formed, largely to heal the rift between the two universities and provide some firm rule enforcement on eligibility. So, West End Park's association with the Texas-Texas A&M game has some interesting history. Rice played Notre Dame at West End Park in 1915, the same year that the Irish (called the Ramblers back then) upset Army with the forward pass. Knute Rockne and Gus Dorias were on that ND team.
  8. My father knew Harry Kalas when he did UH football games on the radio. I had forgotten he did the sports on 11 in those days too. You can still hear his voice on NFL highlight tapes into the 1990s.
  9. Great stuff, thanks for posting it. This is as close to a time machine as we'll ever get.
  10. Historic aerials is fantastic, but I wish I could see Galveston in the 1950s. Still, you can watch the Brownwood section of Baytown fade out over time there.
  11. Hey, good stuff! I never made it to Kitirik's carousel but a friend of mine did. And, yeah, for Houston in the 1960s that cat suit was pretty racy.
  12. Here is a copy of an FBI memo on the meeting from 1961: This was obtained from this site devoted to Malcolm X's FBI files: http://www.wonderwheel.net/work/foia/
  13. This is not new information. My sources are several books and articles on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. One of them is Bruce Perry's Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America written in 1991. It notes that in late January of 1961 (Jan. 28, 1961) Malcolm X along with Jeremiah X, NOI leader in Atlanta, held a secret meeting with the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta on Elijah Muhammad's behalf, seeking the Klan's aid in obtaining land for the Nation of Islam to implement its separatist philosophy. They also discussed possible cooperation in disrupting King's efforts at integration. Present at this meeting was a KKK member who was an undercover FBI informant. Claude Andrew Clegg's book, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad also details the incident. Now, before you say that I don't have my facts straight or I'm lying, you should do more than "a tiny bit of Google research."
  14. As a graduate of Robert E. Lee High School in Baytown I can tell you they also have a Lee College there. However, though named for R.E. Lee, Lee College was always just Lee College, not Robert E. Lee College. The nickname of their athletic teams is still the Rebels. As a kid this decal and logo were everywhere: When I played Optimist Club football, we even wore the 'Angry Rebel' on our helmets. Today, this logo has just about disappeared. my old Optimist team much later changed its name from Rebels to Texans. I have noticed a trend toward giving high schools safe, innocuous names like Pasadena Memorial or Goose Creek Memorial. Blah. Earlier in the thread someone asked how whites would like going to a school named for Malcolm X. I wonder how blacks would like going to the same school knowing that Malcolm X once sat down with the KKK in Atlanta to share ideas on how the Black Muslims and the Klan could work together to disrupt the civil rights movement?
  15. The last Southwest Conference football game was played at Rice Stadium between UH and Rice U, which I find sort of ironic since Houston was the last team admitted to the conference and then after much lobbying. We went to that game, though I never got a program because some bastard bought the whole bunch of them up. After the game, some guy who won a contest went down on the field to pull a giant prop electric plug from a giant prop electric socket. When he did, all the lights went off in the stadium. In heaven Kern Tips wiped a tear from his eye.
  16. I was pretty young but I remember when they were filming Hell Fighters in Baytown. We drove out to the old Baytown-La Porte Tunnel one night to watch an explosion scene being filmed in the Evergreen/Pelly oil field area and highway 146 offered the perfect vantage point. Trouble was, everyone else in town had gone out there to see it as well. There were cars lining both sides of the highway and on both sides of the tunnel. The set could be seen pretty clearly in the distance because of the lights, but with no place to park, we just went home. Later I heard that the didn't even set off the explosion until very late that night. Whenever I watch the movie I can see that they shot a lot of scenes in Baytown. The area is easily recognizable on screen. About 20 years later they shot a Roy Scheider movie at the same location.
  17. Thanks for those terrific photos! Cook's Hoedown or Hoe-Down was a big venue for country acts in Houston. Elvis played there often as well.
  18. I used to go there in the 1980s when it was Cody's. Amanda Arnold used to sing there.
  19. Who remembers the Western Traveller restaurant on old Highway 90? Growing up in Baytown, I remember lots of folks driving out there for dinner. It had a "blue grotto room" that was fairly popular. When I played football at REL and we travelled to take on the North Forest schools (Smiley and Forest Brook), we'd stop and eat there on the way back. The place apparently burned down in the early 1980s after I left the Houston area for a time. Trouble is, I can't remember exactly where it was located. Was it in Sheldon, further east in Crosby or more west toward Houston?
  20. I drove down there as well. Looks like Hurricane Ike, Tropical Storm Allison and the floods of the 1990s have pretty much wrecked the area. Nothing left of what I remember Magnolia Gardens looking like. I'd love to see some photos if anyone can dig some out.
  21. Oh, yeah we had a County Seat and even had a Gap and both a Waldenbooks and a B. Dalton!
  22. I never bought anything there but it seemed like Benetton was everywhere back in the 1980s. They always had those "edgy" ads that were designed to hack people off.
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