FilioScotia

Policies are changed all the time. I'm willing to believe -- that in 1938 -- the government had a firm policy against naming things after living people. That policy has obviously changed. Count me as one of those who doesn't like putting names of living people on things that will be around long after they're gone. I've never believed it's a good idea, but, the government doesn't ask me for advice anymore. Anyway, I got my information from the website created and maintained by the Houston Aeronautical Heritage Society, the group that's restoring the airport's original 1940 terminal building. http://www.1940airterminal.com/ Click on "Houston's Aviation History Timeline" on the left side of the page. And while I'm on the subject, I'm asking everybody here to check out that website. The Society is raffling off an antique 1947 Cessna 140 this weekend. There's still time to get in on it. And if you've never been to that wonderful old building, you owe it to yourself to check out a real piece of real Houston history.

I'm almost a hundred percent sure that the bayou wasn't channelized with the concrete banking until some years after the Corll/Henley murders. So if there are bodies buried there, they're under that concrete.

In July 1938, after setting a new speed record flying his Lockheed 14 Super Electra around the world, Howard Hughes flew to Houston for a 3 day celebration. During a banquet at the Rice Hotel, the City announced that the recently opened Houston Municipal Airport would be renamed the Howard Hughes Municipal Airport. A few months later, it was learned that the airport would not be eligible for Federal funding if it was named after a living person. So the name was changed back to Houston Municipal Airport, and that was the end of that.

I love the Internet. I have just learned something I never knew about Houston and local history. I Thank you. I never encountered an "Humble Camp", but I did live in a what I would call a "Phillips 66 Camp" in Old Ocean for a brief time in the early 50s. My father worked at Dow Chemical in Freeport for about 8 months in 1950 and 51, and the only place he could find for us to live was a housing project right next to the Phillips Refinery in Old Ocean, about 20 miles from Freeport. I learned later that Phillips built the project for its employees during WWII, but opened it to the general public after the war. Believe me. That place made the old Allen Parkway Village/San Felipe Courts look like a high rent district.

Humble camps? I wish I had an answer for you, but I'm now curious to know what an "Humble camp" was, and how someone could be raised in one. I've lived in Houston most of my nearly 70 years and I've never heard that term before. Can you enlighten me?

My reaction to his article was different from yours. For me, he came across as still a bit traumatized by the experience, and bewildered that he can't find anyone who can explain why it was done. Admittedly, swimming pools are probably a thing of the past at many public schools. Liability insurance costs alone would seem to militate against them. ALTHOUGH, a good many high schools have them. Recall a student drowned in the pool at Westside High School just last month. And that's a fairly new school.

Whether Kaplan started this discussion or not, my point is that as an adult who is no doubt in his 50s, it's long past time for him to get over the things that embarrassed him when he was a kid. Earth to Kaplan: It was NO BIG DEAL.

I suspect David Kaplan is the same guy who started this whole conversation a long time back. Countless kids who went to Houston schools in the 40s, 50s and early 60s had no problem with swimming in the nude at junior high school, and if they did have a problem with it they kept it to themselves, and they don't sit around whining about it now the way this guy Kaplan is doing. I'm sorry he was embarrassed, but he needs to get over it. Good grief.

I can't wait to see this stuff. Read about it here http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5851165.html

Some time back, in a discussion of the old red light district, someone was kind enough to post a very old map of downtown Houston that showed the location of that old baseball field. I recall that it was just east of Heiner, on the other side of the Pierce Elevated, where it does that big long dog leg curve around that Hotel. My best calculation, looking at that old map, is that the ground where those old teams once played baseball is now covered by that hotel and the Leland Federal Bldg.

The only "building" now standing at Shepherd and Buffalo Bayou is St. Thomas High School. I'm more inclined to go by those coordinates that place it a few blocks to the northwest of that spot. That's where Google Earth puts the coordinates. There is, after all, an open space there that could be the site of an old cemetery. Google Maps are known for their lack of precision. I'll check it out on my way home this afternoon

How about some coordinates? Latitude 29

Hey WestU...nice to see your name in these spaces again. You're right about the history of that orphans home, but it's a somewhat complicated history, because today's Burnett-Bayland Home is the result of several relocations, mergers and ownership transfers over more than a hundred years. Here's some information on that from the archives of the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department. (HCJPD) Here's a direct link to the full archive. http://www.hctx.net/cmpdocuments/20/findin...uvenilecr43.pdf On May 19, 1914, Harris County Commissioners Court approved the construction of a girls' home in Bellaire, to be known as the Harris County Training School for Girls1. Ethel Claxton and Mary Burnett were hired to be the school's Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent, respectively, on August 1, 1914. On September 26, the home was opened and ready for occupancy. The home filled rapidly. During the Twentieth Anniversary Celebration, Claxton noted that the institution cared for 200 girls in four houses. The school was originally intended to educate both dependents and delinquents, but by 1952, only delinquent girls were living at the facility. The Bayland Orphans Home, founded as a private entity on September 24,1866, as a home for dependent boys and girls, was turned over to county control in October, 1918. The transfer was problematic, with the original Bayland Orphan Home board members charging that the County failed to fulfill its obligations to the home. By 1922, however, settlements were reached, and the Bayland Orphans Home was fully under County control. The County transferred all the girls in the home to the Harris County Home for Girls, and the Bayland Home became a home for boys, exclusively. The Harris County School for Boys, which served delinquent boys, was founded at Seabrook in 1910 and relocated to South Houston in 1914. In 1924, the home moved yet again, to Clear Lake on property adjacent to the county park. Beginning in 1936, Bayland and the Harris County School for Boys were consolidated into one institution at the Clear Lake location. After a small fire in 1951 which required moving the boys to the Girls School, the HCJPD realized the benefits of a co-ed home in keeping siblings together. The two homes were merged to create the Burnett-Bayland Home in 1952. The Harris County School for Boys (at Clear Lake) was refurbished and reopened in 1955. In 1972 the School was re-named the Harris County Youth Village.

Right you are. It's also the location of HPD's Southeast Command Station at 8300 Mykawa. There's also a Satellite Municipal Court office. The City acquired the property way back in the stone age to set up the City Prison Farm. When the "P-Farm" was closed, it sat vacant for years till those rocket scientists at HPD and City Hall snapped to using the land for the Command Station and a City Park with a golf course.

A big friendly cop named Tiny Roman? Omigod.. I DO remember that guy. He worked the KILT Saturday night "Sock Hops" at Mason Park for a time, which is where I met him sometime around 1960, give or take. I also saw him a few times at the Broadway Theater, and at that skating rink that used to be on Holmes Road, not far from Telephone Road. And oh yes. Lest we forget. A moment of silence for the Ranger Drive-in, that carhop place on Telephone at Holmes Road.

As abhorrent as we find them today, debtors' prisons served a useful purpose in their day. They were places where people could, through some financial arrangement, "work off" their debt. They were such unpleasant places people actually worked hard to stay out of them. They were inspired to actually pay their bills. Imagine that. What a concept. And while we're on this subject, does anybody remember the old City of Houston Prison Farm on Mykawa Road? That was a place where people convicted of misdemeanor crimes were sent to "work off" their sentence. Usually six months or less. It was closed sometime back in the 70s or 80s, and the city built the Mykawa Multi-Service Center to replace it.

You do know that "gruen" is the German word for "green". It's worth noting that "Bernie" is the correct pronunciation of "Boerne". It's a two-syllable word, and the "oer" is pronounced "ur". As for Beauchamp, we got "Beecham" from the Brits. They've said it that way forever. Many people with that name over there even spell it "Beecham". The famous conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is just one example.

I'm interested in deducing precisely "where" that roller coaster was. If you look at the streets coming out of the downtown area, you can figure out that it was at or near the current intersections of Houston Avenue, I-10 and Beauchamp. We can see the old Houston Police station on Rusk, where Bayou Place now stands. We can see that old power plant that's still there but now part of the downtown Aquarium. Those old landmarks help us pinpoint the future sites of the police station building at 61 Riesner, and the City Courts Building at Lubbock and Houston Avenue. Trace Houston Avenue north and it appears that the roller coaster stood approximately where Houston Avenue now goes over I-10, and the entire park was where I-10 and I-45 converge. Now when I drive into or out of downtown on either of those freeways, I will always visualize an old amusement park under those overpasses.

Most non-Spanish speaking Anglos don't know or care much about the precisely correct way to pronounce foreign words and names. We're happy if we just come close to the correct way of saying something from another language. It's why people in Austin say "Guada-loop," instead of "Guada-loopay." The town of Mexia is correctly pronounced "moo-hee'-ya." We say it "muh-hay'-uh." Refugio comes out "Reefyurio." There are countless other examples and nobody makes a fuss about it. Not yet anyway. It's probable that the first generation of Texans prounced San Felipe and other Spanish place-names more or less correctly because there were a good number of Spanish speakers around to keep them correct. Over many decades though, as the state was flooded with non-Spanish speakers, San Feeleepay gradually became San Fillupy. After all, Felipe is Spanish for "Phillip."

It was a book. Roemer's Texas, written in 1845 by a German immigrant named Ferdinand Roemer. Roemer's book focuses on the experiences of other German immigrants in settling in Texas, and it's still widely read and respected by historians. It's also still available from a number of publishers. You can buy it on Amazon dot com.

It was a book I came across in the early 70s. It seems to be a fairly well known book because I've seen references to it in other books on early Texas history. I'm still digging around on the Internet trying to find some record of it. I'll post it when I find it.

Your theory is correct. In the 1830s and 1840s, there was a deeply rutted wagon road between Harrisburg and San Felipe, and nearby Columbus. I read about it in a personal history written by a German immigrant in 1849. He traveled that route in the early 1840s, and he described his journey from Harrisburg to Columbus as four days of pure hell. That "road" was soft and deep mud for much of the way across what is now the Katy prairie out to beyond what is now Sealy. He wrote that he and his fellow travelers spent most of their time digging their wagons out of the mud and pushing them to help the horses. Mosquitoes the size of birds also kept them miserable. They camped at night wherever they could find dry ground. It's instructive to think about this when you drive from Houston to Columbus in about one hour. Over many decades this road became known as the San Felipe Road, and, like most "roads" of those times, it probably followed at least several parallel routes that started in Houston and ended in San Felipe.

You may be right about why German St got its name changed during WWI. A lot of German names and names related to Germany were changed because of the strong anti-German sentiment that prevailed at the time. I think I know why it was changed to Canal. I'm just theorizing here, but In 1914, the Houston Ship Channel was completed and opened, and changing the name of a major street leading to the channel and the Port of Houston was perfectly in order. So when the name "Germany" just had to go, why not rename it Canal? It means "channel" in Spanish.

Daylight Savings Time was enacted during WWII but went away after the war. It came back in the late sixties as a way of saving energy. Politicians thought people would use less electricity for lights if there were more daylight hours. Anyway, DST was one of the reasons drive-ins went away. With standard time, movies started at a reasonable hour, but with DST, it didn't get dark enough to start a movie until around 8:30pm. It totally messed with your evening timing. Nobody wanted to wait up that long to see a movie. Rising land prices and film fees theater owners pay finally put the nail in the coffin for drive-ins. They just got too expensive to run. Land values went up and up, meaning property taxes also went up and up, and drive-ins finally threw in the towel in the 80s. There are still a few of them around, but very few.

You're remembering a storm known to local historians as "The Surprise Hurricane of 1943." KUHF Houston Public Radio did a big story about it last year in its lead-up to hurricane season. Full transcript with photos and audio at http://www.kuhf.org/site/News2?news_iv_ctr...le&id=20508