FilioScotia

So it's completely covered now by Westbury? That's a shame. For the airport I mean. Thanks.

That's a great photo and a great article. I've lived in Houston for more than 50 years and I had never heard of the Sam Houston airport until it came up here on the HAIF. I need a little help understanding the photo though. Can you help orient me? I know that's South Main on the extreme right side of the picture, but which direction are we looking? West? East? I've looked up and down South Main on Google Earth and I can't find any sign of an old airport. Is it the property now occupied by the Butler Stadium complex? Where was it exactly?

Does anybody remember the Pizza Yoint on Spencer Hwy in South Houston? It was a favorite hangout for San Jacinto College kids back in the 60s.

Oh no. Oh lord what a talent he had. Not just for singing and playing, but also for song writing. He wrote a song sometime in the early sixties that was recorded by John Gary, and it is quite simply the most beautiful song I've ever heard, before or since, because of the wonderfully poetic way it expresses its thoughts and emotions. The name of the song is "Beautiful", and it had such a profound effect on me 40 something years ago that I remember every word of it today. I can't believe I just typed out all the words from memory in about three minutes. Beautiful By Bobby Doyle Feeling as though it is wrong to be alone and free I sigh, Feeling as though in my brief romances I let my chances go by. Songs by the score mourn the fate of he who just like me declined, I sing no songs of the things I lack now, but looking back now I find, Life

You may or may not know that Larry Hovis died of cancer three years ago. After retiring from "actively" chasing work in show business, Larry settled down and got a real job. He taught drama at Southwest Texas State University -- now Texas State University -- in San Marcos for the final ten or fifteen years of his life. A pity. He was one of the most talented and versatile people Houston has ever seen. Everybody knows what happened to Kenny Rogers, (especially that goofy looking godawful plastic surgery) but does anybody know whatever happened to Bobby Doyle? Or Joyce Webb, who sang and played with Doyle for a long time. They were enormously talented people in their time too. I've read that Tommy Sands now lives in Hawaii, where he owns a clothing store.

You want to know what's really, I mean REALLY depressing? Hitting middle age and finding out that the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about. I sprained my ankle once at that old ice rink next to the University of Houston. Ice Land I think it was called. I limped for weeks. The building is still there -- in that 'V" formed by the intersection of MLK and Calhoun, where Wheeler intersects with Calhoun. It's now owned by UH, which uses it as a maintenance equipment building.

LOLLLL! I know what you mean. I spent a little too much of my misspent youth at that theater. The result is that I know far too much about 1970s porno movies. Things I wish I didn't know. Question: Why did you get kicked out? What does a "young lady" have to do to get thrown out of a porno movie house? I bet there's a good story in that and I'd love to hear it.

Oh - my - God. All the gin joints in the world and I had to walk into this one. Somebody asking about a TV station where I once worked nearly 40 years ago -- for a brief time. Time for true confessions. K-V-V-V Channel 16 was licensed to Galveston, but it was physically located in Alvin. Actually, it was in a brand new building in a cowpasture just outside of Alvin on the road to Dickinson. (One of the owners owned the land.) It went on the air in 1967, to mainly show movies, game shows and syndicated reruns. The big marquee attraction was a six hour live running analysis of the stock market called The Stock Market Observer. It had a large set with computerized display boards providing constant monitoring of the action on Wall Street. The Dow Jones 30, S&P 500, the Chicago Mercantile and the Board of Trade for livestock futures, and others. It was presented on a repeating segmented hourly wheel by an on-air staff of 3 people -- including yours truly -- who kept viewers "almost" up to the minute on everything important in the markets, from opening to closing every business day, complete with the NY and American Stock Exchange tickers crawling across the bottom of the screen. I say it was "almost" up to the minute because the stock exchanges required a 15 minute delay in putting their tickers on the air. The Bloomberg Network is now doing almost the same thing we were doing in 1968. I joined the air staff in early 68, and worked about 7 months with co-hosts Jeff Thompson and Roberta DeFranceso, until the station lost so much money it started laying people off in September and October. I was in the first group to get pink slips. You know what they say -- last hired first fired. It's true. Jeff and Roberta both moved to New York to continue doing the show up there, and it lasted for several more years. I went back to radio, Jeff now has his own PR firm in North Carolina, and Roberta still lives in Houston where she does the Fiesta commercials on TV. She's the Fiesta lady. The Stock Market Observer was a great idea, far ahead of its time, and it had a lot of viewers in just about every company office in town, but the TV station sales staff had no idea how to sell it and get sponsors. They were clueless. The show's creators had identical shows in New York and Dallas, both of which were successful and making money, but the show at KVVV in Alvin ultimately failed for lack of advertising. When the SMO went off the air in late 68, the station limped along on life support for a few months, until sometime in mid 1969, the owners decided to put it out of their misery. It was off the air and history by 1970. So now you know. It's now just a decaying building out there in that cow pasture.

I think Spiegel bought the Art Cinema sometime in the early 70s.

The original Cinema West was in a strip center on West Alabama, out where it merges with Westheimer. The guy who owned it was an interesting guy. Joe Spiegel graduated from the University of Houston with a business degree in the mid 60s, and his father gave him a hundred thousand dollars to start up his first business. Soft-core porn was common at that time, but Spiegel could see that hardcore porn was slipping into the mainstream. He thought it could be profitable, so he took advantage of the public's relaxing attitudes and opened Houston's first hardcore porn house. It made so much money that Spiegel was able to build a free-standing adult theatre on Richmond, and open another adult movie house in the Rice Village off Kirby - Cinema West II. His long range plan was to use his adult theater profits to buy legitimate family movie houses and ultimately get out of porn altogether, which is exactly what he did. At one time in the 70s and 80s, Spiegel owned several neighborhood houses, like the Garden Oaks on North Shepherd and several others, the names of which I can't remember. And yes he was a big softball fan and player. Spiegel organized or sponsored teams in the city softball leagues and tournaments for a long time, and they were good. He had their trophies on display in the Cinema West lobby. I always liked Joe Spiegel. He wasn't a porn-meister, and he never got involved in producing adult films. He was, and probably still is, a smart businessman, and he used the growing popularity of adult movies to get started. I have no idea what he's doing now, but I'm betting that he's successful. He's that kind of guy.

Were you in Houston the last time Zoning was on the ballot in the mid 90s? You may or may not know that it was defeated because of some underhanded doings by a handful of Libertarian anti-zoning property rights zealots whose opposition to zoning was more philosophical than anything else. About a month before the election, these people saw that it was going to be a close election, so they started circulating rumors in the black community that the REAL reason City Hall wanted zoning was so it could zone blacks out of the inner city. That's absolutely true. One of the creators and purveyors of the rumor admitted it to me. It was a blatant vicious lie of course, but it was so effective it caused a near panic in the black community and created a backlash that defeated zoning on election day. I'm telling this story because I don't believe zoning would fail if a "clean" unemotional election could be held on it today.

It happens all the time in this town. City Council has never been able to muster the nerve to pass a Preservation Ordinance with any teeth in it. And Houston has no zoning law. Did you know that Houston is the largest city in the country without zoning? Houston doesn't have zoning, because developers don't want it, and developers are the real decision makers in Houston. It helps to remember that Houston was founded in the 1830s by two developers from New York, and developers have run this city ever since.

Every one of those office buildings on the other side of NASA Rd 1 from the space center also served as temporary space for NASA in the early days. Mission Control and that multi-story Building One were the first to be built onsite, and Mission Control was in operation during most of Project Gemini, while the Public Affairs Office and the NASA auditorium were still under construction in the mid 60s. I was a local reporter who started out covering the Gemini flights in 1965. and even then, the news center and all the NASA news conferences were in a temporary media center off site across NASA Rd 1. By 1966 though, the official press center was finished and we all said goodbye to that temporary place. I still carry a scar from that time. One night in the temp news center, I dropped a heavy table on my left foot and mangled my big toe. To this day that toe-nail is ugly looking and ingrowing, and a source of considerable discomfort when it needs to be trimmed. (all together now: awwwww) As for the answer to the original question, we can thank then Vice President LBJ, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, and the late Houston Congressman Albert Thomas for the decision to build the space center in Houston. With that much Texas born political clout working for us we couldn't miss.

I'm about 90 percent sure that the big house on OGR everyone is talking about here was -- in the late 50s and 60s -- owned and occupied by a guy named Mickey Wilburn, who was head of one of the longshoremen's unions at that time. I can say that because I went to San Jacinto College in the mid sixties with his daughter Cheryl Wilburn, and went to several parties at her home, which was that big house on OGR, right up against Milby Park. I haven't been to that part of town in a long time, so I'm not certain it's even still there.

I grew up in Pasadena and on Houston's east end in the 50s and I've never heard of the Bluebonnet Theater. It must have been a very long time ago, well before my time. However, I DO remember the old Broadway Theater, which was on the east side of Broadway, exactly one block south of where La Porte Road dead-ended at Broadway. That would also put it about three blocks north of Milby High School. The old La Porte Road is still there, and it now runs east from Broadway and merges with Lawndale about eight blocks to the east. That little eight block stretch is all that's left of a road that once ran from Broadway all the way to La Porte.

We're all Bubbas. There was a time when most of us had only one phone number. ONE!! Now, most people have several, and many have more than several. The main landline, at least one secondary landline for children, another for computer DSL hookup, and a cell phone number for every member of the family. It's not unusual for a typical family with two children to have as many as 7 or 8 phone numbers. Brave New World is here.

Actually, HI stood for Hillcrest. In the days of word-prefixes on phone numbers, you could tell at a glance what part of town a person lived in. For example, MOhawk numbers were in Bellaire. Actually, they still are, because the letters "MO" are "66" on the dial. Even today many numerical prefixes in the 713 area code tell me where a phone number lives, because at one time, ALL Houston phone numbers were 713. This is hardly a complete list, but here some others, with the current numeric prefixes listed first, 22 - CApital, and it was the downtown Houston area. 52 - JAckson, in the Montrose area 62 - NAtional, on the west side. 64 - MIssion, on the southeast side. 92 - WAlnut, on the east end. 46 - HOmestead, on the west side north of Buffalo Bayou and in Spring Branch 69 - OXford, on the north side. 45 - GLendale, in east Harris County in the Jacinto City Channelview area 47 - GReenwood, in Pasadena, Deer Park and La Porte. Originally, this was GRand, but it was changed to GReenwood in the mid 50s. Why? 48 - HUdson, in South Houston, and later the Clear Lake Area as NASA moved in. This was changed to HUnter in the 1970s. Again, I ask why? This all went the way of the Dodo bird when the population grew and they needed more phone numbers, and they decided they could no longer use numbers that conformed to the first two letters of a familiar word. So that's why we now have "numbers only" phone numbers. And as Bubba can testify, the area codes fill up so rapidly they've been forced to create more. Ah yes. Progress.

That's a great shot of downtown with old Buff Stadium there at Cullen and the Gulf Freeway. I went to a bunch of Buffs games in the mid and late 50s, and that was a fine little stadium. FYI: the Houston Baseball Museum inside the Finger's Store has Buff Stadium's last home plate in the floor, marking the very spot where it was when a ball park once stood there. That museum, and that home plate, are the late Sammy Finger's gift to Houston Buff fans.

Memories of the Capitan Theater -- ah yes I grew up in Pasadena in the 50s and that was the place to be on a Friday or Saturday night. It was built in the 1940s in that old art deco style, by the same company that built the Granada Theater out on Jensen Drive on Houston's north side. The two were practically identical in appearance and decor. I have vivid memories of some of my adolescent "pursuits" in the balcony of the Capitan. We won't talk about the night in 1960 I was thrown out by the manager, who was very angry at me because of what I and a girl were doing up there, but let's just say that we had gone beyond necking to some "serious" groping. The manager was so steamed he banned me from the Capitan forever, and this incident is the basis of one of my favorite stories. Ten years later, in 1970, my first wife and I were living on Houston's far south side, not far from the McClendon Triple Screen Drive In Theater on South Main at Hiram Clarke. I had to take a part time job there for a few months to make some extra money and get me and my wife through a financial tight spot, and lo and behold, guess who the projectionist at the McClendon was? The former manager of the Capitan, the same guy who threw me out and told me to never come back. We had a good laugh when I identified myself to him and we spent many good hours reminiscing about those "innocent" times at the Capitan. He told me he was surprised and pleased to know that I had amounted to something. The movie house in the old downtown part of Pasadena on Shaw Street was the Long Theater. It was owned by the old Phil Isley theater chain, which had movie houses in a number of Texas towns. You may be interested to know that Phil Isley's daughter was a very famous movie actress. Her name was Phyllis Isley, until she moved to Hollywood and the studio changed her name to Jennifer Jones. The Long stopped showing movies sometime in the 60s, and the building was used for other things, like an indoor gun range. More Pasadena memories: does anybody remember that miniature golf course and trampoline park on Shaw Street about a block from the Capitan? Or Trainer's Drive-in on La Porte Rd, also about a block away, where the high school kids cruised and hung out, the same way the kids cruised and hung out at that drive-in American Grafitti? Another popular drive-in hangout was Vicki's, on South Shaver at Spencer Highway in South Houston. Vicki's was enormously popular with the high school crowd, because Pasadena was "dry" and South Houston was "wet", which means Vicki's sold beer. We could always find a college friend over 21, or someone with a fake ID to get us some beer at Vicki's. There was another drive-in on La Porte road in the shadow of old Sinclair Refinery -- it's now the Lyondell Refinery. It was also just outside the Pasadena city limits, and it also sold beer. For the life of me I can't remember the name of that drive-in. I worked at the Red Bluff Drive-in Theater for a couple of years in the late 50s when it was still showing family movies. Oh the stories I can tell.