FilioScotia

A simple renovation is just cosmetic and easily done, but it won't solve the problem. MDACC Operations VP Bill Daigneau says the foundation is slowly cracking and sinking and this is causing the building's superstructure to pull apart and fall in on itself. There are cracks in ceilings and walls from top to bottom, including the lobby wall with the mural, and they're spreading. MDACC's attitude is that it's beyond saving. He said if they did nothing the building would collapse in a few years.

I don't disagree with your assessment of the building, but I have to ask if we're talking about the same frescoe? I've examined the frescoe at MD Anderson up close and in person, and nowhere on it will you find "emboldened young white men wielding blueprints, and contented Negroes picking cotton." What you will see is a ranch, with people of various ethnicities spreading their harvested food out for what appears to be a picnic, children playing in the background, and some men of undeterminable ethnicity loading a hay wagon. Not a cotton field anywhere. Personally, I think it's an important representation of life in the southwest, as seen through the eyes of an major artist of the 40s and 50s, and Peter Hurd was a major artist and muralist. It's a shame the art world doesn't appear to be interested in preserving it. At least not interested enough to raise the money needed to remove and move the mural somewhere else.

In a radio interview on KUHF back when all this started in 2008, Bill Daigneau of MDACC said the old building is slowly falling in on itself. There are visible cracks in ceilings and walls from top to bottom, including the lobby and in the mural itself. It's no longer safe for people to be in it, and repairing it would cost more than demolishing and building new. Also, let's face it. It's just a refitted office building that's not suited for what MD Anderson does. They want something built for medical research and hospital care. Here's a link to audio and transcript of that story in KUHF's news archives in April of 2008. There also some interesting photos of Peter Hurd painting the mural back in 52. http://app1.kuhf.org/houston_public_radio-news-display.php?articles_id=31046 For those who wonder why removing the mural is so difficult, here's some information about the "fresco" technique of painting. "Fresco Painting is one done with earth colors, mixed with distilled water on a specially prepared plaster wall. There are several kinds of mural paintings: Oil paints are used on canvas and the canvas pasted to the wall, and a secco mural, which consists of letting the plaster dry and then painting on the wall tempera color. An example of this is Peter Hurd’s mural in the Prudential Life Insurance Building, Houston, Texas. A Fresco Mural is one of the most lasting, the most expensive, and the most difficult types of mural decoration. Few artists will even attempt it. There are frescoes in Pompeii, Italy, which were covered with ashes and lava. After they were uncovered, the colors seemed just as brilliant as they were at the time they were painted. An example of another well-known fresco is the evocation of Genesis by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in St. Peter’s in Rome. Fresco demands perfection in painting; mastering the art of making a perfect joining of one day’s work to the next is also the fresco painter’s goal. The cutting of the edge of the finished part to provide for the next day’s plastering was done before the painting was finished."

The mural isn't painted "on" the wall. The mural "is" the wall. It's a fresco, which means it was painted on the wall while the plaster was still wet and soft, before it dried and became solid. The paint is mixed with the plaster. To save this mural, the entire wall has to be removed in small sections, very carefully, so the sections can be taken out the much smaller doors and put together again somewhere else. Making the job even harder, the mural is painted on a corner in the lobby. Over about 40 feet, the mural curves around the corner and makes a 90 degree turn. Removing the mural, moving it, and storing it safely until a permanent home can be found is going to be very expensive. At least half a million dollars, according to those in the know. The Hurd Museum in New Mexico has made every effort to find the money, with no success that I've heard of. They also haven't been able to find anybody interested in providing a permanent space for it. Even the art world doesn't care much what happens to it. It's not just MD Anderson. They've worked with the Hurd Museum for more than five years on this, with no success. So don't blame MD Anderson.

We all know that Fedex and UPS packages can be dropped off in a nearby office, or at a neighbor's house or apartment, but anything coming in by US Mail MUST be delivered to the addressee or taken back to the Post Office. It's a federal crime for US Mail to be delivered or given to anyone but the person to whom it is addressed.

Hey Niche you may be interested in a website I've discovered. It's put together by an amateur historian in Tyler County in east Texas. It's a pretty comprehensive accumulation of Tyler County history, as you will see, but if you scroll down you'll find the results of his search for the site of Fort Teran, including some photographs. Enjoy. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~txtyler/misc/tyler_links.htm

Hey Niche you may be interested in a website I've discovered. It's put together by an amateur historian in Tyler County in east Texas. It's a pretty comprehensive accumulation of Tyler County history, as you will see, but if you scroll down you'll find the results of his search for the site of Fort Teran, including some photographs. Enjoy. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~txtyler/misc/tyler_links.htm

I agree those two legendary entertainers deserve a historical marker in the town they came from, but they didn't come from Houston. Townes Van Zandt was from Fort Worth, and lived most of his life in and around Austin. Chenier is from Opelousas Louisiana.

We have similar memories of Valian's Brucie. Their pizza really wasn't all that good, but we didn't know that then. That was when "pizza" was new in Houston. It was "different", and we thought it was so good because we had nothing to compare it to. Almost nobody else in town was serving pizza then. I think all this nostalgia for Valian's has more to do with our memories of the fun we all had back in the innocent 50s and early 60s. Gathering up a carload or two of friends and going to Valian's for pizza on a Friday or Saturday night was just part of the fun.

SSgt Macario Garcia was a highly decorated veteran of World War II. President Truman presented him the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous heroism in a battle in Germany. I think it's highly fitting for a major thoroughfare in Houston's predominantly Hispanic east end to bear his name. Here's his story in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcario_Garcia

What he said. Matt Jackson is the single most annoying "personality" on Houston radio today, for all the reasons SecondTour just mentioned. He's going to fit right in at Clear Channel. Unfortunately, KILT has found another one who I fear is just like him. Josh Ennis shows all the earmarks, so far, of being every bit as annoying and irritating as Jackson. Having opinions is what talk shows is all about, but to demean and insult callers who don't agree with you is something else. Does Ennis really think being opinionated and insulting attracts listeners? I heard him insult three callers in one half hour span Sunday evening after the Texans game, and I just tuned to another station.

My well known anal tendencies force me to point out your misspelling of that club owner's name. His name was Jimmy Menutis. With no apostrophe. My college buddies and I spent many a fun Friday and Saturday night there in the early sixties.

I'm fascinated at learning that the name "Sigman Byrd" lives on, in the form of a teacher and poet at the University of Colorado. He just has to be related to Houston's Sig Byrd. The Houston Press article mentions Sig's son Sigman Byrd Junior, who was a Houston banker when the article was written in 1994. This guy in Colorado must be Sig's grandson, Sigman Byrd III. He even has his own website. http://sigmanbyrd.com/Site/Home.html The odds that two men could have the name Sigman Byrd and not be related are impossible to calculate.

I stumbled across an old article in the Houston Press archives, about Sigman "Sig" Byrd. He was one of the best of those old school newspaper reporters with the low flat-brim hat, cheap suit and worn out shoes, who smelled of cheap cigars and straight whiskey back in the days of yore. Sig Byrd knew Houston as few people knew it and he wrote some of the finest prose ever written to describe it. David Theis's article -- written in 1994 -- will have some of the old gray heads around here flashing back to our misspent youth. Here's a link. http://www.houstonpress.com/1994-11-10/news/the-lost-houston-of-sig-byrd/1

Actually, the AlRay was named for the two guys who bought it in 1960. Al Zarzana and Raymond Boriski. Zarzana died this week, and there was a big story about him in the Chron. He owned several movie houses around town. http://blogs.chron.com/bayoucityhistory/2009/11/obituary_al_zarzana_73_theater_owner_1.html

A pity. I remember when the Avalon stopped showing movies in the mid 50s. It sat empty for a few years, until the late 50s when the owners did some paint-up fix-up and started booking road show productions of Broadway plays. I remember seeing At War With the Army with Maurice Gosfield in a leading role. You may or may not remember Gosfield as the guy who played Private Doberman on the old Phil Silvers TV sitcom You'll Never Get Rich. Getting a part in a road show was an extension of Gosfield's 15 minutes of fame. The Avalon also booked A Hole in the Head, with Hal March. He's better remembered as the quiz-master on the $64 Thousand Dollar Question TV show. The Avalon's zenith in legitimate theatre was when it was one of the stops in Diana Barrymore's doomed effort to sober up and have something resembling a stage career by proving that she could act. She did a national tour of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, which stopped at the Avalon for a couple of weekends. She got decent reviews, because she managed to stay on the wagon, most of the time. Sadly, when the tour ended, she couldn't get another play, and she died a year later at the age of 38. She lived and died just like her father, John Barrymore. Incredibly, the Barrymore curse lives on. I read the other day that John's grand-daughter Drew Barrymore recently confessed to Parade Magazine that's she's "not sober" most of the time these days. My own personal memories of the Avalon came by virtue of the acting academy that a University of Houston Drama Prof and some others started in 1959. It was the Avalon Studio Theatre and Workshop -- a summer drama school in a store front around the corner on Lawndale. I was a 10th grader at Pasadena High School, and thought it would be fun so I signed up. It was the real thing, with real acting classes taught by local professional theatre people, and our final exam was a single performance of the play Stage Door by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. They picked that play because it has a very large cast and they wanted all of the 60 or 70 people in the acting school to have a role or have something to do with getting the play done. Interestingly, the "students" ranged in age from teenagers like me to adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s. We all had a lot of fun, and when it was over we all went our separate ways. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof was the last play the Avalon owners were able to book, because those road shows just didn't make much money. So they closed it again. We know its history from there forward. I'm saddened to know it's gone now. I had some good times there.

Actually, NPR wasn't "broadcasting" from Houston with this series. Steve Inskeep came to Houston early in the week and did his interviews, which were arranged well in advance. Then he stood out there near I-10, and, tape recorder rolling, pretended he was on the air with Renee Montaigne. What we heard on the air was: "This is Morning Edition from NPR, I'm Renee Montaigne in Los Angeles. (insert tape) And I'm Steve Inskeep in Houston Texas. I'm standing alongside Interstate 10, and the noise you hear....etc etc)" Renee was "live", but Steve was memorex. Actually, he was an audio sound file in a computer. It took Inskeep a couple of days to do his interviews. In his Houston hotel room, he wrote his scripts, went through the recorded interviews to pick soundbites he wanted, recorded his voice tracks into his own laptop, and then sent all the recorded sound to NPR in Washington via FTP. NPR's sound editors spliced it all together into the 8 minute Morning Edition segments we all heard on KUHF. FTP is a lot like MP3, except it can handle much larger sound files and the quality is significantly better. That's why I can say Inskeep never "broadcasted" from Houston. NPR calls what he did "faux" anchoring. They do it all the time when one of the anchors goes off on "special assignment" in another city or another country. Like when Renee did a week of "faux" anchor segments from Baghdad. They make it sound like he or she is "anchoring" from that city, and that's how they make the sausage at NPR. And to answer the other question, we're not sure why they decided to do two days of stories set in Houston. We really didn't learn anything we didn't already know. Houston is big, VERY big, crowded, sprawled out all over creation, has a very diverse population, lots of job opportunities, land use and transportation problems, and, oh yes, minorities who aren't always happy with the way things are going. So new?

That "story" Jerry Patterson included in his remarks to that group had all the earmarks of an urban legend that's probably been floating around around Austin since Jester's death. It sounds exactly like something someone would make up about a Governor who was not popular in the Austin area. Recall Jester served on the UT Board of Regents in the 30s and was remembered as a solid conservative figure. When he ran for Governor In 1946 one of his opponents was Dr. Homer Rainey, the former UT President who was fired because of his fights with the Regents over academic freedom. Here's what a member of the Texas Historical Association wrote about that election. "That election originally featured fourteen candidates for the Democratic nomination. The most controversial contender was Homer Price Rainey, former president of the University of Texas and also an ordained minister who had earned a Ph.D. Rainey’s "former" status really meant fired, because he had opposed the university’s board of regents over firings of faculty and banning books from its library. Tactics of Rainey’s opponents included men-only meetings featuring readings of portions of the banned books. Jester, who stayed above the fray, then claimed that he was the only candidate "without mud on his hands," and he won." Austin has always been more liberal than the rest of the state, and in those days Austin liberals suffered through one conservative Democrat governor after another. Homer Rainey was one of their heroes, and I'm willing to bet they never forgave Jester for beating him in the '46 governor's race. Ridiculing conservative politicians is a cottage industry in Austin, so how would you heap ridicule on a man with a reputation for being a family man? Make up a story about him dying in the arms of a lover. We know that story has been around for years. That's just my theory on how it may have started. Absolutely nothing that happens in Texas politics can surprise me.

That "story" Jerry Patterson included in his remarks to that group had all the earmarks of an urban legend that's probably been floating around around Austin since Jester's death. It sounds exactly like something someone would make up about a Governor who was not popular in the Austin area. Recall Jester served on the UT Board of Regents in the 30s and was remembered as a solid conservative figure. When he ran for Governor In 1946 one of his opponents was Dr. Homer Rainey, the former UT President who was fired because of his fights with the Regents over academic freedom. Here's what a member of the Texas Historical Association wrote about that election. "That election originally featured fourteen candidates for the Democratic nomination. The most controversial contender was Homer Price Rainey, former president of the University of Texas and also an ordained minister who had earned a Ph.D. Rainey’s "former" status really meant fired, because he had opposed the university’s board of regents over firings of faculty and banning books from its library. Tactics of Rainey’s opponents included men-only meetings featuring readings of portions of the banned books. Jester, who stayed above the fray, then claimed that he was the only candidate "without mud on his hands," and he won." Austin has always been more liberal than the rest of the state, and in those days Austin liberals suffered through one conservative Democrat governor after another. Homer Rainey was one of their heroes, and I'm willing to bet they never forgave Jester for beating him in the '46 governor's race. Libs love to ridicule conservatives, so how would you heap ridicule a man with a reputation for being a family man? Make up a story about him dying in the arms of a lover. We know that story has been around for years. That's just my theory on how it may have started. Absolutely nothing that happens in Texas politics can surprise me.

I've never even heard of her, so I have no idea what she sounds like. But, thanks to Mike McGuff, here's what she looks like. http://houston.bloggerspub.com/index.php?s=krbe

I had no health insurance when my wife got pregnant with twins in 1968, so I took on a second job for five or six months to set aside money to pay the bill, which I expected to be huge. Our twins were born at St. Luke's in February of 1969, they were healthy with no complications, they were in the hospital for four days, and when I checked them all out I wrote a check for $975 dollars to pay the bill in full. I had already paid the doctor his fee of 300 dollars. These days an identical birth at that hospital would cost untold thousands of dollars.

The spectacle of prison inmates deliberately getting hurt so they could spend weeks or months in the hospital was one of the factors in the demise of the prison rodeo. Over the years the crowds starting expecting to see inmates taking stupid chances and the inmates didn't disappoint them. Critics in the legislature started comparing it to gladiators killing each other to entertain the crowds in ancient Rome. The idea of men in prison entertaining the public that way was troubling to more and more people, and it was finally cancelled in 1986. Guess who the star entertainers were that year. Here's the complete history of the Texas Prison Rodeo. http://www.txprisonmuseum.org/articles/rodeo_history.html

I'm puzzled by your posting. What do you mean?

Cronkite was not a newsreader, in the modern sense of that word. He wasn't one of those people who could be hired off the street to sit in front of a camera and read other peoples' words off a prompter. Cronkite was a journalist, in every important sense of that word. Read his biography for goodness sake. He spent years working as a print reporter before he ever got into TV in 1950. As a war correspondent for UPI he covered WWII from start to finish, and later covered the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. He was at CBS for more than ten years before he became the anchor of the evening news. He brought his famous perfectionist work ethic to that job and he demanded the same attitude from every person involved in putting the news on the air. As the anchor, he personally wrote every word he read on the air, and he worked with the Executive Producer to supervise the writing and production of the stories from the reporters and correspondents. People who didn't give 100 percent every day didn't last long when Cronkite was there. It's why CBS News was known as the "Tiffany's" of network news. The standard by which all other networks were judged. It's an insult to Cronkite's memory to refer to him as a "newsreader", or imply that he did nothing more than read from a prompter. Item the Second: Saying "he passed" isn't a "southern thing." It's actually a very old English term that comes from Latin. The Latin word "passus" means "suffer" or "suffered." "Passus" found its way into English by way of the Latin version of the Nicene Creed, which down in the body of the text states that Jesus "passus, sepultus est". When the Bible and the Creed were translated into English for the Anglican Church in the 1500s, that phrase became "he suffered death and was buried." By that time, many English speaking people were already saying "pass" and "pass away" when saying that someone had died, and many people still use it, even if they don't know where it comes from. The phrase "give up the ghost" has a similar history, and it's a lot older than you think. It's a very interesting story. Check out this link: http://www.keyway.ca/htm2006/20060517.htm