FilioScotia

All your observations hit the nail on the head. KPRC News was for the longest time the standard by which other TV stations were judged. In the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, Ray Miller and his corps of overachieving reporters and photographers raised the bar to incredible heights. Then it started falling apart when Ray Miller retired, and then went completely to hell when the Hobbys sold it to Post-Newsweek. It's been in the toilet ever since, and I see no sign that it will ever change. I've known Nancy Holland since she interned for KPRC Radio in the mid 70s. She blossomed into one of the finest reporters this town has ever had, but don't worry about her. She left KHOU to move to New York and be with her husband, who is a photographer for one of the networks. They commuted back and forth between Houston and NYC to be with each other as often as they could, and they finally just got tired of it. She moved there for good. They bought a condo near Central Park, and I still chuckle at the story she told about going househunting up there. She said it's really strange to have a Realtor tell you it costs 1.2 million dollars, and hear yourself saying "We'll take it." Nancy went to work as an executive producer for a company that provides free lance video for the networks and TV stations. She and her husband are finally working in the same town and I wish them well. Meanwhile back on Allen Parkway, even without Nancy, KHOU is now the undisputed best news department in town. They've managed to assemble a staff of first-rate reporters, and with the addition of Lucy Noland as co-anchor, they're going to be the leader for a long time.

Looks to me like somebody had a lot of blue paint they needed to get rid of and they didn't want to just throw it away.

Where is the Piney Point City Hall located now? What has happened to the seat of Piney Point city government? What is preventing it from continuing to operate where it has always been? And if it is being forced to relocate, for whatever reason, why is it necessary to move city hall into the middle of a very expensive residential area?

Lawsuit? Who needs a lawsuit? Whatever happened to just voting this mayor and city council out of office? Nobody in this country is elected to anything for life. They serve at the pleasure of the voters who put them in office. People in Piney Point who're unhappy over this deal need to start circulating a petition calling for a recall election NOW. If they get enough signatures, state law requires the City Council to set a date for the election. When they get their election, they should vote unanimously to send everybody on that council back to private life, and replace them with people who have a better understanding of the duties and responsibilities of municipal government. Some political careers need to be ended out there. The first action of the new council should be to cancel the deal to buy that house, and then go looking for some inexpensive office space to rent. If the citizens of Piney Point just roll over and let the people they ELECTED to office get away with doing this to them THEY DESERVE IT.

Very obscure. I lived on the north side in my childhood, and I still have relatives in different areas around Jensen Drive from downtown to points north. Over my many decades in this town, I've spent a lot of time visiting my relatives, ran with friends in Denver Harbor and Podunk when I was in high school, and absorbed a lot of the local history, but until this thread began I had never encountered the name "Little Pearl Harbor". Never seen it before now. Methinks, along with isuredid, that the name is probably used more in police circles than in the general community.

For as long as I can remember -- and I'm near retirement age -- the area along North Wayside from the Ship Channel across Lyons Ave to Liberty Road was called Podunk. I haven't seen that name mentioned in this discussion.

It's really sad but the area around Jensen Drive and Lyons Avenue was, at one time, a thriving and busy little business district, about a mile north of downtown Houston. There were stores, shops, even a movie house. It looked like the downtown area of a small town. When I was a kid living in east Texas, Jensen Drive was the only way into Houston from the northeast. The East-Tex Fwy was still on the drawing boards. Highway 59 became Jensen somewhere way out there, and my dad always stopped at one of the car-hop drive-ins on Jensen to buy burgers for everybody. We'd stop at Lyons Avenue so mom could go shopping in one or more of the small shops. It's all gone now. Gone without a trace.

I'm going to assume you're kidding, but just in case you're not, people of that generation weren't as "lawsuit happy" as people are today.

As a near lifelong resident of the Houston area, who knows a little bit about Houston history, I was knocked for a loop this week when I found out about a hurricane that made a direct hit on Houston in 1943. Nobody knew the storm was coming because the government was censoring all information coming in and out of Houston, including weather alerts. It was the middle of the war, and the War Department didn't want anybody -- especially the Nazis -- to know the storm did considerable damage to shipyards, munitions plants and oil refineries in the Houston area. Here's a link to the whole story, on, of all places, the City of Houston website. http://www.houstontx.gov/oem/1943.html

How about Intelligent Liberal? In the same vein, my all time favorite -- Military Intelligence.

Never made it to the Bellaire gym, but I did make it to a lot of KILT Saturday Night Sock-hops at the Mason Park Gym on 75th Street. KILT DJ's were always there spinning the platters and acting crazy. They had a mean old woman with a yard stick too, but we -- horny and determined teenagers that we were -- managed to stay out of her line of sight enough to "get close" and still have a good time. Of course that doesn't include all the making out that was going on outside around the park. I agree -- those were the days -- and nights.

Those traffic cameras were put there by TXDOT and are monitored for traffic flow management by Houston Transtar. A lot of Transtar's money comes from federal highway funds. Also, I could be wrong, but I think only incorporated municipalities can put up cameras to catch red light runners. County governments don't have the authority to do that in unincorporated areas.

I think you're wrong, but just a little bit. I'm almost certain the song you're thinking of was "Bee-bop-a-lulah She's My Baby". A bunch of singers did that song in the 50s.

It's completely lost in the haze and that's the catch. It's like Woodstock. If you can remember it, you probably weren't there.

Thanks Bruce. One of the things I love about this website is the way I learn something practically every day. So KTRH started with all the space in the world, but moved to smaller quarters later because it didn't need all that space anymore. That's certainly very different from most other stations' experience when they start out, but as you point out, this was Jesse Jones' baby after all. I'm wondering whatever has happened to all that open space on the sixth floor. Is it still there? Or did the hotel turn it into more rooms? May I ask where you find all that archived information on such short notice? Do you live in the Houston Chronicle morgue? Just kidding. I'm very impressed.

You are correct. KTRH's original studios were where you say they were, on the 6th floor of the hotel. I'm willing to bet it was in a couple of adjoining hotel rooms, meaning they probably didn't have a lot of space or room to grow. At some point -- probably when the parking garage was built in the early 30s -- the station had outgrown that space, so the owners decided to move it into a suite of offices on the top floor of the garage, where it operated until it moved out of the hotel to Montrose sometime around 1970.

Actually, KTRH was on the fifth -- and top -- floor of the Rice Hotel Garage, overlooking Texas and Travis. I suspect that the parking garage was attached to the hotel as an afterthought in the 1920s as more and more guests were able to afford automobiles. For the public to get to KTRH, you had to go into the Rice lobby, take the elevator to the 5th floor, and follow a long winding hallway around until it went through the outside wall of the main hotel structure into the top floor of the parking garage, which had been built out as office space specially designed for a radio station. I went there a few times in the early 60s to visit friends who worked there, and that was the way I had to go. I think KTRH had a private elevator to the ground floor of the parking garage, so reporters and other employes could come and go quickly. The station moved to that awful looking fortress style building on Lovett in Montrose sometime around 1970. They called that monstrosity Fort Rusk, because KTRH was owned by the Rusk Corporation. It was founded by Jesse Jones, who died in the 1950s and passed the company to his nephew John Jones Jr. I had the pleasure of knowing John Jones when I worked at KTRH in the 1970s and again in the late 80s, when he was in his final years. He was a cordial and funny guy who loved to sit in the coffee lounge and shoot the bull about the old days. His son John "Jay" Jones III now runs Rusk Corp, and he's the one who sold KTRH-KLOL in the mid 90s after his father died.

My apologies for seeming to snap back at you. Actually, the girl from Galena Park didn't "accompany" me to the Red Bluff. She was already there, flirting with every guy in the concession stand, and I managed to finish my work first. If not me, it would have been the next guy. She was just one of many. I'm not kidding. At least once a week an "opportunity" would present "herself" at that place. We finally figured out that girls just can't resist a man in uniform, and those funny looking concession stand shirts and caps we had to wear must have looked like a uniform. You knew how to read the signals too. Girls inclined to making out always said "sure" when asked if they'd like to see a movie at the Red Bluff, the Eagle, or the Pasadena, or the Decker, or some other place. Those not so inclined said no thanks. And even if you couldn't find a date, you could go to a drive-in with one of your buds and there was always a fair chance of picking up a girl, and more often than not she would have a friend for the bud. That happened for me and some of my friends on a number of occasions. Those were the days. I need to stop now. I'm stuck in flashback mode.

Of course! What did you think I was talking about? You had to look in Wikipedia to learn that? I'm sorry. I have to remind myself that an entire generation of people has been born and grown to maturity without the experience of making out in a drive-in theater. Back in the day, drive-ins were famous for being the best cheap and easy place to park and make out. Nobody cared what was showing on the screen. And it wasn't just teenagers either. When I worked at the Red Bluff, I saw lots of adults getting after it too. We weren't supposed to allow it, but it went on every night. My own "coming of age" involved the occasional unescorted sweet young thing who would hang out in the concession stand. Every now and then one would invite me out to her car when I finished work for the night. God only knows how many of today's baby boomers and Gen X'ers were conceived in a drive-in. I don't think any of them can be traced to me, but I'm dreading that knock on the door by someone saying "Hi Daddy! Remember the Red Bluff Drive-in? And that cute blonde from Galena Park?"

You're right about the Red Bluff Drive-in. It went porno sometime in the 80s, and ultimately went out of business. It sat there closed and decaying until a few years ago, when someone finally bought the property for other uses, and tore down the screen tower. I worked at the Red Bluff when I was in high school in the late 50s, and every time I drive past that corner of 225 and Red Bluff Road these days I always have flash-backs to some "memorable" experiences I had there. Let's just say it's where I starting coming of age.

Thanks. You're right of course. Memory fails me once again. Memory is the second thing to go when you pass 60 you know. I forget what the first thing was.

No you didn't miss anything. That's an interesting history. Where on earth did you find it? It's a shame the writer doesn't mention the location of the old building HPD moved out of in 1925. I still think that unmarked building on the Downtowner map was the old HPD building they moved out of into 61 Riesner in 1952. But I could be wrong. I frequently am. I'm fascinated that the department got its first police radios in 1927. The radios were ordinary AM radios tuned to KPRC, the only radio station in town at the time. The announcers would interrupt programming to broadcast police calls. Officers in cars could hear the calls but couldn't respond. Two-way police radios were still a few years in the future.

I know. I'm talking about the building across the street from the fire station, on the north side of Rusk. The one behind the courts building/jail.

I'm almost a hundred percent certain that the smaller building next to the old Criminal Courts building was the old Houston Police Station. I remember it was still there in the early 50s, and it was very old and delapidated. It was torn down when HPD got the new building across the bayou at 61 Riesner Street. And BTW, the very observant among us have probably noticed over the years that the city has never been able to agree on how the name "Riesner" should be spelled on street signs. "Riesner" or "Reisner"? I don't know what the situation is now, but until the 90s, there were street signs spelling it both ways.

Oops. You're right. Wrong Hampton. It WAS Carl -- not Fred. My mistake.