FilioScotia

Check out the small country churches west of Houston in the La Grange and Schulenberg area. They all date to the 19th and early 20th centuries. Collectively they're known as The Painted Churches of Texas. They're only an hour and a half from Houston, and well worth a day trip to see. They're incredibly beautiful and you'll never regret taking the time. Here's a link: http://www.texasescapes.com/CentralTexasTo...hurchesTour.htm

You are correct and I am wrong. I had forgotten about the annual Shrine Ball.

You may be thinking of the Arabia Shrine Circus, which was held annually in the Coliseum for many years. My own kids grew up going to see it every year. And by the way, the Shrine Circus is still going strong. It will be in April at the Fort Bend County Fairgrounds in Rosenberg. Tickets are priced for families, and proceeds benefit Shriners' Childrens' Hospitals and other Shriner causes.

include seeing Johnny Cash perform with the Carter Family, the Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins and the Tennesee Three. I remember that June Carter Cash wasn't on that tour because she was back home having their baby, who they named John Carter Cash. Mother Maybelle Carter was there though, and seeing that grand lady performing old classic Carter Family songs was one of the musical high points of my life. It was a helluva show. My wife and I also enjoyed pro wrestling, and one memorable night we saw Andre the Giant. He was HUGE, but not as big as his promoter claimed. We also loved pro hockey, and the Houston Apollos hockey team on their home ice in the Coliseum.

The American Institute of Architects did a public survey and came up with a list of the 150 most popular buildings and structures in the United States. You have to look far down the list to find anything in Houston. Here's a link to the list. http://www.npr.org/documents/2007/feb/buil...50buildings.pdf

The 75 year old Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was held in the Coliseum in the 40s, 50s and 60s, before it moved to the Astrodome in the late 60s. Over those years, when it was called "The Fat Stock Show", many movie stars and celebrities were part of the show in the Coliseum. It's where I saw Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Gene Autry, James Arness, and a bunch of others.

Oh my god I had forgotten all about that incident. Norman Granz was an early hero in the civil rights struggle. Here's the story of that incident in the Music Hall from the WikiPedia. "Norman Granz is generally remembered also for his notable anti-racist position and for the battles he consequently fought for his artists (many of whom were black, perhaps the majority), in times and places where skin color was the cause of open discrimination. In 1955, in Houston, Texas, he personally removed the labels "White" and "Negro" that would have separated the audience in the auditorium where two concerts were to be performed by (among others) Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie; between the two shows they were found playing cards in the dressing room and arrested by local police, but after some nervous negotiations allowed to perform the second show, and only formally released after that. Oscar Peterson recounted how Granz once continued to insist that white cabdrivers take his black artists as customers even while a policeman was pointing a loaded pistol at his stomach from close range (Granz won). Granz also was among the first to pay white and black artists the same salary and to give them equal treatment even in minor details, like dressing rooms. Beloved by his artists (in part because he paid more than average), he had three main goals, as he repeatedly and frankly declared: to fight against racism, to give listeners a good product, and to earn money from good music."

It's a popular misconception that the Sam Houston Coliseum was built in 1928 for the Democratic National Convention. Actually, the Coliseum we all knew and loved for so many years was not the same structure that was built in 1928. Houston banker-developer-political mover/shaker Jesse Jones lured the convention to Houston by promising to build a new convention hall. He had a large hall built on that site in the record time of six months. Unfortunately, it was made completely of wood, which is why he was able to build it so fast. Sam Houston Hall wasn't much more than a very big cavernous barn, but it did what it was intended to do and the convention came and went. Sam Houston Hall, made entirely of wood, was a giant fire-trap, so in 1936, it was razed, and the permanent brick-mortar-steel Sam Houston Coliseum and Music Hall took its place. They were built at the same time, and both were demolished in 1998. The Hobby Center and parking garage now occupy that site. As for who performed in the old Music Hall, my goodness just about everybody who was anybody, and hordes of nobodies. It was the home of the Houston Symphony, Houston Grand Opera, Houston Ballet, Theater Under the Stars and other local arts organizations. National touring companies brought Broadway plays and musicals, and just about every singer, singing group, musician, band and musical aggregation you can name or imagine did shows there. I even saw a troupe of Russian folk dancers one night. It would be impossible to produce a complete list.

Preservation Texas is out with its annual list of the state's Most Endangered Historic Places, and a number of Houston area places are included. You won't be surprised at any of the names on the list. Here's a link to the story on the Preservation Texas website: http://www.preservationtexas.org/endangered/2007.htm

"Semi" non-fiction? Where did you get that idea? There is nothing fictional about that book. Everything in it is true, and I also recommend it highly. But you are right about water being the overwhelming problem. In 1900, the highest point on the island was just a few feet above sea level. It's hard for us to imagine today but the entire island was inundated by the storm surge. Only the strongest structures survived it.

My memories of Carla I had just completed Air Force basic training at Lackland AFB in San Antonio the very day Carla hit the coast. We were scheduled to ship out for Mississippi that day, but we had to wait several more days for the storm to pass. The Air Force took steel bunk beds out of all the barracks and sent them to evacuation shelters closer to the coast, which meant that I and thousands of other Air Force basics had to sleep on our mattresses on the floor for several days. When we finally left Lackland, four bus loads of AF recruits heading for Mississippi came through Houston. Being a Houston native, I had a lot of fun being the tour guide for all the other guys from other parts of the country. You may or may not be surprised to know that many of the guys from up north were genuinely surprised to see that Houston actually had paved streets and tall buildings. It has never ceased to amaze me how staggeringly ignorant people in other parts of the country are about Texas. This is still true today. Our bus convoy stopped at Bill Bennett's Steak House in downtown Houston so we could get something to eat, and I grabbed the opportunity to find a pay phone to call my parents in Pasadena. To my great relief, I learned that my mom and dad came through it all in very good shape. Our house just off Harris St. in Revlon Terrace had only minor roof damage.

Dean Corll's home FYI: That house is in Pasadena, and it was where Corll was living when Henley and David Brooks killed him. Can't remember which street, but it's off South Shaver just a block or two from Shaver Elementary School.

That's not hard to understand. Have you ever seen an average house that was built as strong as a high school gym? Every gym I've ever seen was steel frame construction with a lot of brick or stone trim, reinforced steel in the walls and steel girders holding up the roof. Your typical hurricane can rip the roof off your typical residential house, but it won't scratch a high school gym. If I lived right on the coast, and a hurricane was going to make a direct hit in my area, if I couldn't evacuate several days ahead of landfall I think I would prefer to ride it out in the gym instead of at home.

It was a common practice for titled nobility to put their family names on their homes and estates. The word "arms" refers to the family's official symbol, the "coat of arms", the family crest or seal. From Dictionary dot Com: Arms: Heraldry. the escutcheon, with its divisions, charges, and tinctures, and the other components forming an achievement that symbolizes and is reserved for a person, family, or corporate body; armorial bearings; coat of arms.

Preservationists said the mayor's comments reflect growing support for stronger efforts to protect historical neighborhoods and buildings in a city whose preservation laws have been criticized as inadequate. ************ Don't get your hopes up. Developers founded and created Houston. They own the Houston City Council body and soul and they run this city. I don't believe Houston will ever have a historic preservation ordinance with any teeth in it, because developers won't allow Council to do anything that would restrict their ability to do anything they want with their property. Yes I know that sounds cynical but more than 50 years of exposure to Houston city government has made me that way.

Anybody here have any idea when the Memorial-Hermann Branch Hospital on 1960 just north of 290 will open? The signage said it was to open last summer, but that didn't happen. I drove past it just last week and it still isn't open. What gives?

courtesy of the Houston Chronicle: SIGN OF THE TIMES / Glowing logo once hovered over the city that oil built For years, it hung over downtown Houston like some wacky corporate moon. Giant blue letters - Gulf - in an orange neon disc announced to land and air travelers that they were approaching the nation's oil capital. It was called "The Lollipop." At 58 feet tall, it was the world's largest rotating sign. And while the Gulf Oil Co. reveled in the giant corporate logo atop its neo-Gothic office tower, critics called it an 83-ton monument to tastelessness. Today, as Houston reassesses its downtown architectural heritage and recasts itself as a city it hasn't been in 50 years, the hotly debated landmark of the 1960s and early '70s is largely forgotten. Still, with nostalgia an undercurrent in the central city's reawakening - Enron Field, loft apartments, refurbished office buildings and even a popular new diner all feature a "retro" feel - there are those who fondly recall when the downtown skyline was bathed in an orange glow. "When I first came to Houston for the first time," recalled Gordon Campbell, a former Gulf budget analyst, "I flew from Tulsa on the company plane. That sign was one of the first things I saw. It really gave me a thrill." "I was very passionate about it. . . . It was an icon," added one-time Gulf chemicals division executive Charles Rhoads, who first visited the city as a young Gulf employee in the mid-1960s. "It was the definition of the skyline back then." Undoubtedly the sign that had been atop what is now the Chase Bank building was an eye-catcher. With 4,700 square feet of display area illuminated by 7,350 feet of neon tubing, the sign rotated at a steady 1 1/2 revolutions a minute. "Airline pilots used it as a beacon," boasted Sherman H. Hink, chairman and chief executive officer of Neon Electric Corp., the company that built the sign. "It was advertising. As far as I'm concerned, bigger is better. The object of any sign is to sell." Built at a cost of $250,000, the sign took six months to erect. When it was completed in the summer of 1966, it commanded immediate attention. Signs of the Times magazine, a trade journal, featured the sign on the cover of its September issue. Gulf Oil Co. issued postcards of it, noting on the back that the "landmark will guide travelers and residents to the heart of Houston." "It was a fantastic sign," Hink said. "People loved this sign." Or at least some people loved the sign. "I don't want to be disrespectful," said Bill Roher, former president of Gulf's chemicals division, "but I was somewhat aghast. I hadn't seen anything that garish in any of of the cities I had been in. It wasn't the only sign. Tenneco, all the other oil companies had signs emblazoned on their buildings. But nothing like Gulf. We outdid them. "It was very emblematic of the times. There were very aggressive advertising people who felt that was one way to sell gasoline." Former Houston Chronicle fine-arts editor Ann Holmes said the sign made the the old bank building look like an oversized gas pump, to the amusement of some. "It became a joke and not a very funny one," she said. Artie Lee Hinds, then and now a member of the Houston Municipal Art Commission, recalled that members of the advisory body abhorred the sign. "They didn't like it," she said. "It wasn't that the sign wasn't good-looking. The art commission didn't want any signs on any buildings, and this one was revolving around." Members of the commission quietly urged Gulf management to remove the sign as a public service. Today, such a sign, which finally came down in 1975, never would pass muster with a city ordinance that regulates sign height and size. Critics never warmed to the Gulf sign as they did - begrudgingly, perhaps - to the giant red neon Pegasus that revolved above the old Magnolia Oil Co. headquarters in Dallas. "The Pegasus is interesting," said Rice University architectural historian Stephen Fox. "I don't think the Gulf sign was offensive in any way. But it never claimed people's affection as a civic symbol the way the Magnolia emblem did in Dallas. It basically was a transposition and magnification of a Gulf filling-station sign. There was nothing special, nothing especially Houston about it." While the details of why the gargantuan sign was erected in the first place probably are lost to history - many of those involved in the project are dead - Fox suggested Gulf simply may have been trying to regain its lost prominence on the Houston skyline. When the sign was erected, Gulf, which traced its history to the 1901 discovery of oil at Spindletop, occupied a striking old bank building at Main and Rusk streets. Built in 1929 and standing 450 feet in height, it long had been the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. In 1963, though, Gulf's tower was eclipsed by the 600-foot-tall headquarters of the Humble Oil and Refining Co. (now Exxon Mobil) at 800 Bell Ave. The orange disc brought the Gulf Building's height to more than 500 feet - still short of Humble's height but topping its rival in garishness and illumination. By the time Z.D. Bonner became president of Gulf Oil - United States in the early 1970s, criticism of the sign had reached a crescendo. "It certainly was not an asset," Bonner said. "We had very few people - aside from those in the Gulf marketing department - who really liked it. And there were mechanical problems with it. It had suffered wind damage." When the massive porcelain panels were dismantled - a process Hink said took about a month - workers were surprised to find they were pockmarked with bullet holes. "We got a letter of commendation from some civic association for taking it down," Bonner recalled. The sign was replaced with a helicopter pad, which remains atop the building. Gulf Oil Co. lost its corporate identity in a mid-1980s merger with the San Francisco-based Chevron Cos. About the time the Houston sign was dismantled, Dallas' neon flying horse - erected in 1934 for an oil convention - was donated to the city. It was welded in place to keep it from toppling. In 1997, its neon lights went dark, victims of the elements and neglect. Admirers of the sign raised $600,000 from individual and corporate donors - including Magnolia's descendant, Exxon Mobil - to replace the 15-ton sign with a replica. The new sign was illuminated at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day 2000. No such resurrection was in the cards for the Gulf sign. Its porcelain panels were taken to Hink's workshop on the city's northwest side. Hink kept the small "R" from the sign's trademark emblem for himself and donated the rest to an employee who wanted to use the panels to build a barn. The barn was built, but the worker since has died, and Hink no longer remembers where the farm was located.

Today's Gen-X'ers whose butts were covered by disposable diapers may find the idea of real cloth diapers a little hard to believe, but it's true. Before disposables were invented and took over the baby-world, there really was a company that made a lot of money delivering clean diapers to peoples' homes. When my twins were born in 1969, my wife's sister gave us a one-year pre-paid subscription to the Tidy-Didy Diaper service. We got two large plastic buckets lined with sealable plastic bags. Every Friday the Tidy-Didy man would pick up the dirties and leave us 200 fresh clean diapers. We never washed a single one of them. The age of disposable diapers had not yet dawned in 1969, and believe me, with twins keeping us on the run, Tidy-Didy was the only way to go. Incidentally, the Tidy-Didy building on the southeast side burned to the ground sometime in the early 70s, at about the same time the first disposables were showing up in the stores and cutting into Tidy Didy's business. Coincidence? You decide.

If you're talking about more than two screens that could be true. I have clear memories of going to the Gulfgate multi-cinema in the late 60s, when two screens were still a novelty.

It would be nice if they ran it at hours real human beings are awake.

Please tell me that you are aware that Giff Nielsen knows more about football than any other sportscaster in town, because he's the only local sportscaster who actually played football in college and in the pros. In the off chance that you didn't know that, it's worth knowing that Giff was the leading passer in the country two years in a row at BYU, and he was a fair to middling pro QB with the Oilers. He was never a "great" QB, just a dependable backup. He knew his limitations, and he knew he would never get a job as a starter, which is why he took the TV job while he was still young and healthy. I've encountered him outside the TV station on several occasions and he really is one of the nicest and friendliest TV people I've ever met. He's a Mormon but I don't think he would mind me calling him a mensch.

What a wonderful and heartwarming article about two of the finest people this city has ever known. A million thanks to you for finding it and sharing it. Is it a recent article? I guess I'm asking if Jeanna is still living. It would be nice to know which retirement home she lives in, so we could send a card thanking her for being such an important part of our lives.

That's the place. Thanks. I wuz going nuts trying to remember that name. It was out on Telephone Rd in that area behind and around the old airport terminal.

"The eradication(??) of San Felipe was the beginning of a less extravagant era for this particular branch of Houston's sin." Look again suredid. Enlarge that page again and you'll see that it says "the erection of San Felipe etc etc etc. I'm old enough to remember reading George Fuermann's columns, and I recall his fondness for sly and mildly risque puns and jokes. I know he was referring to the construction of the old San Felipe Courts -- now Allen Parkway Village -- but I'm betting that it was NOT by accident or chance that he used the word "erection" when writing about the city's old Red Light District. No, that was deliberate. Howard Street -- which went east-west -- doesn't exist anymore. Several north-south streets on that old Sanborn Map -- Crosby, Arthur, Burton (now Buckner) and Valentine -- are still there , but only Valentine and Crosby extend north of West Dallas. I see on the latest Google map of that area that everything west of Heiner, east of Gillette, and north of West Dallas -- an entire neighborhood that was the old Red Light District in days of yore -- is now occupied by Allen Parkway Village, the City of Houston's Public Works Department and the Federal Reserve Bank. There's no trace of it anymore. A pity.

I remember back in the 60s and 70s there was a wonderful barbecue restaurant on Telephone Road, alongside the old part of Hobby Airport. It served up some of the best BBQ I've ever had in this town. They had a BBQ po'boy unlike any I've ever seen. It was an unsliced half loaf of bread, hollowed-out and stuffed with chipped or sliced BBQ. My mouth is watering just remembering it. I wish I could remember the name of that place.