FilioScotia

You just answered your own question. It makes no sense to commemorate a historic battle anywhere but the very ground on which the battle took place. There are memorials and monuments for entire wars, and it doesn't make much difference where you put those, but a battle was fought at a particular place, and that's where the monument to that battle should be. To people who lost loved ones at San Jacinto, it's not just a battleground. It's holy ground.

Remember "Buck James"? The 1987 TV series set in Houston at a hospital remarkably just like Hermann Hospital. It was awful. Let us give thanks that it lasted only one season. Dennis Weaver played a Texas rancher with a medical degree who was clearly based on Dr. Red Duke. Visualize "McCloud" in a medical smock speaking ER medical jargon and you have "Buck James". Almost none of it was actually filmed in Houston and it lasted only 19 episodes from 1987 to 1988. If you don't remember this show -- lucky you -- here's everything you need to know. http://www.tv.com/buck-james/show/11026/ep...g=tabs;episodes

It doesn't work or even make sense to base or film any kind of show -- medical, legal or otherwise -- anywhere but in Hollywood. That's where the TV industry is centered and headquartered. Even if a show is about a particular place, like Chicago Hope, LA Law, or Boston Legal, the shows aren't filmed there. They're shot in Hollywood sound stages with exterior shots of the city edited in. Even NYPD Blue was shot in Hollywood. Back in the 80s, Houston Knights was a mediocre TV cop show, but only the exteriors were done in Houston. There was a doctor show supposedly set in Houston, about Hermann Hospital's world famous trauma unit, with Dennis Weaver playing a character patterned after Dr. Red Duke. It was awful and thank goodness it lasted less than one season. It too was filmed in Hollywood. Shows like Grey's Anatomy aren't about a particular town or a hospital. They're about relationships and "relations" between doctors and nurses. Like soap operas. They're all in fictitious towns in the midwest.

Then I am clearly thinking of another hotel that once stood across the street from it. My mistake. Thanks for weighing in and correcting me.

Point the arrow the other way. The old Traveler's Hotel was across the street in the block that's now a parking lot. And as I remember, it faced Main street at the Franklin end of the block.

That's a remarkable old photo. You can see Meyerland Plaza clearly there at the very bottom, alongside Post Oak as it goes south all the way across South Main. There's Hiram Clarke going south from Main up in the top left corner. Looking West from Meyerland there's South Rice, and what will be Chimney Rock. There were no houses west of Chimney Rock and North of the bayou, which is why Captain Herod took his plane in at that spot. The crash site couldn't have been much more than a mile from Meyerland Plaza. I love this picture. In the top right hand corner where Chimney Rock gets close to South Main you can make out faint traces of the old Sam Houston Airport. And at the corner of Chimney Rock and Belfort you can see the beginnings of what would be Westbury Square. Freakiest of all -- in the very top left hand corner I can actually see the house my first wife and I lived in about ten years after this photo was taken. It's on Simsbrook, four blocks east of Hiram Clarke. Clearly visible. Like I said, a remarkable old photgraph.

(August 21, 1988) In a story about local schools named for heroes, the Chronicle wrote: "At 10:22 p.m. on March 15, 1961, Capt. Gary L. Herod pushed forward the throttle on his T-33 single-engine jet trainer and left the runway at Ellington Air Force Base to begin a routine flight home to San Antonio's Kelly Air Force Base. Ten minutes into the flight, over the densely populated Meyerland and Westbury neighborhoods, Herod's plane suffered an engine "flame out." Herod, 31, decided to stay with the disabled plane, guiding the falling jet away from the neighborhoods, rather than parachute to safety. Two minutes later, the plane lay burning in a five-foot crater it created in the ground where it crashed at the end of Atwell Street near Braes Bayou. Its pilot lay dead nearby. (Atwell is two streets west of Chimney Rock) He left behind his pregnant wife and a 3-year-old daughter. Four years later, just a few miles from the crash site, the newly opened Herod Elementary School at 5627 Jason was dedicated in his name. Ivy Spain remembered when the plane went down, a mile from her home, on Willowbend. She remembers watching television when she "heard sirens, rushed outside and the sky was lit up. They broke in on the show and said a plane had crashed." In the days after, Spain collected money from neighbors to establish a fund in Herod's name. "I had been through a war myself," said Spain, who was living in her native England during World War II. "It's so easy to be a hero in wartime because everyone is around you. But to be a hero by yourself when you are all alone ... It was a very brave thing he did. He thought of the people on the ground even though he had a family of his own to live for." (And two years before, in February of 1986, there was another Chronicle story about the memorial plaque that once stood at Meyerland Plaza) "After Herod's death, people in the neighborhood collected about $3,000 for the Herod children's education. The Houston Independent School District named a school in his memory. Merchants at Meyerland shopping center planted a tree, dubbed the "Hero Tree," in his honor and in 1963, placed a marble and bronze plaque in front of the tree. The Air Force awarded Herod a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross. Today, the plaque is nowhere to be found."

Yes the school opened in 1965, and yes it happened at night. Obviously my memory isnt perfect, but I do remember the part about the plane staying in the air past a school yard because that's all anybody could talk about for several weeks. The crash and the school yard were equal parts of the story, and people marveled at how heroic Herod was by keeping his plane from crashing in the school yard. Or, maybe I just think that's what I remember, and I'm just getting senile here in my middle age.

I was a senior at Pasadena High School when this crash happened and it was a very big story for several weeks. I remember reading that the pilot stayed with the plane to keep it from going down in a school yard where children were playing. It went over the school and crashed in an open field not very far away. The pilot was killed because the plane was too low for him to eject safely. HISD renamed that school for Capt Herod, and the school children planted the memorial tree in Herod's memory at Meyerland Plaza, which is a considerable distance from the school.

It was posted on the website of KLRU TV, the UT Austin TV station that did a well received documentary on the Painted Churches about six years ago. http://www.klru.org/paintedchurches/churches.html

I didn't know it either until today, when I read about it in the Chron's neighborhood supplement that comes out every Thursday. Houston City Council has extended the ban on fireworks to areas outside the general purpose city limits. These areas are called "Limited Purpose Annexation Zones" -- commercial property strips along major thoroughfares the city has taken in purely for taxation purposes. I don't think they include any residential areas. FYI: this is how the city got Willowbrook Mall. It annexed a strip along Hwy 249 to 1960 and roped the mall into the city. It's how the city extends its reach and adds to the tax base without taking in residential areas with large blocs of voters who could band together and vote some people out of office. Anyway, here's a link to the Fire Department website, which has maps of these areas where city officials say the ban on fireworks will be enforced. http://www.houstontx.gov/fire/news/120506.html

In my surf-searching today, I came across this remarkable set of photos of downtown Houston in the late 20s and early 30s. It includes shots taken around the Coliseum in the summer of 1928, as the city was getting ready for the Democratic National Convention. Here's the link. http://www.sloanegallery.com/newpage117.htm I'm still searching for an explanation of that saloon picture, and I'm focusing on that reference to October 2 thru 7. I'm guessing there was some big event in Houston that week, of whatever year, and Houston bars (speakeasies?) had sent promotional cards out all over the country, and even out of the country, to let people know where they could go to get a drink if they were going to Houston that week. The bar is shown as a saloon because everybody outside of Texas thought all Texas bars were old west style saloons. Many still do. As for Toro Street, it's worth remembering that countless old Houston streets have disappeared over the decades to make way for new construction, residential development and freeways. It's also true that any number of old streets' names have been changed for one reason or another. One example: the street we now call West Dallas used to be San Felipe. It's why that old housing project was named the San Felipe Courts. Sooner or later, someone is going to find an old map or city plat with a street named Toro on it. I'm betting it will be within a few miles of downtown Houston, because in those days, all of Houston was just a few miles from downtown.

That was Downtown Memorial Hospital, the original flagship of what is now the Memorial Hermann Hospital system. My baby brother was born there in 1956. Downtown Memorial was closed and the property sold in 1979. The same block is now occupied by the 1100 Louisiana building.

Believe it or not, I found a website that says he was singing at a little honky tonk on I-45 up north of Conroe as recently as April of 2003. Check it out. http://www.thebulletin.com/archives/2003/april/royhead.htm And Johnny Lee is still out there singing and recording. These days he can be found in Branson Missouri most of the time. He doesn't have his own theater. I'm sure he sings at Mickey Gilley's Theater and other venues. Here's a link to his fan club. http://www.johnnyleefanclub.com/news.htm

Does anybody else here remember that restaurant/club Sonny Look had on Market Square in the early 70s? My dates and I frequented that place a lot because he booked in some pretty big name entertainers. I remember seeing the Four Freshmen, and anybody who ever saw those guys can testify to how great a show they put on. Ray Rogers and the Bojangles also performed there just before, or at about the same time that he was opening his own club Bojangles over on Franklin. Of all the local entertainers I've seen over the years, I still regard Ray and his group as the most talented and most entertaining. They just put on one helluva show. Ray gave Lisa Hartman her first singing opportunities. Speaking of, I know that Ray's now married to Jonni Hartman, and is Lisa's step-father, and Clint Black's step-father in law, but does he still perform anywhere? And as long as we're talking about Ray and the Bojangles, does anybody know whatever happened to Rex Kramer, the Bojangles' original front man? After his "thing" with Liza Minnelli, he seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth. Sometime around 1970, Liza Minnelli did some shows in Houston, and while she was in town she went to The Bojangles show one night. She and Kramer immediately went into heat for each other. She liked Kramer so much she took them all on the road with her as her backup group, but that was mainly to stay "close" to Kramer. He wasn't totally useless -- he arranged a lot of her recordings -- and was with her in Germany during the filming of Cabaret. Here are a couple of paragraphs from a Time Magazine article about Liza. written in 1972. "Unlike most of her romances, the affair with Rex ended with some unpleasantness. Rex's ex-wife is suing Liza for $500,000, charging alienation of affection. Rex, who now plays in joints in Houston, apparently saw a more unstable side of her nature than did most other people. "The pace she sets for herself is simply terrific," he says, "but she just can't slow down. She would worry about not sleeping and would start taking downers to help herself." He describes terrible tantrums, after which she would "literally rave, then collapse." Liza angrily rebuts him point by point and now claims that she knew all along that Rex was using her. Finally, to get rid of him in Germany, where he was such a nuisance that he was barred from the set of Cabaret, she says that she and her secretary, Deanna Wenble, arranged an elaborate, melodramatic scheme to make him think she had fallen in love with a cameraman. "He said he'd leave me only if I fell in love with somebody else," she explains." Kramer was banned from the sets because he was a monumental pain-in-the-ass who was always trying to insert himself into the production process. The producer and director had to put up with him because he was schtupping their star, but Liza also got tired of him and dropped the group. Kramer dropped out of sight, but Ray took over the group and kept it going as Ray Rogers and the Bojangles and the rest is history. But where is Rex Kramer now?

My sentiments exactly.

And not long after that, New Orleans built its first airport and named it for him. It was Moisant National Airport until 1962, when the name was changed to New Orleans International. Now it's Louis Armstrong International. I wonder if locals over there refer to it as "Satchmo" International? I wonder if the site of the 1911 Houston air show is the same location that later became Sam Houston Airport? That old airport off South Main was plowed under after WWII when developers bought the land to build Westbury.

The Penguins are officially "off the market" and not for sale, but they are open to finding a new home. Les Alexander has made it abundantly clear that his only interest in the NHL is as an owner. Not a landlord.

I became a member of the boy's choir when I started 7th grade in 1955. A little late but still a couple of years ahead of puberty. We lived in Pasadena and as luck would have it, there were several other choir members from Pasadena, so our moms took turns driving us into Houston for rehearsals every Wednesday. My mom eventually got tired of it, which forced me to take the bus. People today will find this hard to believe, but in the 50s, Texas Bus Lines provided hourly bus service between Pasadena and Houston. Every Wednesday after school, I caught the bus on Shaver, which went right past my school, Jackson Jr High, and for a dollar I rode all the way to the old Greyhound Bus Station at Texas and Crawford in downtown Houston. From there I walked down Texas to the old City Auditorium at Texas and Louisiana just in time for rehearsal, which started promptly at 4:15. After rehearsals around 6:30 I walked back to the bus station and caught the bus back to to Pasadena. The bus did a large loop around Pasadena picking up and dropping off passengers. Coming into Pasadena, it went south on Shaver to Southmore, east on Southmore to Tatar (now Pasadena Blvd), north on Tatar back to La Porte Rd, and then west again for one last stop at the Pasadena Drug Store before heading back into Houston. I got off at Tatar and Harris and walked the rest of the way home. I was 13 and 14 years old and I don't remember ever feeling nervous or afraid about riding the bus alone, or being in downtown Houston alone. I thought it was fun and I learned a lot about Houston. It really was a different world back then. Everything changed in the fall of 1957, when, at the age of 14 and a half, my voice changed and brought an end to my career as a boy soprano. You know -- the only other choir members I can remember were those other kids from Pasadena. Glenn Currier, Pete Shak, and Kenny Hilzendager. We all had to drop out when our voices changed.

I checked the alignment of highway vantage point, bend in the river and the courthouse dome on GoogleEarth just to see for myself. I didn't think the courthouse in Columbus is that close to the freeway. It's interesting because, you recall, that one of my guesses was the Wharton County courthouse in Wharton. GoogleEarth showed an identical alignment of highway vantage point, bend of a river and courthouse dome.

The Wharton County courthouse, looking eastward from Hwy 59 down whatever river runs through that area. The San Bernard?

This is the same website posted above by Gnu, but it's to the front page where there are links to other pages, including one with some fascinating photos of places where faint traces of the street car era are still visible. Someone went to a helluva lot of trouble to track down this collection of photos. The last remaining Houston street car is still in existence, and is being preserved in -- of all places -- Highlands. http://members.iglou.com/baron/

I agree. This Mr. Harriman was closer to that story than most of us, and something tells he already knows everything he wants to know about it. I'd let it go and leave him alone.

Somewhere around Navasota? Or La Grange? Is that a courthouse cupola I see peeking from behind those trees in the distance? Your photos remind me of a very funny sight I wish I'd taken a picture of on the Interstate going north out of Chattanooga Tennessee. I've been through there a couple of times and it was still there on my last trip in the late 80s. On a high hill outside Chattanooga, there are -- or were -- two large hat-box style water tanks -- the same kind and size our refineries down here store oil in. I'm assuming they're water tanks because they're labeled -- in very large letters readable from a mile away -- HOT and COLD. I laughed so hard I almost drove off the road.

It just seems like at least half a million. Give or take. I remember when you had to drive through every town and wide spot in the road because they hadn't built the loops around the towns yet. In those days it took nearly three hours to drive from Houston to Lufkin because you had to go through downtown Cleveland, downtown Livingston and downtown everyplace and stop at every red light. Nowadays, it's a straight nonstop shot all the way to Corrigan, where you encounter your first stop light because Corrigan is the first town of any size without a loop to go around it. Going to Lufkin is now a lot quicker than it used to be, and you know what? I miss those old days because when you drove through a town, you developed a feeling for it. You recognized houses and buildings, street names and you felt like you "knew" the town, even if you didn't know anyone who lived there. I know every curve, hill and bridge between here and Angelina County. I remember stores, cafes and gas stations that aren't there anymore. Places like the Tower Cafe just north of Porter on old 59. It's been gone for a very long time. I've wondered for more than 50 years who is buried in that small cemetery in the median just north of the San Jacinto River Bridge south of Cleveland. It hasn't always been in the median because the median hasn't always been there. 59 used to be a 2-lane highway, and the cemetery was about a hundred feet from the road. The northbound side was the original highway. I think one of these days I'll stop and check it out. For years there was a gas station in Leggett owned by a man with the memorable name of R.A. Vanderslice. He had his name on the front of his gas station and I always wondered if he was as interesting as his name. Another thing I've noticed over the years is how those sawdust mountains have disappeared. Was a time when every town in east Texas had at least one sawmill, and a huge pile of sawdust alongside it. Then sometime in the early sixties, one of the wizards at Southern Pine Lumber Company in Diboll found a use for that sawdust. He mixed in some chemicals and compressed it, and invented particle board. That was the end of the sawdust mountains. The lumber mills now use every ounce of every tree and every ounce of bark and sawdust. Nothing is wasted, but I still miss seeing the sawdust mountains.