Houston News Blog

​Of all the columnists in the history of Houston journalism, Sigman Byrd was easily the darkest and the most literary. From the late 1940s to the early '60s, Byrd wrote a column called The Stroller for the old daily Houston Press and later, briefly for the Chronicle. He always much favored the city's dark shadows, scruffy neighborhoods, and forgotten, often wrecked people over the big affairs of the day and Houston's high and mighty.

As David Theis put it in his 1994 remembrance :

Byrd ranged for copy far and wide in the Houston of his day. He listened to the alcohol-treated stories of the merchant sailors in the bars on 75th Street, near the Ship Channel. He ate chicharrones and drank Jax beer with Don Antonio and the Laredo Bar regulars (who knew him as Don Segismundo) just off Navigation. He hung with the Fifth Ward's assorted cats. But it was downtown and its environs that Byrd had a particularly strong feeling for. It was possible to make a human connection with downtown then. The way Sig Byrd wrote it, at least, it was impossible not to, not if you had any feeling for raw, unadulterated humanity.

Byrd's was the pre-Interstate Houston, a Houston of strongly distinct neighborhoods and districts with poetic names like Catfish Reef (the 400 block of lower Milam), Pearl Harbor (the corner of Hill and Lyons), Vinegar Hill (the eastern terminus of Washington Avenue) and the corner of Six-Bit Street (75th) and Canine Street, as one local wag designated Canal, because it was "dog-eat-dog."

Here, from his long out-of-print Viking Press collection Sig Byrd's Houston, is Byrd's report of the action in Catfish Reef, written in typically Byrd-ish noir style:

Courtesy Harris County Medical Examiner

Rederings of the last two unidentified Corll victims. The boy on the left will be buried Thursday.

​
Just a couple of weeks ago we went on a Houston 101 nostalgia trip about Houston's most notorious mass murderer, Dean Corll.

Today in our e-mail-box comes word that one of Corll's victims will be buried Thursday.

Harris County announced today that one of the unidentified victims left over from Corll's sad list of 27 dead young boys will be buried in the county's potter's field. He is one of only two bodies left unidentified from the 1973 event.

Who is he? Says the county:

The victim being buried is described as a white male, 15-20 years of age at the time of his death. He had dark brown hair about 7 inches in length. Personal effects believed to be his are being included with the remains in burial. They include a brightly striped swimming suit, cowboy boots, corduroy slacks, and a rope bracelet. This body was retrieved from the infamous boatshed in southeast Houston.

A longhaired teen runaway who for whatever reason couldn't stay home and instead found hell, like all of Corll's victims.

​The late summer of 1973 was a strange, strange time in Houston. The handiwork of a sadistic mass murderer had been discovered, and as more and more bodies were found, the city and the local media couldn't get enough.

Says one former Houstonian who was there:
 

When this thing broke, in early August of '73, the US mass murder record was 25, I think, by Juan Corona of California, who would hire illegal farm workers and then kill and bury them when they asked to get paid.

Well, when the Houston case broke, the radio stations would report it gleefully every time HPD pulled another body out of the ground.

I mean, it was literally, "We're only four bodies away from the record!" And people all over the city had their ears to their radios to keep up with the body count as it rose over the days.

Eventually 27 bodies of young boys were dug up, and lots of people believe there were more to be found if the police would just keep looking.

But by that point the murderer, Dean Corll, known as "The Candy Man," was dead.

​While Beyonce and Billy Gibbons (not to mention five or ten rappers) have undoubtedly sold more records, we're betting that neither of them have written anything that will endure as long as Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," "To Live's to Fly," or "If I Needed You," or any one of a dozen or so others. Nor are either known as much for their songs as they are for their singing and dancing and/or bandleading and guitar playing.

By those standards -- immortality and fame as a pure composer of music -- Van Zandt is easily Houston's most prominent songwriter.

What remains of the musical environment Van Zandt emerged from back in the '60s and '70s? The power of Google tells us more than we might want to know...

​It's a little-known fact that Clark Gable was -- at least for a brief time -- a Houston resident. While the original Hollywood male superstar is far more remembered for singlehandedly destroying the men's undershirt industry and delivering the finest breakup scene in history, his life in Houston was no less interesting.

​We're not sure why Houston 101 seems to be on a gay jag; maybe it's because a staunch defender of the Houston Texans opened our eyes to the fact we're secretly into that kind of stuff.

At any rate, in the glorious pre-AIDS days when closeted men could find dark corners to embrace their inner alternative lifestyle, where did they go?

Houston has plenty of places where the urge to merge was taken care of anonymously and in semi-private.

1. The Ripcord Bar Chutes. Behind the bar at Chutes the Ripcord was a seemingly incongruous wooden ladder. If you had to ask what it was for, you were in the wrong place. Upstairs was a pitch-black crawlspace where naked men did what comes naturally.

Why they had to go upstairs is not very clear to us, because we've always heard Chutes the Ripcord was a pretty out-there leather bar anyway. Longtime gay activist Ray Hill, our guide for this tour, tells Hair Balls that he still recalls going there to report on a police raid, and after the cops left he found a dozen or so frightened guys hiding upstairs, wearing any clothes they had grabbed in the dark.

Today, it's the site of the Empire Cafe.


View Larger Map

​The 1960s weren't a very pleasant time to be gay or lesbian for most people, but especially in Houston. Somehow the Bayou City wasn't as accepting of alternative lifestyles as it is today (and we're not saying it's Nirvana today.)

Police raids of gay bars were common. Common but bizarre, in the case of lesbians.

City ordinance Number 28.42-4 prohibited cross-dressing, and HPD and the courts interpreted that to mean -- believe it or not -- that a woman wearing pants with a zipper or a fly front was cross-dressing and could be arrested.

"Police would come into a bar and all the women would dash to the bathroom and come out with their pants turned around," longtime gay activist Ray Hill tells Hair Balls. "They'd waddle out with their Levi's with the zipper in the back, and it wasn't a pretty sight."

One of the most well-known lesbian bars at the time was the Roaring Sixties, on Shepherd north of Fairview.

Photos by Katharine Shilcutt

An empty giant on Riverside Drive, built in 1936.

​People often complain about Houston's flat, uninspiring terrain -- the topological equivalent of the doldrums, almost. But those people have probably never ventured south on Highway 288 to a sleepy neighborhood off MacGregor called Riverside Terrace. Long a stronghold of the marginalized yet affluent members of Houston society -- first Jews, then African-Americans, and now gays -- the neighborhood has been overlooked throughout the city's history.

Looping streets flow along the same path as Braes Bayou and the smaller gulleys that run through the neighborhood. Rolling hills of verdant green dip easily into kudzu-covered streams while Spanish moss hangs in dense curtains from the thick oak trees lining the neighborhood. In the middle of Riverside Terrace, a mossy pond sits in repose amidst a thicket of trees and the heavy, moist air. The streets are quiet here, home to some of the city's best examples of architecture from the late Art Deco and Mid-Century modern eras. These are some of Houston's finest homes that history has all but forgotten.

Riverside Terrace was established in the 1930s, a home for Houston's wealthy Jewish community who were forbidden by an unwritten gentleman's agreement from building or living within the WASP-y enclave of River Oaks. Families like the Weingartens, the Sakowitzes, the Battlesteins and the Fingers built their homes in the sleepy neighborhood just east of the Medical Center and Hermann Park.

​Ted Kennedy died this morning, as anyone on the Web already knows.

His death presents a problem of sorts for right-wingers, who despised him as much as they do Obama or the Clintons (or JFK and RFK back in the day, probably).

So how are they reacting?

The Lone Star Times blog is home to some of the most passionate conservatives in the city; moderators there are taking a "Don't speak ill of the dead" tack, deleting comments as being inappropriate.

"It is not asking too much of any fully mature adult to abide by rules of common decency and momentarily refrain from battle within one small corner of cyberspace," the moderator wrote. "It seems we have to go through this every time there is a thread marking the death of a prominent person. It is just not necessary and I get very weary of having to explain this to those readers who should know better."

Some deleted comments have been replaced with copy saying something like "Inappropriate comment for this day. Deleted."

How bad were those deleted comments? Look at some that were approved:

​Aside from the city's namesake, no 19th-Century Houstonian was more famous than Dick Dowling, the Irish-born saloonkeeper / businessman and Confederate war hero. In fact, when city leaders commissioned Houston's very first public monument in 1905, it was Dowling and not Sam Houston who got the honors, not least because Dowling was loyal to the Confederacy and Houston was famously not.

​Nowadays, being an astronaut just doesn't have the cachet it once did. But back in the 1960s, astronauts were celebrities, and an obscure neighborhood near Clear Lake was their Beverly Hills.

Timber Cove was a development of what today would be considered smallish homes -- no McMansions here -- on small cul-de-sacs and streets, surrounded by water and trees. Astronauts flocked there.

Anyone who's watched Apollo 13 remembers Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn Lovell, telling a NASA flack that reporters who want to put an antenna on her lawn "Can take it up with my husband...He'll be home on Friday!!"

That happened on Lazywood Lane, a small street in Timber Cove. As one history of the development put it (scroll down to page 48), four of the original Mercury 7 astronauts moved there, and, "Sharing a common goal at work, the neighbors became friends; friends became extended family and the subdivision evolved into a close-knit community."

​Some Houstonians -- mostly University of St. Thomas grads -- know that Howard Hughes lived for a while as a teen at 3921 Yoakum, now a campus building called the Hughes House. It's home to the theology and archeology departments.

But before that Hughes and his family lived in the Beaconsfield Apartments near downtown, or at least near where downtown was then.

And, just by going from the book Howard Hughes: Hell's Angel by Darwin Porter, the billionaire's legendary weirdness pretty much got its start there.

How weird? Well, from his home there "Sonny" would go out for bouts of mutual masturbation with a neighborhood boy. Which we guess is not that weird, maybe, especially if you compare it to what he and his mother were allegedly doing at the Beaconsfield.

​For such a big city, '80s Houston was in some ways still a small town. Case in point: the teenage ritual of cruising Westheimer, in which the fourth largest city in America did its best to impersonate a one-Dairy Queen town, one where all you can do is drive down the strip and then turn back around.

While cruising Westheimer has multiple connotations, especially as you approach Bagby, back in the Reagan Era, to most it meant getting in your car and driving aimlessly east from west Houston, gawking at the freakshow in the Montrose area, and turning around on Elgin and heading back out.

View Larger Map

Numbers: One of the few buildings that still has the same purpose today that it had back in the golden age of cruising Westheimer. They are also still playing the same songs and still using the same bottle of bathroom cleaner they had back then. (Much the same could be said for Mary's.)

This was Oil Bust Houston, and it looked then like Montrose might become a full-on slum. There were no condos along 'Theimer (as it was often called by the mullet set) and few fancy restaurants. From Montrose Boulevard all the way to what is now called Midtown, Westheimer was lined with little more than one "modeling studio" after another, and it seems like there were even more tattoo shops than there are now. The denizens and visitors to these businesses (not to mention the street hustlers, drag queens, punks and Guardian Angels that still lurk in the area) provided plenty for the hordes of suburbanites -- getting their first taste of freedom and big city life -- to gawk at from the safety of their Blazers and Cutlasses.

​At first, it seemed like a routine call to Houston cop C.M. Bullock. On June 23, 1965, a concerned relative of elderly couple Fred C. and Edwina Rogers had asked the police to check on the couple, as they hadn't been answering the phone for a few days.

Bullock and his partner forced their way into the locked house at 1815 Driscoll in Montrose and found nothing amiss. At first. Bullock did think it was odd that food had been left on the dining room table, so on a whim, he decided to open the refrigerator. And still nothing looked off.

Sure, there did seem to be an inordinate amount of meat in there, but hey, this is Texas. And then, just as he was closing the door, something caught his eye -- the severed heads of Mr. and Mrs. Rogers peeping out at him from the vegetable bins.

​Houston 101 is taking a bit of a road trip today in honor of George Strait. Our sister blog Rocks Off is counting down the days until Strait returns here for a non-rodeo appearance, and it put us in mind of the first time we'd heard a Strait song -- at the trial over one of the Texas political world's most notorious deaths.

Price Daniel, Jr. was the son of a former Texas governor and U.S. senator. Junior got elected to the legislature and made a name for himself as one of the reformers who tried to clean things up after the Sharpstown scandal (A bit of Houston real-estate bidness that played fast and loose with ethics laws). He became one of the youngest House Speakers in Texas history.

His private life, alas, wasn't that exemplary. After a divorce, he married a Dairy Queen waitress named Vickie from his home town of Liberty.

The marriage lasted until January 19, 1981, when he was shot to death by a .22 rifle held by Vickie.

​

Rice University's foundation story is amazingly checkered and includes spousal double-dealing, a secret will, a lengthy court battle, and finally, murder. A murder committed by the butler, no less, and one involving many of Houston's first families. Dominick Dunne would love this one...

William Marsh Rice arrived in malarial Houston as a 22-year-old in 1838, and after a few false starts, hit it big in the cotton business. By 1850, several of his siblings had moved to town and joined the family firm. (Two of these siblings settled on land that is now the headquarters of Music World Entertainment, the nerve center of the Beyonce/Destiny's Child Empire, and the antebellum house on that land was once the property of William Rice's nephew.)

View Larger Map

In 1867, the widowed Rice, by then one of the richest men in Texas, married an unintentional femme fatale. The widow Elizabeth Baldwin Brown was what passed for a blueblood in Victorian Houston, a niece of city founder Augustus Allen's wife Charlotte Baldwin Allen and the daughter of former mayor Horace Baldwin, who is not to be confused with her nephew Horace Baldwin Rice, who also served as mayor before and after the turn of the 20th Century.

Perhaps tired of all their spouses dying of tropical diseases, William and Elizabeth moved to the more salubrious climes of New York. Rice oversaw his Texas business from there, and on a trip back to Houston in 1891, he became enamored with the idea of devoting his estate to the foundation of an institute of higher learning here. Little did he know his devotion to that dream would wind up getting him murdered in his own bed...

​In the late 1970s, the explosion of stand-up comedy that eventually led to every half0sized burg having a strip-mall Laff Pit or Jokey McGags, complete with a bare-brick background, had yet to happen.

Stand-up clubs outside of LA and New York were few and far between. That started to change in 1978, when the Comedy Workshop opened in Houston.

Located on Shepherd Street, the small club (the Comics Annex was home for stand-up; the larger Cabaret part of the facility was for bigger acts) quickly attracted raw, edgy comics who went on to big things.

"What made it special, and what gave us such a great reputation that people moved here just to become regulars at the club, was that we totally policed each other and kept pressure on each other to write new material," Mike Vance, who was there from the beginning, tells Hair Balls. "If you stole jokes, you got kicked out. Simple as that. We produced some very good comics and very good writers."

The most famous was Bill Hicks, a local guy who appeared often. You never knew what you'd get -- a white-hot killer performance, or the back wall punched because of his frustration at an unreceptive crowd.

It may not look like much today, but back in the '50s and '60s, Magnolia Gardens was the place to be if you liked country music and rockabilly. The open-air dance hall/bandstand on the banks of the San Jacinto River was in a resort-like setting, with a restaurant or two and a few boat ramps scattered about the grounds.

View Larger Map

But the place is best remembered for the music. In his autobiography Whiskey River (Take My Mind), Texas honky-tonker legend Johnny Bush remembered as the place to go on a Sunday afternoon, where people would sit around in their bathing suits on a sandy beach at the riverside and take in shows by all the biggest country and early rock and roll stars.

When you think alternative societies, you may imagine the New Mexican or Californian semi-wilderness in the late '60s, NYC squats in 1990s or the Montana backcountry, um, probably now.

Try this one: The Galleria area, 1992.

That's when then-high schooler John Kyle and friends began a "new nation project" called the Principality of Freedonia, a micronation founded on libertarian ideals. We'll let a verse and the chorus of the Freedonian national anthem let you know what they were about.

People less fortunate than we,
Sadly to their governments kneel,
While our nation shines great and free,
A land of solace, land of zeal.

Oh, Freedonia, Freedonia the land that saves,
Freedonians never shall be slaves.

Despite our uncontrollable desire to sing along, no one wrote music to go with these lyrics, so we're stuck wracking our brains for tunes that would fit the words. Five minutes in and all we know is "Bohemian Rhapsody" is not in the running.

(And Freedonia obviously didn't have a Marxist bent, as the lyrics to Groucho's Freedonia anthem don't match up.)

Way up Bagby near the bayou, there stands a live oak that was old when the Allen Brothers arrived here and perpetrated the real estate scam of the Millennium. One of the few trees to have escaped the city's 173 years of boom times, the majestic oak owes its survival to its history as Old Houston's hanging oak. Or does it?

A plaque on the site tells one version of the story:

Many stories attached to the 400-year old history of this live oak. Some say that, during the days of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845), at least eleven criminals were hanged from its graceful boughs. Although others dispute the tales, the legend survives.

In 1896 a courthouse with jail was built nearby. Inside, criminals were hanged from scaffolds. Outside, beneath this tree, relatives, mourners, and onlookers gathered and waited.

A second courthouse building later occupied the site. When it was demolished in the 1960's to make room for the Albert Thomas Convention Center, a basement wall was left intact to protect the tree's root system.

The Old Hanging Tree is thought by some to be the oldest tree in Harris County.

Today the Old Hanging Tree is maintained and preserved by the City of Houston Civic Center Department.

Photo courtesy of KM&G-Morris

But there appears to be another hanging oak about a mile or two away.

According to Bayou City History, in his 1913 book True Stories of Old Houston and Houstonians, Dr. S.O. Young mentioned a hanging tree in what is now Freedman's Town that was also said to have been the site of many an execution. Young disputed the high number of hangings. He wrote that only three men were hung there - the first a white man named Hyde who ambushed a traveler and fled back east to Louisiana or Mississippi, from which he was legally expedited to Houston and hung in 1853. In 1868 and 1870, two black men each named Johnson were also hung from the tree.

Virtual Tourist paints a far more monstrous picture of the Freedman's Town hanging oak.

Photo by Emerald Wood Archives

Some bands are just fated to live fast, die hard and live a pretty corpse. Maybe no Texas group ever exemplified that credo better than the 13^th Floor Elevators, perhaps the first and certainly one of the most dramatic exemplars of a band that flew too close to the sun.

While rock historians know that story pretty well, only the most devoted know that one of the original members was murdered in a domestic dispute in Montrose.

Band lyricist and electric jug player Tommy Hall decreed early on that the band should never pick up an instrument without first dosing heavily on LSD, and let's just say that the Elevators picked up their instruments pretty often.

Nobody knew then what dangers lurked in long-term use of LSD, so the Elevators found out the hard way that their "quest for pure sanity" was a dangerous trip. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland once recalled trying to perform while high on a 1000-microgram hit; the audience started to glow, and then turned first into wolves and then into angels who had the power to determine if Sutherland would be allowed to live or condemned to die.

This was the kind of spiritual ordeal these guys taxed themselves with night after night -- Sutherland once recalled that the members dropped a few times a week every week for five straight years, even though the majority of their trips were bad ones, in his recollection.

The Sixties. A time when you could open a club called the Love Street Light Circus & Feelgood Machine. Unironically, too!

I mean, look at that picture. It looks like it's from a very bad Hollywood movie -- you can almost hear the lame attempt at psychedelic rock, the wavy light show, the tortured hippie-speak -- and yet it is real. People actually did this.

It was the epitome of being far out, man.

For three years, this club in a dilapidated warehouse played host to groups like the 13th Floor Elevators, Bubble Puppy and even Johnny Winter. It is believed that at some point, the audience (and perhaps even the performers) ingested drugs of some kind.

The club was on the third floor of the building -- bands (or their roadies) had to lug their gear up -- and featured the standard blacklights, posters and other groovy stuff. Those chair/sofa things in the picture were in what was called the "Zonk-Out" section of the room.

For decades, vital issues affecting the U.S. and Texas were hashed out in Suite 8-F of the Lamar Hotel in downtown Houston.

The suite had only two rooms and a kitchenette and it was decorated in whatever the relevant time period's definition of "tacky" was, but it became the Unofficial Capital of Texas.

George R. Brown of Brown & Root was the nominal host, but the guest list included people like Jesse Jones, owner of the Chronicle, William Hobby (owner of the Post), Clint Murchison, LBJ and John Connally, and people whose names now are familiar as identifying prominent buildings: Gus Wortham, Albert Thomas and Hugh Cullen.

From 8-F Johnson's political career was financed -- Robert Caro's epic biography of the 36th President is full of tales of Connally hauling suitcases of cash to and from the room -- and, just as importantly to those present, the Oil Depletion Allowance was savagely protected.

Houston 101 is a new running feature seeking to educate the ignorant masses on some of the more offbeat bits of our town, whether it's long-gone music places, bizarre murders, political trivia or odd bits of construction.

Rising out of the strip mall-studded, boundless and bare scrub prairie suburbia of far Southwest Houston, the Chong Hua Sheng Mu Holy Palace (12800 Ashford Point) presents us with one the city's more surreal tableau: something that looks like a Mayan Epcot Center with touches of the Far East, crumbling and forlorn, amid a huge empty parking lot in the middle of nowhere.

It was originally slated to have been the centerpiece of the headquarters for the Wu-Wei Tien Tao Association, an East Asian universalist religion. Under the leadership of the aging Master Cheung, the Tien Tao faithful had grand plans: alongside this grandly bizarre edifice, there were to have been homes, shops and daycares scattered about the eleven-acre site, much to the chagrin of many of the workaday neighbors.

Photo by Nothing to See Here