As it inks arena’s renaming, UH shouldn’t forget Hofheinz’s legacy
Unpacked boxes clutter the sprawling brick home in the Champions area where Mary Frances Hofheinz is still settling in. Elegant antiques and tapestries adorn the living room. On a wall in the entry way, the 87-year-old widow showed me the first thing she hung in the house.
“There’s my judge,” she said, her green eyes sparkling a little as she pointed to a painting of a young Roy Hofheinz, with his signature horn-rimmed glasses and dark hair slicked back.
To her, he’s still “the judge,” that firebrand, cigar-chomping former Harris County judge and Houston mayor who dreamed up the world’s first air-conditioned domed stadium and got it built when many said it couldn’t be done. She was his longtime secretary, and the two later married after his first wife, Irene, died.
Mary Frances could probably never run out of stories about him.
One of her favorites was the time just after he took office as mayor in the early 1950s. Two men with a contracting com- pany paid a visit to City Hall. From outside, she could hear yelling. Then suddenly, the men hurried out. She said she watched as the mayor literally kicked one in the rear end.
“He said he wasn’t going to take bribes, and he didn’t,” she told me in an interview last week. “That was my first impression of his honesty.”
These days, she is wishing the fine folks over at the University of Houston would show some of the same integrity.
Decades after UH agreed to call the basketball arena the Hofheinz Pavilion in exchange for a $1.5 million gift, the school plans to strip the name from the venue. The reason isn’t nearly as well-intentioned as renaming efforts we hear about these days involving namesakes with Confederate affiliations.
In this case, the noble cause is money.
The university announced plans to rename the facility af-
ter an anonymous donor offered up $20 million toward a major renovation. To make matters worse, UH apparently didn’t even call the Hofheinz family to let them know. They read about it in the newspaper.
‘Forever situation’
After months of conversations between the family’s attorney, John Raley, and the school went nowhere, UH moved last month to have the 1969 agreement dissolved in court. The family responded with a lawsuit, a step that Mary Frances said nobody wanted to take.
“We don’t want to cause them any problems,” she said. “We just want them to honor their agreement.”
She said she was there when a handshake initially sealed the deal. She said the athletic director at the time asked to talk with Hofheinz and later came by the Astrodome for a meeting. She remembers UH officials sounding desperate, asking for onethird of the money needed to complete the facility.
In her recollection, it was school officials who suggested putting the Hofheinz name on the building, not only to honor the judge, but also his late wife, for whom the family’s foundation was named.
“It didn’t take long to make a decision,” Mary Frances recalled of her husband. “He stuck out his hand and said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ ”
Later, a written agreement was drawn up.
“I know that the judge felt like it was a forever situation,” she said.
The judge loved UH, Mary Frances said. He had attended the school and met Irene there. The arena wasn’t the only cause he funded at UH. Among them, he helped the marching band get to bowl games when it couldn’t afford to go, and Mary Frances remembers band members returning the favor one Christmas by showing up to the couple’s River Oaks home to play carols for him.
In the 1960s, when tuition couldn’t cover costs and enrollment was falling, he lobbied the Legislature to allow UH to enter the state university system, according to the lawsuit.
Nothing is impossible
For Mary Frances, the renaming issue is personal. But she said reneging on the deal also sends a bad message to students. And with the name goes the history.
The judge’s influence on Houston goes far beyond the Astrodome. In his first year as mayor, the lawsuit states, Hofheinz took steps to avoid the race riots happening in other cities; he removed “white” and “colored” signs from city buildings and swimming pools. He led efforts to bring Houston its first National League baseball team, the lawsuit notes, and insisted that any stadium where the team played would freely admit people of all races.
Still, the Hofheinz Pavilion is the only Houston monument that bears his name.
I asked his widow what he’d think of UH’s plan.
“I think he would just be terribly disappointed,” she said, standing in her kitchen after showing me an album of old photos. “I think he would try to talk and reason with them. He was always good at that.”
It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to force UH into doing the right thing. Perhaps the university feels there’s no way it can reject $20 million. I don’t know; officials wouldn’t talk to me for this column. But there’s got to be a compromise that doesn’t result in the university breaking its bond. Maybe a creative fix like the grand huckster himself might have devised.
Nothing is impossible. Just remember the Astrodome.