Quirky Houston history? The Chronicle’s readers have answers
One morning in the mid-1980s, an Andrews & Kurth secretary on one of the top floors of the Exxon Building happened to glance out her window — and into the eyes of a pilot navigating his pre-World War II Stearman biplane through the skyscraper canyons of downtown Houston. The shocked secretary didn’t know it at the time, but the daredevil buzzing by was the late Jack Blalock, co-owner of the Backstreet Café and, as friends can attest, a wild man in many ways. (According to his 2004 Chronicle obituary, he had been a pilot in Southeast Asia for Air America, the CIA front, and once took it upon himself to walk across Africa.)
That morning in the mid-1980s, Blalock was dropping leaflets onto downtown streets in protest of Iran-Contra demonstrations. His escapade, as recalled in an email from Rick Hagens this week, doesn’t necessarily rank with “The Eagle has landed” in the annals of Houston aeronautical history, but if you’re compiling a quirky, between-the-niches history of Houston — see my request for suggestions in last week’s column — it might qualify as a contender.
“The FAA took exception to Jack’s antics, and dispatched a helicopter to follow the rogue biplane,” recalled Hagens, who was Blalock’s insurance agent. “Jack beat the FAA chopper back to his landing strip well out the Gulf Freeway, so the authorities were able to impound the aircraft but could not prove that Jack had been the pilot.”
Larry McMurtry’s favorite Texas city — “an opportunist’s delight,” he once called it — has always offered both fun and opportunity, and Blalock, it seems, took full advantage of both. He’s the quintessential quirky Houstonian.
Speaking of aeronautical history — and of famous people passing through — former Chronicle reporter Jim Higgins recalled writing a Chronicle Magazine story years ago about Charles Lindbergh at Ellington Field. Shortly after World War I, the young and not-yet-famous pilot and a few other flyers spent the winter living in an abandoned barrack. To ward off the cold, they cut up floorboards to fuel fires.
Back to Blalock-style quirky: Larry Vecera nominates Roy Bonario, who opened Houston’s first comic-book store in about 1970. Roy’s Memory Shop was originally on Bissonnet, then for many years in a castlelike building in Westbury Square and during its final years on Hillcroft. Bonario and his longtime assistant, Ernie, are beloved figures in the comic-book community,
Vecera wrote.
He put it this way: “In the beginning there was Roy. And Roy was good. Roy begat Ernie. And Ernie was good. From Roy and Ernie comic books flowed out into the lands of Houston. And they were good comic books, for Roy would not contemplate evil.”
The late Red Adair, the legendary oil field firefighter, might not have been all that quirky, but an Adair-related incident Rob Hallett recalled certainly qualifies. It seems the old Boots and Coots guys got together for an anniversary party at the downtown Petroleum Club (also in the old Exxon Building). In the presence of executives decked out in tuxes, flame-red bow ties and matching cummerbunds, waiters wheeled in a massive ice-carving centerpiece in the form of an oil rig. Unknown to club management, the carving had been soaked in kerosene, and when it came time to present awards, a waiter lit the rig.
Unfortunately, these worldrenowned firefighters underestimated the height of the flames. In Hallett’s words, “All hell broke loose, and the ceiling was damaged and the sprinklers went off and wetted the guests, as lore goes.”
Who knows, maybe that was the first and only time a fire befuddled the old Hellfighter. Other local firsts include the first automobile owners in Houston, as suggested by Jay Woodard, who’s been working on his family genealogy. He’s found that a man named George M. Hawkins was likely the first Houstonian to take possession of a gasolinepowered vehicle; John H. Kirby and Howard Hughes were among the earliest.
In 1903, C.L Bering, a Woodard relative, made the first automobile trip from Houston to Rockport. According to an old account called “Oxcarts to Airplanes,” “every town cheered him on, and city officials bade him welcome. He and his passengers found the prairie road blocked by cattle at one point. Bering tried to stampede the herd by sounding his horn; instead the cattle lowered their head and charged. The autoists escaped unharmed.”
Also in 1903, one T. Brady earned a first of his own. On April 1 of that year, Brady became the first Houstonian to be arrested for a traffic violation. He was fined $10 and costs for speeding on Main. According to police, he had exceeded the 6mph speed limit and had caused a disastrous runaway.
Reader Jay Oates credits former Gov. John Connally with a Houston first of sorts. In 1967, the governor tried to lure the 50,000-member National Association of Homebuilders to Houston for its annual convention. The group declined his invitation, because, as Texas Monthly put it some years back, “there was no way conventioneers would meet in a state so uncivilized that a man couldn’t even buy a drink.”
As Oates pointed out, this spurned invitation strengthened Connally’s resolve to bring “liquor-by-the-drink” to Texas. It took a while, and the battle was hard-fought, but the governor and the tourist industry prevailed when an amendment to the state constitution in 1970 made liquor by the drink legal in Texas for the first time in 50 years.
We have other firsts, of course, including all those innovations that continue to flow from the Texas Heart Institute and other prestigious medical institutions, as Mimi Swartz documents in her fascinating new book “Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart.” Theresa Gregorio-Torres mentioned another: Dr. William A. Spencer, who established one of the nation’s first polio treatment centers in Houston and went on to found the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research in the Texas Medical Center.
Thanks, dear readers, for all the suggestions — too many to mention in a single column — but let’s end with music. George Craig, speaking for older Houstonians, urged me to look beyond the magnificent Beyonce; he suggested such Houston originals as Billy Gibbons, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clint Black, Billy Harper, Wilton Felder and Robert Earl Keen.
Chris Elhardt had a similar idea. She suggested her husband’s old UH roommate. As the Houston Press noted a couple of years ago, the old roommate grew up in public housing on Allen Parkway (San Felipe Courts), worked as a busboy at the Rice Hotel, performed regularly at the Act III Club (known for its gyrating go-go dancers in the front window) and was a member of an early folk group called the New Christy Minstrels. The fellow’s name, in case you haven’t guessed, is Kenny Rogers.