The Man With Candy Read Free Page B

citizens who step from air-conditioned homes into air-conditioned limousines and drive to air-conditioned offices, taking their ease in the evening at air-conditioned restaurants and clubs and watching air-conditioned sports events. They are the lucky ones. The typical working-stiff Houstonian is drenched by perspiration except when he is drenched by rain.
    In recent years, this community so lacking in meterological advantage has been second only to Orange County, California, in rate of growth, moving quickly from what one observer calledwilderness to bewilderness in a tiny parenthesis of time. World War II accelerated the exploitation of the Gulf Coast’s rich hoards of oil and sulphur and natural gas, and rural depressions after the war sent thousands of hungry farmers sputtering toward the city in their jalopies. Battening on both trends, Houston doubled and trebled and quadrupled its population, and its growth shows no signs of abating. Along the fifty miles of the Houston Ship Channel, linking the city to the Gulf of Mexico, a massive marine-industrial complex has risen from meadows that once were the domain of muskrats and mink. Rice and wheat and other grains are sluiced into ships from giant spouts, while sweating blacks wearing respirators level the loads with rakes. Tons of baled cotton and whole boxcars of paper move out of the port, and so many gallons of oils and acids and liquefied gases and other petrochemical products that Houston has moved to third place among U.S. ports in total tonnage, even though the city itself has all the seafaring atmosphere and tradition of Indianapolis.
    Unemployment is low, especially among skilled laborers and artisans, and the workingman makes enough money to live comfortably. His immediate superiors, the foremen and managers and supervisors, move into tony areas like Memorial and Tanglewood, sometimes buying more than they can afford, falling for real-estate come-ons designed to appeal to their competitive natures (“Your subordinates cannot afford to live here”). The oil rich wallow in their oil riches, increasing every year.
    One Houston millionaire bought a hotel and assigned his wife to redo it, thus indulging her taste for interior decoration on a grand scale; he built public fountains and named them after himself, and he stocked his ranch with exotic game and rode to the hunt on half-tracks with machine guns. A Houston woman reported the theft of a mink coat—from her pickup truck. A furrier who knew the tastes of his rich customers sent out a letter: “I am taking bids from several people on a mink bedspread…. Thebidding will start at ten thousand dollars if you desire the bedspread to be the only one in Texas, or at twenty-five thousand dollars if you desire the bedspread to be the only one in existence.” Roy Hofheinz, creator of the Astrodome and former Houston mayor, said he thought he had made his first million by the time he was forty, but he was unable to pinpoint the date. “You just don’t notice things like that,” Hofheinz said. Not in Houston.
    This emphasis on the stockpiling of money has not always left time and energy for community planning, for human problems and sharings and mutuality. Forty-three years ago, Houstonians were advised by hired consultants to decide whether they were “building a great city or merely a great population.” The city fathers opted for population, for economic growth, for more and more residents with more and more spending power. Through the years, any regulations that would inhibit the dollar flow have been summarily rejected. Thus Houston finds itself in 1973 with no zoning laws. If a man wants to set up a chili stand next to a monastery or shooting gallery by an old folks’ home, no zoning law can stop him. The attitude toward public advertising is equally laissez-faire; despite the proximity of Lady Bird Johnson’s aerie to the west, Houston has never been able to enact reasonable billboard control and the