Houston’s gusto in the 1950s was epitomized by “M” Day, as July 3, 1954, was called. When statisticians divined ahead of time that the city’s metropolitan population would reach one million on that date, a festival was planned to welcome the millionth citizen. Houston Bucks were printed in a denomination of $1,000,000. A huge thermometer, its peak registering 1,000,000, was put at the Rice Hotel corner and the reading raised a notch a day. Thousands of auto-bumper signs said “I’m One in a Million—Houston.” Many concerns changed their postage-meter messages to read “Houston’s a Million Strong.”
At a town meeting held in Hermann Park on July 3, Mr. Million was identified as B. C. McCasland, Jr., who moved to the city the day before from Clinton, Mississippi. Aged thirty-six, a geologist, and the father of five children, he typified the city at that moment. Receiving gifts said to be worth $10,000, he was flown to the eleven cities then larger than Houston—to talk about Houston. He moved away some time afterward, but “M” Day may not have been premature. A year and a half later, when the Bureau of the Census estimated the populations of Houston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Washington, the population of Houston was put at 1,077,000.
One of the earliest known sketches of the Port of Houston, probably in 1866, showing approximately the same area as the [previous photograph].
The Satilla, inaugurating ocean commerce at the Port of Houston in August, 1915, attracted crowds of sight-seers. The deep-water Houston Ship Channel was completed the year before.
The downtown building boom of 1927, which was unequaled until the first years of the 1960s: In various stages of construction are the Niels Esperson Building, the Lamar Hotel (lower left corner), the Gulf Building, an addition to what was then the Second National Bank Building, and, on the right, the West Building. The building with three white domes, on the left, is the old Carnegie Library; next to it is the old First Presbyterian Church. In 1947 the F. W. Woolworth Company bought this half-block for $3,050,000, or at the rate of $2,000 a front inch.
The first Houstonian to fly an airplane, one he built himself, was L. L. Walker, in 1910. The plane, above, was a Bleriot-type with a forty-horsepower engine; it flew at a peak altitude of three hundred feet and had a top speed of nearly thirty miles an hour. The photograph—Walker, at the controls, is hidden by the wing—was made at the start of an attempt to fly to Galveston late in 1910. He reached La Marque, well over half way, and prudently decided to return. Walker died in 1960, aged seventy-one.