Houston, where it is against the law to make “Goo Goo Eyes,” to give the title of the ordinance, or for women to wear slacks, though the courts have refused to uphold the last. Where enough coffee comes into the port annually to give every American more than forty-three cupfuls. And where Roman Catholic nuns ride the city buses free, a tradition believed to date from the nuns’ heroic work during a yellow fever epidemic in the nineteenth century.
Vick’s Park, around 1900, an area now covered by the cloverleaf at Waugh and Memorial Drives and the Allen Parkway.
Houston, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated Al Smith for the presidency in 1928, is said to be dominated by conservatives who give the welfare state no quarter. Yet William S. White, writing in Harper’s in 1959, said Houston “was ... the first large community in the United States to feed the depression hungry with no questions asked, no kind of means test, no social worker’s cross examination, no stigma, and no nonsense.”
Longhorns at E. H. Marks’s ranch, near the western edge of the city limits.
Nothing about Houston is more enigmatic than its weather. The weather long ago made Houston the site of one of its principal experiment stations.
W. D. Bedell has written that Houston, more than any other big Texas city, is a crossroads of weather. “Here we can have Dallas weather or Caribbean weather or Colorado weather or Arizona weather,” he wrote. “Houston gets more Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico weather than any other major Texas city. That is the steam bath kind of weather.”
Houston gets more steam bath weather than any other kind. In 1952, when the Prudential Insurance Company transferred scores of employees from New Jersey to its new Southwestern Home Office in Houston, it prepared an immigrant’s guide. The question “How’s the Climate?” was answered: “To be perfectly frank about Houston’s weather, even a Texan wouldn’t brag about it in the summertime. It’s hot and it’s sticky.”
