You are Sugarland bound.[1]
3
Many “think of Houston as a cluster of mud huts around the Shamrock Hotel, in the cellars of which people hide from the sticky climate, emerging at long intervals to scatter $1000 bills to the four winds,” Gerald Ashford wrote in 1951. Such a fancy formed a dominant theme of Houston appraisals during a brief and a bizarre period. The myth that Houston’s population consisted mainly of the rich was absurd, but the millionaire legend, though arresting to the world, was a liability to Houston. For one thing, it obscured the city’s reality, which was itself exceptional enough.
The Shamrock Hilton Hotel, built by the wildcatter Glenn H. McCarthy at a cost of $21,000,000, opened on St. Patrick’s Day of 1949 with what turned out to be a spectacle. Conrad Hilton took control of the hotel in the spring of 1955. The two dates roughly mark the period of the legend’s vigor.
Still, it was in some ways an exhilarating time, and it left Houston with an extravagant folklore. The goose hung high. The legends die reluctantly: An oilman was said to have offered his daughter $5000 for every pound she lost; a Houston man who sent a new Cadillac to Europe to have a $5000 custom body put on its chassis was said to have told the craftsmen to “Throw the old body away;” wanting to play a joke on a colleague who was traveling in Europe, another Houstonian had a fair-sized roller coaster built in the traveler’s wooded yard.
But the maybe-so stories are less remarkable than many of the authentic ones. A Houston oilman well known for eccentricity and boyish hedonism was staying at a hotel in Los Angeles one night in 1955. He wished to awaken at a certain early hour the next day, so he made a long-distance call to a man on his staff in Houston and told the man to call him in Los Angeles at the specified hour the next morning. In 1957 a Houston high school girl received a graduation gift from her father, an oilman: wrapped and tied in her school colors, it was a map and a legal assignment of the overriding royalties in a lease near Odessa, in West Texas. A memorandum said a geologist expected the lease to produce oil for at least fifty years.
Roy H. Hofheinz, the mayor of Houston in 1953, disclosed at a press conference that he had recently made his first million dollars, though he was unsure of the exact date. “You just don’t notice things like that,” he said. The oilman Robert E. Smith has described newspaper estimates of many fortunes as “paper profits.” But some fortunes were as surprising as they were real. In 1957, when a Houston oilman’s former secretary died at the age of eighty, her estate was found to be worth $790,031.
A query by a New York matron, visiting Houston for the first time, showed America’s credulity in Houston’s millionaire legend. Passing the Rice University campus—three hundred acres of lawn; buildings in Byzantine, Moorish, Italian, and Spanish architectures—she said, “Tell me, who lives there?”
