Random Facts about Houston

My grandmother sent me an article from the Chronicle last night that mentioned a series of stories from the 1920s and 1930s in Houston. I found some of the information quite interesting and thought they deserved a mention here.

Oil used to cost .25 cents a barrel, and cotton was .05 cents a pound!

In 1928, the price of a pound of cotton, a cornerstone of the state economy, was 18 cents. By ’31 it had dropped to 5. Making matters worse, a severe drought parched the Southwest in ’31, destroying crops and leading to foreclosures on many small farms.

Oil suffered a similar fall, from $1.10 per barrel in October of 1930 to 25 cents in early 1931.

Hobby Airport was purchased by the City of Houston in 1937 for just under $300,000. I found out from Wikipedia that it also used to be called Howard Hughes Airport.

On May 12, 1937, the Chronicle reported that Houston City Council had appropriated $356,400 to buy a private airport on Telephone Road from Houston Airport Corp. (The cost was later reduced to about $298,000.) At the time, the airport was limited to 10-passenger planes, so the city widened and lengthened three existing runways and added another.

The Houston Press is not 75 years old (it’s actually 20 this year), but until 1964 there was another paper in Houston called the Houston Press.

The Chronicle opposed Hofheinz’s candidacy and two years later came out against him when, at age 24, he ran for Harris County judge against incumbent W. Henry Ward. The Houston Post and the Houston Press also lined up against Hofheinz initially, but as the campaign intensified, both papers switched to Hofheinz.

It used to take 11.5 hours to fly 14 passengers from Houston to New York. If it were still that way I guess we would have a lot more passenger rail in the states.

Braniff and Eastern airlines were the first to bring in 14-passenger planes, which took 111/2 hours (with frequent stops) to fly from Houston to New York and nine hours to fly to Chicago.

The San Jacinto Monument cost about 1 million dollars to build in 1939.

Festivities on April 20-21, 1939, celebrated the dedication of the San Jacinto Monument and museum at the scene of the battle that 103 years before had won Texas its independence from Mexico.

Jesse Jones himself designed the 570-foot shaft surmounted by the Texas star. During planning for the Texas Centennial in 1936, Jones had obtained a $400,000 federal grant to help build the monument and the museum in its base. Thinking the amount insufficient, he persuaded the centennial commission to increase it to $1 million.

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