Summer of '76

A few front page photos from the South Belt Press in the summer of 1976

Cathie Hawkins (now Orozco) was a twirler at Dobie and featured on the front page of the South Belt Press in the summer of 1976 when she was selected as a twirler for Sam Houston after attending Blinn. In the small-strange-world category, I, who grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same high school, taught at Blinn, and attended Sam Houston, did not meet Cathie until 2004 at a church in College Station that we both attended. And even then, we didn't figure out how much we had in common until we ended up on the same Dobie band page on Facebook just last year. 

In other news, without social media or texting or cable news stations with programming of any interest to a young person in the summer of 1976, they actually found things to do, anyway. Behold, Stringazar, crocheted by Reva Lazar and Lisa Stringer over the summer when it was too damn hot to possible be outside all the time. 

Not that the heat kept us inside for long. The Sagemeadow park on Sageyork, brand new, didn't even have nets on the tennis courts yet when Rickey Armstrong and Alan Graham tried them out in the first weeks of June.

I remember playing on these courts as a kid in the late 70s. Tennis seemed to be very big, I suppose with the popularity of Billy Jean King still fresh. Everyone played. Most of us didn't play well, but we certainly tried.

This was when kids were left to their own devices all summer long, playing outside, in the culvert and ditches catching crawdads under rocks, riding banana seat bikes with flags up to the Sagemont Rec pool if you were lucky, grabbing a bite at the Snack Shak, or 7-11. Buying baseball trading cards and chomping all the gum at one time. There were still drive-ins to pile into the back of the truck together and sit through. You went to the Skate Ranch and boogied to the disco. The skates were metal. So were the backyard swingsets, where you could slice an artery at any moment. Skateboards were really narrow. Yo-yos ruled. So did Shrinkydinks. Going on family vacations in your conversion van (or station wagon) with the eight track player, bouncing around in the back with no seatbelts, reading comic books and playing the license plate game to pass the time: classic.

Was there any summer as iconic?

Nadia Comăneci at the summer Olympics kick started the gymnastics craze for every girl under the age of 15. 

It was the Bicentennial, with the quarters that had the patriot drummer minted on them. The July 4th stuff went on forever. 

Movies that year: Rocky, The Omen, Carrie, The Bad News Bears, Taxi Diver, King Kong, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Freaky Friday, the list is ridiculous.

TV? The Bionic Woman, Laverne and Shirley, Family Feud, the Gong Show, Charlie's Angels, The Muppet Show all debuted in 1976. And we were still watching Happy Days, Barney Miller, Baretta, The Six Million Dollar Man, Carol Burnett, Welcome Back Kotter, Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, Maude, The Waltons, Bob Newhart, Barnaby Jones, Hawaii 5-0, M*A*S*H*, Kojak, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, Little House on the Prairie, Police Woman, Rhoda, Good Times, The Rockford Files, Candid Camera, Hee-Haw, Soul Train, Lawrence Welk.

As a kid? Electric Company! Fat Albert! Captain Kangeroo! Schoolhouse Rock!

And songs that summer were almost entirely disco-tastic: Elton John and Kiki Dee's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart"; Abba's "Dancing Queen"; the BeeGees "You Should be Dancing"; "Shake Your Booty" by KC and the Sunshine Band.

Shakey's Pizza Parlor at Almeda Mall

In the June 3, 1976 Leader, Shakey's announced its Grand Opening in Almeda Square.

Free Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers to the first 150 ladies! and carnations! and Flying Saucers!

May 1976

Front page news from May, 1976:

The Sagemont Rec Center pool opens on weekends in May. That high dive scared me to death as a little kid. This is where I, and hundreds of other kids, learned to swim each summer while the big kids did insane flips off of the boards on the other end of the pool.

Homer Ford for County Commissioner

Eddie Sawyer with the Pig Trough supplied by Farrell's 

Easter 1976

The Sagemeadow Easter Egg Hunt, with 1200 real eggs boiled and dyed for the occasion.

The Haygood boys' Easter baskets

Ah, Easter baskets. Filled with fake green grass (if memory serves, most of the other colors came later) that you'd be finding by the strand in dusty corners of your house for the rest of the year. They'd stick to your bare feet like nothing else.

We always dyed eggs with food coloring, although I think we tried out some of those kits that had the thin little stickers you could apply to your boiled eggs. I remember their warm weight as you dunked them, as patiently as you could, willing them to turn some brilliant hue instead of the pastel color they would inevitably turn out to be. 

We had plastic eggs around this time, but they weren't nearly as fun, except when you were hunting them all over your backyard to try and discover the most diabolical hiding places your grandmother could come up with. It made sense to use plastic in those cases, because there'd always be that one no one found or remembered hiding that showed up in August. 

And, of course, there was always the pièce de résistance of every basket: the chocolate bunny. Ears first, always and forever.

April 1976

Without a stop sign at the intersection of Sagecanyon and Sageorchard. I'm still trying to work out how that Olds' hood took that shape in the encounter.

 Timely...

Honda Hills

Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday might seem like redundancy, since this entire blog is dedicated to looking back at the history of the South Belt area. 

But since it's Thursday, and since I've just returned from a trip to Houston where I had a bit of time to get into the Houston Public Library files, this post is going to be even earlier than our little community was established.

Houston librarians, for decades, have sat at their desks, in between helping patrons, and clipped items from the local newspapers to file away.  They sat in the same building I spent quite a few hours in last week, the Julia Ideson building, before the Jesse H. Jones building was completed in 1976. And what they left behind from these "scrapbook" types of collections, at least until the late 60s, are now housed in the "Morgue Files" in the Texas Room, alphabetized by subject or, in the case of people, last name and kept on microfiche.

(After the late 60s, the work continued, but hasn't been converted to fiche format, which baffles me. The Vertical Files are housed in the Texas Room of the Ideson building as well, but in their paper formats, much less efficient and less protected.)

Here are a few things I managed to dig out regarding the Almeda-Genoa area from the mid-60s that were stored in the Microfiche Morgue. 

(I mistakenly assumed I'd found a few from the late 50s, filed under "Almeda" that were also germane, but these addresses turned out to be on the Almeda Road that is now 521. west of 288. Oops.)

What did check out as "our" area are the early signs of Houston's growth southward, especially the fight for the city to pick up the tab on water and sewage lines as well as paving roads.

1961 (Noting completion slated for 1980)

1963

1965

'76 Ms. Motorcycle Enduro, Linda Asher

The first photo I'd scanned from the black and white print that appeared in the Leader was this one, of Linda Asher. As you can see, having the print is vastly superior to a newspaper copy, but having the caption is that much better. 

'76 Hawaiian Spring Show: Dobie Lariettes

Lynn Kim, Linda Varnado, Leigh Weaver, and Janet Husdon 

The Rest of February 1976

Other February 1976 news and photos featured on the front pages of the Leader:

Three alarm fire on Rambling Trail at the Hourani house. Note: the Hourani's weren't at home, and their neighbors still got into their house and saved a lot of their furniture. It's most definitely 1976 in a sleepy suburb, no?

And J. Frank Dobie's Beamer sign gets a facelift by metal shop students Chris Smith, Richard Winfield, Pat Smith, and Mike Wacasey. In a similar 1976-vibe vein, how many liability forms would you need to sign for this to happen today?

2/12/76 Building the Ballpark Concession Stand

Maybe that line in the article last week about the women bringing the men coffee bugged the Women's Booster Club, too...

2/5/76 The South Belt Press hits the stands

The local paper began its life on 38 years ago this month, hitting the stands for the first time on February 5, 1976.

The first photo to ever run in the paper was young Chris Alan Robberts, the 1000th sign up for baseball season that year. A companion piece on the front page says main registration closed with 1005 registrants, including 150 girls playing softball in the second year it was offered. There was also late registration being set up since more kids were wanting to get in on the fun. 

In fact, it appeared most of that first paper was concerned with the emerging Little League baseball program and the community effort involved in creating a new place for the kids to play. 

I think my favorite parts was "The turning point came on March 15 of last year, when, with the aid of Seabees and over 120 local men, 54 light poles were set between sun up and sun set. While the  men labored, women kept them fed. Even coffee proved to be a problem as there was no electricity." The horror.

The photo on the second page in full:

(Gulf Freeway signs visible in back)

And the second photo that ran on the front page of that edition:

The Pasadena Police 'Copter lands in the Frazier parking lot

And the final scan I grabbed from the first issue is the note from co-creators Bobby & Marie:

Note the pledge to do all they could to make this paper "our community's own special publication."

I think I can safely say, nearly 40 years later, they most certainly did. 

Spending two days at the Leader offices, I was amazed at how this little paper-that-could is still information central, both past and present, for the community. 

It is because of them that we have such a great a start on our South Belt History Digital History Archive. 

Our little corner of Houston was largely ignored by the big boys, the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle, although they would sometimes run small stories, typically without photos, from time to time. (Blog posts about those are in the works, too.) 

But our stories, of course, are ours to tell. I'm so thankful that these two ladies felt the need to chronicle roads, and sports, and crime, and events, and school awards week after week, as generations grew up and had their own babies.

My little dream is that this blog, as I can get photos and stories uploaded and shared, will spark a community-wide movement to pull out those old photos and home movies you, the readers, still have hidden away, perhaps even forgotten in attic corners or back closets, and be willing to share them and add them to our attempt to save the bits of history we can find. 

Until then, enjoy, and please share!

mystery post #2

Mystery solved: found the captioned photo in the 3/29/79 edition of the paper

Sonic Drive-In 1975

1975 the Sonic constructed along Fuqua in late 1974 boasted the restaurant's second slogan "Happy Eating" with it's blocky letters. Those wouldn't change until the 1998 revamp that played on the 50s retro-future shapes.

The first, original slogan from 1959 "Service with the Speed of Sound" was coined at the first Sonic in Shawnee, Oklahoma when Troy Smith was enchanted by a little kitchen-to-carport microphone he happened across driving between Texas and Louisiana. It revolutionized the popular drive-in restaurant as he wired up the intercoms to play the latest rock-n-roll hits, and serve up orders within minutes, rolled directly to you from the kitchen by your friendly carhop. His original drive-in called the Top Hat was changed to Sonic to play on this quickness and the intercom "speed of sound" angle.

Their first menu from 1959

And the menu as it probably appeared at our Fuqua Sonic in the early days:

The first Sonic commercial did not air until two years after the Fuqua location was opened. That means the chain had been in business for nearly 25 years using only print ads.

When the South Belt Sonic was celebrating its 30th year in operation, the chain celebrated the opening of its 3000th store in 2005, entirely within the United States and Mexico. These days, the company pushes the drive-through lane far more than the more expensive carports of old. But all in all, not too shabby for a little root beer stand from Oklahoma.

Vintage Sonic photos here.

Early Construction on Kirkdale 1970

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess even in 1970 they had slightly more athletic gear to wear than this. 

But the point of this picture is really the background. 

You can see the first homes being constructed on what will be Kirkdale, if I've got my orientation correct.

A bit of zoom for you:

Vintage Houston Clips Set

Some fun old stuff on YouTube of the larger Houston area to check out when you have a chance. I'll be poking around and adding to the list as I discover other fun nostalgic stuff. 



(Embedding disabled, so I can't pull it over for you.)

Galveston History from the Victorian era here 

A rundown of the oldest Houston restaurants here

Houston's Shamrock Hotel here

The City Auditorium & Sam Houston Coliseum History here 

A Night in Houston 1960 here.

Downtown Foley's (toy section), early 60s here 

First part of an Astrodome film from the 60s here

Astroworld here

Silent home movie clips from around Houston here

The 1960s KTRK celebrity Kitirik here 

1962 Holiday Safety Reminder here (Yikes)

See Ron Stone in 1962 covering Hurricane Carla fallout here

KHOU early stuff here 

1963 Galveston Film here

1963 Bicycle Safety PSA here

1965 Astrodome Clips here

Union Station 1968 here

The Hermann Park Train in the late 60s here 

And the cutting edge promo for KTRK from 1968 here

The Houston Astros from the late 60s here

Houston Texas 1971: Pot Smokers are Sloppy here

NASA Mission Control in the early 70s here 

Channel 39 Restrospective from 1967 here

1968 KHOU News Team with Ron Stone here

Houston Television Memories here 

Mix of vintage Houston clips here.

Great clips from Houston area fun in the 1970s at this link. 

'76-'78 Commercials here

Monterey House Candy

Monterey House, a favorite in the neighborhood through all of the '70s and '80s, was just across the street from Almeda Mall, near the Target and the little office supply store (remember that tiny box of a place in the parking lot?). 

I've tried to pin down some of the history of the place, but haven't had much luck online. I'm told the food was actually prepared at a central location and shipped out to all of the restaurants around town, where it was simply heated up and put on a plate.  I do seem to remember really fast service. It was also very cheap, so highly favored by the high school crowd.

The restaurant chain was founded in 1951 in Texas and bought out in the late 80s by conglomerates. There appears to be one of the oldest of the spots still in business by the same family since 1963 in Beaumont and still under the Monterey House logo of old. 

But the real star in my memory was the sugar candy. That candy at the bottom of the chip basket was legendary. And I could never leave without a praline from the counter. 

As it turns out, the granddaughter of that candy maker has taken up the mantle of social media press and started a Facebook page specifically for the candy and her grandfather, Jesse Bocanegra, who is still cooking. 

from the La Colmena Facebook page

From the La Colmena Mexican Candy Page: 

La Colmena Mexican Candy Mfg. Co. was famous for their Leche Quemada and Praline sold at Monterey House, Felix Mexican Restaurants, Santa Anita, Molina's, El Patio, Los Toros, Mexico Way, Old Mexico Taverna, Bertha's, Martin's Mexican Restaurant, Sarabias Curio Shop, Las Casuelas, La Consentida, Arturo's Mexican Restaurant, The Green Leaves Cafe, Los Tio's, Adoph's Mexican Restaurant, La Providencia, Mexicatessen, La Placita Restaurant #1, La Placita Restaurant #2 (Pasadena), Larry's Mexican Restaurant (Richmond TX), El Original (Galveston, TX) and Moreno's Mexican Restaurant (Baytown, TX) until the company closed their doors in the early 1970s. After 40 years, La Colmena Mexican Candy Mfg. Co. is expected to reopen in the Fall of 2014.

Updated to add:

After posting the above, I added my name to the email list and when the order mail showed up, I asked around for someone local who wanted to share with me. Lisa was up the challenge and we ordered two pounds for free local pick-up. I was coming in the following month and wanted to save the shipping (which runs more than the pound of candy.)

When I finally met up with Lisa she confessed: she'd eaten my share! But another order had been made the week prior to my arrival, so she got me a fresh batch.

Her experimentation also paid off, since she told me the real secret is to set the candy out overnight to get just the right consistency we remember from the chip basket. It dries out the sugar to the perfect mouth feel.

I didn't make it back to Colorado with very much! And up here, drying it out overnight kills it (no humidity), so your mileage may vary. If you're in humid Houston, the overnight trick is the one to remember.

And yes, it tasted just like I remembered. All I needed to do was cut it into little rectangles and find a chip basket!

Digital Preservation 101

I've had a number of people say that they either have a box of dusty photographs or are pretty sure their parents do, stowed away in a closet or attic that's been lucky enough not to have been in a house that flooded or burned down over the years. 

But what inevitably follows is the lost, "But I don't know what to do with them."

On my occasional trip to the area, I would be happy to help with preservation, but since that's not feasible for the majority of the media that still exists, largely forgotten, here are some basic tips to help you archive any material you might want to preserve for future generations . . . or this blog, for instance. 

Yes, there are a myriad of scanning services out there who will do all the work for you. They will also charge you substantially. If you'd rather shell out the bucks, I'm guessing you'd have already done so and wouldn't be reading this post. If, after reading these tips, you are overwhelmed and hopeless, however, here is a quick review of your best options for handing them over to a service.

Scanning Old Photographs

Many people already have a scanner in their home, typically built in to their all-in-one printer. (Those that do not can either cozy up to someone who does or use their local library or Kinkos to access a scanner.)

The number one error I see for people who are trying to share photographs on Facebook is that they've slapped their photographs on the glass, pushed the "auto scan" button, saved and uploaded in one go. You get tiny photographs, often little squares on top of a giant white space (the scanner bed cover) and wonder why even bother. Let's work on that.

The priority in your scanner settings is to use the highest DPI available to you. In reality, anything higher than 600 is overkill, as the human eye won't be able to tell the difference. 

Dots Per Inch is how tightly and tiny the printer can create an image. If it can get 600 dots in a square inch, its resolution will be much better, so that your scanned image can be enlarged without turning everything into big blocky pixelated squares that makes it look like you're trying to protect everyone's identity and surroundings and renders the picture useless,  unless you want it the size of a postage stamp.

You should find these settings in your printer/scanner's control panel. Don't accept the scan's auto quick scan and dig around a bit. 

All the interfaces look a bit different, but here's how I set mine:

Note a few things here and click around to see if your scanner offers these menus:

1. I select the document type as magazine. Doing do gives me a bit more flexibility in clearing up some the common problems with old photographs printed on papers that can often scan as bumpy.

2. Obviously unless your photographs are all black and white, you will want to select the Color option. 

3. For document size, I will either select "Platen Size" from the drop down or Auto Detect. If you are attempting to scan a page from a book or magazine, use Platen Size so it will scan everything from corner to corner on the glass for you. If you've laid a number of small square photographs out on the scanning bed, use Auto Detect so you'll be sure to scan everything laid out, even with spaces between them. Some scanners offer Batch mode to speed this up.

4. Scanning Resolution: this is where you will want to bump up your dpi option to th highest available to you. The higher the DPI, the slow, and larger, the scan.

5. The additional options available on my scanner when Magazine document type is selected include the Unsharp Mask. Without getting too technical on you, this acts as a sharpening filter that can help improve the details in your photograph. I also click "reduce show through" for thinner photographs or clippings from a newspaper to help the final image appear as clear as possible. "Descreen" is another helpful tool for newspaper and "bumpy" dot picture issues. 

You can also typically set up an Auto-Fix, rotation correction, etc if you trust your scanner to do as good of a job as your post-processing photo software. Play with it and see if its corrections work for you.

If you have the patience and software, saving your files as .TIF is the better option than .JPG.


Post-Processing

Once you've let the scanner do its thing and have saved the scans into a folder whose name you can actually remember and find...

You will need to post-process your scans. 

PLEASE post process your scans if at all possible. The scanner is simply not equipped to detect and fix the color/contrast/toning/lighting issues on each picture, especially when we tend to scan batches together. 

If you don't have a good photo-editing software, here is a list of 10 Photoshop alternatives you can download that are free. Some are friendlier than others and it make take some trial and error to find the one you are most comfortable with. (I'd try Gimpshop first, personally.) Another tip: if you've never used Photoshop, it's probably best that you never do. You can't go back. 

In most cases, the first job will be to open up your first scanned file and crop the large scan with multiple photos into each single picture. You can drag, crop, and save each photo as its own file to manipulate and improve. Some scanners will allow you to "Batch scan" and save this step. 

From there, you can play with the color, contrast, and tone. Start with the typical "auto-contrast" etc and see if you like the programs attempt at maximizing your photo's look. Much of this is trial and error, but that's what the "undo" button is for. And if you save your cropped single photos as their own file name, should you kill one, you can always return to the original scan and start over. 

Home Video

The old Super8 home movies are wonderful. Even in their silent, grainy form, they capture moments that photographs just can't convey. But they are also the biggest pain ever to try and digitize yourself. In the late 80s I handed over a bunch of reels to a company and paid a ridiculous amount to have them transferred to VHS. It probably saved me a ton of time later when I easily record that VHS tape version to DVD and then digital file, but I'm still smarting over that original bill. 

I recently found a few other reels in my parents basement that hadn't been included in the VHS tape and ran into the main and massive problem these day: most people do not still own a working reel to reel projector. My dad however found one on ebay and set it up to play back movies we hadn't seen in decades. We'd forgotten how insanely frustrating threading those things can be and discovered very quickly that forty year old film breaks very easily. I did manage to set up my camcorder to capture what was projected on the screen as sharply as possible, but we had several "snaps" in the film which means it will never be played again unless we take it to a restoration place to have it converted. 

Enter your lucky day: The Texas Archive of the Moving Image.

Check out their parameters and see if your video qualifies for the free service. If it does not, their rates a competitive and they are trustworthy. 

I have a DVD player that also records and my parents' old machine that plays VHS tapes, so I am able to convert most video taped in the 80s and 90s without too much trouble or cost, but when it comes to the earlier stuff, it's best left to someone with the right equipment to handle. Consider the cost, if you can afford it, as a contribution to the historical record of both your life as well as your town/state/country/God and apple pie. 

1971 Super8, converted to VHS in 1989, 

recorded onto DVD from VHS, and then into digital files 2010

The common issue of frame centering is front and center here.

The next step that I haven't taken is to crop down the area to eliminate the ghost feet in the sky. It's never perfect, but as a work in progress, just getting your film to the computer screen is a huge leap worth taking!