| |
While
Galveston
and Houston have always been rivals,
there has never been a time when wisdom didn’t show it to be in both cities’ best
interest to work together.
When construction on an electric railway was
begun March 28, 1910, to connect the two cities, Galveston
had a population of about 40,000. Houston
was just twice as big.
The new electric train was called the Interurban,
a made up word, and it was built in just one year, and that included laying the
tracks and building the large plants that generated the electricity that fueled
it. The cars, much like trolleys, ran down a single track for just over 50 miles,
and at a speed of 60 miles per hour. They hauled passengers and freight from downtown
Galveston
to Houston and back until October 31,
1936. |
Galveston
Houston Interurban
Photo
courtesy Rosenberg Library |
“Galveston’s
historic Interurban line between Houston
and Galveston, once the fastest in the nation, gave away last night to the march
of time, and ceased operation after 25 years of almost continuous service,” The
Galveston Daily News said the next morning.
Just three years later, the
Houston Electric Co. that owned and operated Houston’s
downtown streetcar system shut down. Because the Interurban shared some of its
tracks in Houston-proper, through some intercompany trade-out, Houston Electric
ended up owning a major portion of the Interurban’s right-of-way that connected
Galveston
with Houston. To be allowed to shut
down, Houston Electric was legally responsible by their contract for removing
the tracks.
Houston’s Mayor Oscar Holcombe told Houston Electric that rather
than pull them up, a task that would be extremely costly, he would let them just
pave over them if they would donate the right-of-way to the city. The deal was
cut.
Holcombe said in 1952, “I felt sure we would be able to use that
right-of-way, and equally confident that someday a major, multilane highway would
be constructed there.” When the state opened the first section of the proposed
super highway connecting Houston and
Galveston
in 1948, it was built on that right-of way.
The first business on the
highway opened up a few days later. It was a service station. When the owner applied
for mail service, the highway had no name. The postmaster called Mayor Holcombe
and told him the road needed to be formally named. A contest was quickly put together,
and Sally Yancey, a Houston bank clerk, won a hundred bucks for naming it, “the
Gulf Freeway.”
The Gulf Freeway was officially proclaimed completed in
1952. Four years later, Houston’s first
enclosed shopping mall opened. Called Gulfgate, it was anchored by Sakowitz’s
and Joske’s. Galveston’s
E.S. Levy’s also had a store there. |
| Gordon
McLendon
Photo
courtesy Liberty Broadcasting Co. |
The following year,
Dallas’ Gordon McLendon, the radioman
who stole broadcasting from network stations with his Top 40 format and personality
disc jockeys, bought back Houston’s
KLBS, an AM radio station he had previously owned. To build interest in the new
format he planned for it, he had a disc jockey lock himself in the shack at the
station’s transmitter and play nothing but Ray Anthony’s “Dragnet” for several
days before the call letters were changed to KILT and the new Top 40 was introduced.
And then with the salvaged frame of an oil derrick he had put on the corner
of the Gulfgate parking lot, Don Keyes become a flagpole sitter, attempting to
break the world record for KILT.
Keyes was not just some silly DJ trying
to make a name for himself. He was McLendon’s right hand man in the development
of the Top 40 concept from the very beginning, and he had personally come to Houston
from Dallas’ KLIF to put KILT on the
air and win over the market.
The personality disc jockeys that opened
KILT included Joel A. Spivak, Red Jones, Bob White, Leaping Lee Perkins and Bill
Slater. Shortly thereafter, legend Rascal McCaskill
joined as the host of the all night show, “Milkman’s Matinee,” and a few years
later one of the now most noted names in Top 40 radio, Chuck Dunaway, was brought
in to take over a shift and pump up and stabilize the numbers. Under the name
Van Anders, Galveston’s
Vandy Anderson did news there for awhile.
As
unusual as it may seem today, driving to see the KILT flagpole sitter did more
to get people from Galveston County to have their first experience with the new
freeway and the enclosed shopping mall than any of the advertising and promotions
the stores and the mall owners had done.
So with the opening of the Gulf
Freeway, Gulfgate and the KILT flagpole sitter working congruently, traffic began
building faster than anyone had predicted. The highway department built a crude,
tripod duck blind looking affair and moved it up and down the freeway from Gulfgate
to the Galveston
causeway. It kept two employees on top of the thing to take photos of the traffic. |
 |
Galveston
causeway
Postcard
courtesy www.rootsweb.com/ %7Etxpstcrd/ |
Several places
along the way, they constructed traffic counter mechanisms that were attached
to thermometer-looking signs. This was for public relations purposes, to show
everyone how popular the new roadway was.
But it was those fellows taking
photos from atop the tripod and the traffic count thermometers that were the basis
for 100% of the research that the highway engineers used to remold sections of
the roadway over the next twenty years. No one had dreamed up a scientific methodology.
The advent of Top 40 in Houston; Don Keyes, the flagpole sitter; and the
Gulf Freeway being set on top of the old Interurban right-of-way did more to get
Galvestonians to explore the world off of the island than anything had before
or has since. And
McLendon’s KILT, with its zany disc jockeys, fast paced and tight programming,
station ID jingles, listener contests and rhythm and blues music, moved teenagers
into a dimension that no way reassemble that of the teens of the past.
June
19 , 2012 column
Copyright William
S. Cherry. All rights reserved
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Bill Cherry,
a Dallas Realtor and free lance writer was a longtime columnist for "The Galveston
County Daily News." His book, Bill Cherry's Galveston Memories, has sold
thousands, and is still available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com and other
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