Discovery 
A Beautiful Mind 
Greetings From the Eighth Wonder of the World
Happy birthday, dear Astrodome, happy birthday to you.
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A Croesus even by Texas oilman standards, Bob Smith’s net worth was reckoned (by Fortune magazine) at $500 million, and he was Harris County’s largest landowner. By happy coincidence, his holdings included a 122-acre tract hard by the intersection of South Main and Old Spanish Trail, containing one not very promising oil well and one mesquite tree. It seemed the ideal place to resurrect Vespasian’s stadium.
The two new partners soon owned 66 per cent of the reorganized Houston Sports Association (Kirksey, Cullinan, and a few others became minority shareholders) and Hofheinz stormed County Commissioners Court with the same irresistible exuberance that overwhelmed the National League. Almost predictably, the outcome was similar: the court voted out a general obligation bond bill of $18 million for construction of a domed stadium, to be leased to the HSA for 40 years (with a 20-year option) at $750,000 annually.
In rapid succession Hofheinz also: defeated a lawsuit challenging the county’s wisdom in entering the baseball business; convinced the Texas Highway Department that a fourteen-lane highway conveniently bordering the stadium site should be rushed to completion five years ahead of schedule; ran a successful campaign to win voter approval of the bond issue; wheedled $750,000 out of the federal government to equip the Dome as a fallout shelter; paused for a deep breath; supervised construction of a $2-million temporary stadium; went back to the county commissioners for another $9.6-million bond issue to underwrite mushrooming visions; peddled television and radio rights; put together 600 more acres of land; dominated absolutely every phase of the Dome’s design process; sold the voters the second bond issue; and bought out his partner, Bob Smith, who didn’t like Hofheinz doing all those things without telling anybody.
Ground-breaking ceremonies took place January 3, 1962; then for over a year the enterprise was beset with drainage problems and advanced scarcely beyond broken ground. There was just this gaping, water-filled Astrocenter causing no end of consternation in Houston. After construction actually got started, though, it progressed relentlessly through two uneventful years at an ultimate cost of $45 million; most of the override was charged to the HSA for their own frills and extra, of which there were naturally quite a lot. When finally confronted with the imposing reality of a Dome-accompli, Houstonians generally applauded, engineers marveled, architects cringed, and stand-up comics had their juiciest windfall since Liz Taylor’s courtship.
Amazingly, the Dome had only one relatively minor defect: it wasn’t very useful for playing baseball. It seemed that sunlight splintering through the prismatic clear-span dome caused pop flies to disappear somewhere around the lipstick-red third tier, only to emerge due course, plummeting terrifically from the Astrosphere. Outfielders took to wearing batting helmets and chest protectors, pastel baseballs were introduced, and umpires worriedly consulted the rulebook for games canceled on account of daylight. The simplest solution—painting over the dome—was desperately discouraged because it would complicate the already dubious struggle to grow grass indoors; and grass, it must be remembered, was still believed an essential ingredient of baseball in those primitive, pastoral times.
The Astrodome’s premiere consequently saw the Yankees play the Astros at night. An injured Mickey Mantle, who’d planned on sitting the game out til he heard the President was coming, gained the uncertain honor of hitting the Dome’s maiden home run. The Astrodome scoreboard recognized the occasion and, in a sense, celebrated its own debut with the garish yet gloriously apt, 30-foot-high neon pronouncement: TILT.
Astrograffiti
“If the Astrodome is the Eighth Wonder of the World, then the Judge’s price for a lease is the Ninth.” Bud Adams, owner of the Houston Oilers
Astrotrivia Again
The world’s largest indoor crowd for a music festival turned out for the 1974 Astrodome Jazz Festival.
The steel door in center field is the largest in the South.
The world’s largest tennis crowd, indoor or out, watched Billie Jean King manhandle Bobby Riggs on September 20, 1973.
Astrothink
It stands to reason that the Judge wouldn’t have just an ordinary scoreboard in the Dome. What they have instead, in their own words, is “An electronic marvel, costing $2 million, giving patrons of the Astrodome more information, faster, than any visual display ever before seen on any athletic field. Easily the world’s largest, it stretches 474 feet across the center field wall…and measures more than four stories high.”
Put simply, it’s one helluva scoreboard. Put otherwise, it’s perhaps the most impressive and surely the most frightening contrivance in all Astroland.
Besides displaying a prodigious volume of the usual sports data—scores, downs, balls, strikes, yards, etc.—the scoreboard has two additional features. One is the “home run spectacular,” an electric collection of snorting bulls, shooting stars, spangles banners, and rockets aglare that Ella Fitzgerald described with dead accuracy as “a television gone wild.” Designed for use (together with its accompanying megadecibel “stereo quality” soundtrack) whenever the home team does something profitable, the “spectacular” explodes into a 45-second Astroorgasm that brings the entire stadium to a complete and utter halt. Its rather forbidding presence may help to explain the habitually arid fortunes of the Dome’s home teams.
The other and far more ominous scoreboard feature is the Astrolite, an enormous TV-style light screen that looms out over center field, staring directly into each and every deep-cushion foam seat and serving as a kind of Big Brother cum cheerleader. With a seemingly endless repertoire of animated light pictures, story-board cartoons, or often simple one-word commands, the Astrolite orchestrates partisan crowd response to action on the field. Should an opponent’s base runner reach second base the screen shouts WHOA! in 30-foot letters; if an Astro somehow achieves the same perch, bugles blare and the screen orders CHARGE! Almost everything that transpires on the field, from hits to errors to fights, merits editorial comment from the screen—sometimes witty, occasionally savage, but never subtle. As Larry McMurtry once observed, “The game’s true function is to provide material for the man who operates the screen.”
What makes the Astrolite so sinister is the incredible power it seems to possess: even a man as willful and cynical as McMurtry found himself, to his horror, unconsciously muttering “charge” by the seventh inning. Umpires have complained of being genuinely intimidated when the screen answered close calls with a huge WE WUZ ROBBED, and the league commissioner felt compelled to rebuke the Dome’s management. As the Dome’s official guidebook succinctly puts it, “A trip to the Astrodome is enough to convince anyone that baseball will never be the same again.”
Another Astrofable
The largest convention in the world is the annual meeting of the National Association of Home Builders so, naturally, the Judge wanted them for Houston. Or, more specifically, for his still-unbuilt (this was 1964) Astrodome. The NAHB had never in its history met anywhere but Chicago, and showed no great yearning to explore new territories—particularly not in drinkless, taxiless, then-Domeless Houston—but the Judge was determined.
For eighteen months the 450 members of the NAHB’s board of directors were shamelessly wined, dined, proselytized, and plain browbeat with respect to the exotic splendors of the Bayou City. Then in April 1966 the Judge took a private jet up to Washington D.C., to present his case at the showdown board meeting.
Houston was allotted fifteen minutes to address the board, which time was divided evenly amongst the Judge and the two men he’d brought along to help him: Mayor Louie Welch and Governor John Connally.
Connally opened with a splendid soliloquy on Texas’ scenic wonderments, mentioning that the state has more lakes than any other excepting Alaska, “where the lakes are generally frozen.” Speaking to the more urgent problem of Texas’ archaic liquor laws, Connally pledged, if need be, to call an emergency session of the Liquor Control Board in El Paso while the convention was meeting in Houston.
Welch, after remarking what a shame it was that neither Chicago’s mayor nor Illinois’ governor was able to show up, quickly dealt with the taxi shortage. There would be more than 500 courtesy cars, he promised available free to anyone with an NAHB registration badge.
Then came the Judge, who needed to assuage NAHB fears that they might lose money on exhibitor-rental fees by moving from Chicago to the hinterlands. “I understand you’d like us to guarantee $750,000 for each of three years,” said the Judge, “and you want satisfactory evidence of our ability to meet that guaranty.”
The board members nodded their assent.
The judge glanced over to the NAHB treasurer. “Would cash be satisfactory?”
Astrospeak
The very first paragraph of the official Astrodome guidebook reads as follows:
“The Astrodome is the Taj Mahal of all stadia, from ancient Rome’s Coloseum even to the present day. Once a Texas swamp, its 260-acre setting now enfolds a sparkling diamond whose brilliance is refracted ’round the world. It is beyond compare, because nothing like it has ever been built before. This colossal amphitheatre, built at a cost of $38,000,000 is located six miles from downtown Houston, and is served by a radius of roads making it easily the most accessible stadium in the world.”
Astroastronauts
Gus Grissom and John Young, recently returned from the initial Gemini flight, are sitting in the skybox.
Young: “This is the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen.’
Grissom: “Well, you’ve been around.”
The Astroczar
Reduced to the tame dimensions of print, Roy Hofheinz’ life reads like collaboration between Horatio Alger and Sinclair Lewis. A precocious learner, he finished high school at fifteen with a pair of scholarship offers, but had to abandon them when his father was killed driving a laundry truck. To support his family he began booking dance bands through East Texas, brokered radio time, and discovered there was no great mystery involved in the making of money.
He went to law school at nights, passed the bar at nineteen, was sent to the legislature at 22. At 24, in 1936, he was elected county judge, the youngest man to hold such office in a major county in the nation—ever. The honorific title of Judge is the legacy of eight tempestuous, energetic years spent presiding over Harris County. His enthusiasm for building was apparent even when as he expanded the road-paving program, formed the flood control district, began a brace of toll-free tunnels under the ship channel and a battery of New Deal-funded projects.
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