Discovery 
A Beautiful Mind 
Greetings From the Eighth Wonder of the World
Happy birthday, dear Astrodome, happy birthday to you.
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In 1944, owning less than when he started, the Judge announced he was taking a sabbatical from politics until he could make himself into a millionaire, which he figured would take about eight years. Dealing in real estate, practicing law, working in the slag and the radio business, he met his deadline easily (even with time out to run his friend Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 campaign for U.S. Senate), and reentered politics in 1952 as Houston’s freshly elected mayor. It was not a casual reentry.
With all the brashness he could muster, Hofheinz launched a public works program that resembled a Five-Year Plan for the Roman Empire. City Hall, in the rotund person of the mayor, was suddenly everywhere—building, annexing, condemning, overhauling, unveiling the new Houston International Airport. When the City Council griped bitterly about not being consulted on any of these public endeavors, the Judge answered blithely that, well, come to think of it, he didn’t need their help anyway. He called his councilmen “cookie-jar boys” with their hands in the till, prompting a furious challenge from one of them to step outside for a while. Cooler heads prevailed, however, and the council decided merely to impeach him. The Judge laughed them down as “penitentiary inmates trying to oust the warden,” and the council responded by locking him out of City Hall. The voters threw away the key in the next election.
The Judge’s cavalier approach to city government, and the surreal ambience that surrounded his whole tenure, have generally obscured the considerable achievements of his brief fling at municipal administration. His personal integrity was never once called into question (that being a notable distinction in itself) and his grandiose schemes, while perhaps wanting to restraint, undoubtedly laid the groundwork for Houston’s subsequent dizzy economic expansion.
He was also an idealistic, effective innovator in the area of race relations. As county judge was back in the Thirties he integrated public golf courses and buses, always in the straightforward Hofheinz manner of just doing it, without asking or telling. As mayor he had “colored” and “white” painted out on City Hall rest room signs and nobody realized it for months. He similarly integrated the public libraries, again without discernible reaction until a prominent River Oaks matron stormed into his office one day.
“I won’t let my children go to the library,” she huffed. “I don’t know what they might catch!”
The Judge leaned back in his chair. “Maybe tolerance,” he said.
Astrograffiti
“I always wanted to be a baseball player when I was a kid,” admitted the Judge. “But I had three handicaps: I couldn’t run, hit, or throw.”
More Astrograffiti
“Buckminster Fuller [poet, philosopher, architect, and inventor of the geodesic dome] convinced me of one thing: it’s possible to cover any size space if you don’t run out of money.” The Judge
“It’s an engineering blunder.” Buckminster Fuller
“I’m not saying it’s perfect. But within the limitations of $45 million I think it’s as perfect as possible.” The Judge
And An Astrofable
The Monsanto Chemical Company hurriedly recalled their foremost salesman, charged him with the highest priority sale of his career, and frantically dispatched him to Houston. Agronomists had recently abandoned any possibility of cultivating grass in the Astrodome, and Monsanto hoped thus to secure a first customer for their newly developed “revolutionary material”: synthetic grass.
The salesman was ushered into a meeting with Judge Hofheinz, who watched impassively while the man unveiled a gallery of charts, drawings, renderings, and brochures, simultaneously delivering a brief, but breathless, carefully memorized sales pitch on the wonders of synthetic grass matting.
When the salesman completed his spiel, the Judge remained rock-still and stone-faced. Sensing indecision, nervously fearing a lapse into uneasy quietude, the salesman quickly launched into a recap of his product’s attractions: durability…easy replacement…cheap maintenance…colorful….He continued for ten minutes in mounting consternation, his eyes anxiously surveying the Judge for some slight indication of interest.
The Judge was absolutely immobile; stoical; expressionless.
Growing desperate, but truly a protean salesman, the man plunged once more into a paean on the glories of man-made grass, praising its miracles for another fifteen increasingly terrifying minutes. The Judge never blinked an eye.
The salesman, now thoroughly talked-out, was exhausted. “What do you think?” he gasped, pleading for a flicker of recognition.
A tremendous, formidable pause from the Judge. “Sounds good, “he deadpanned. “What’d you say it cost? “
Hope rekindled (!), the salesman blurted, “Since you’re our first buyer we’ll give it to you almost at cost: $800,000.”
“Hmmph,” grunted the Judge. “Funny thing.” Another long, fearfully long pause. “That’s just exactly what I was thinkin’ of charging you to let you call it Astroturf.”
And so, they compromised. Monsanto installed their artificial grass free and the Judge let them call it Astroturf.
Astroprojection
When he was hanging around Vespasian’s Colosseum, the Judge had been taken not only with its roundness said its cover, but also with the fact that “all the bigwigs sat up at the top”; his Astrodome, then, obviously required that the bigwigs should sit at the top. Since that’s also the worst place from which to observe whatever’s happening on the playing field eight floors below, some means had to be found to entice all the bigwigs up there. The Judge’s answer was simple: make it expensive.
Thus were born the “sky boxes.” 53 personalized club-rooms-with-a-view featuring closed circuit television, valets and butlers, stock market tickers, and all the opulence one could want, available at a starting price of $20,000 to anyone whose ego demanded he have one, and who wasn’t too fussy about actually seeing the game. These sky boxes are without question among the world’s classic examples of senseless consumption and four-star self-indulgence. Never let it be said that the Judge didn’t understand his audience.
His great gift, really, was the ability to create a demand for something as gaudy and pointless as (just for example) sky boxes, and them have people pay outlandish sums to get them. This achievement alone would stand him as one of the supreme hucksters of all time. For nine years he even lived in the Dome itself, tucked away behind the scoreboard in a mini-palace that Bob Hope called “early King Farouk,” wheeling and dealing in the grandest imaginable style. Like a Roman emperor, you might say.
Then, a little over a year ago, the Judge suffered a stroke which has left him physically, though not mentally, impaired, and has forced him to move out of the Dome and to relax his day-to-day dominance of its operation. Though the prospect of a Judgeless Dome is difficult to conceive, his absence is already becoming apparent. Early plans for the Dome’s Tenth Anniversary included a gigantic production of Verdi’s Aida, performed by Milan’s La Scala troop with a supporting cast of lions, elephants, and 10,000 people. There was also talk of a baseball challenge from Cuba’s national championship team. But while these schemes all have the ring of the Judge’s imagination, without the Judge himself to bring them off they simply may not happen.
Likewise in daily dealings, the Dome without the Judge is a dubious Dome indeed. As one man who’s done business with them puts it, “The place really isn’t prepared to function without him. He was a one-man show for so long that no coherent organizational structure ever appeared. Where before everyone always deferred to the Judge, now you mostly just have confusion. They seem to have some cash flow problems in terms of having much ready money on hand. They’ve always had those, probably, because the overhead’s so high, but the Judge never worries about little details like that and he always blustered his way through. It’s lucky for them that they got all their big loans before interest rates went through the roof.” Or the Dome.
Astrograffiti
“The trouble with Roy Hofheinz is that he never learned to work under the democratic process.” Louie Welch, also a former Houston mayor
“The man who said that is an idiot.” The Judge
Astrotrivia
The world’s indoor basketball attendance record was set on January 20, 1968, when the University of Houston Cougars beat UCLA 71-69.
There are more water fountains in the Dome (40) than in any other major league stadium.
Astrodugouts
The baseball dugouts in the Astrodome are (what else?) the world’s largest, so long—120 feet—that one Astro brought his motor scooter with him to drag up and down the length of it. Visiting teams grouse regularly about the need for walkie-talkies to send signals from one end to the other.
“There’s psychology behind this,” explains the Judge. “People like to go home and say they had seats behind the dugout.”
That’s true: there’s no such thing as sitting way out on the left-field sideline in the Dome; the visitors’ dugout stretches all the way down the left-field sideline.
“We can get 65 per cent of our seats behind the dugout,” says the Judge.
Astroeulogy
In many quarters there has been a noticeable sigh of relief that somebody—New Orleans, as it happens—is finally building a domed stadium even bigger than the Astrodome, thus removing from the neck of Texas an embarrassing albatross. It’s become fashionable these days to aim snide, pious potshots in the direction of the Dome, and at all it represents or encourages: ostentation, pretention, indulgence, megalomania, waste.
A Texas cultural axiom has long been our uncanny knack for confusing quantity with quality, appearance with substance, price with value, and the Astrodome seems to epitomize all that. Larry McMurtry, who observes his home state with a kind of painful ambivalence, has called the Dome “echt-Texas” and the perfect symbol of what he terms the Old Vulgarity. “Money,” said McMurtry , “like any other god, should be worshipped in a proper setting, and with an appropriate ritual, and the Dome provides both.”
This revisionist, decidedly mordant view of the Dome can probably be seen as a reflection of the way Texas has changed, grown more sophisticated, acquired a patina of urbanity. More importantly, though, it shows the route we’ve taken from there to here, with the Dome revealing a blaze on the cultural trail. Roy Hofheinz is a remarkable man, and characteristic (if not altogether typical) of a remarkable generation of Texans, the last one to come into a world that was, metaphorically speaking, still open range. Their Texas was unfenced and rich, and without the dense thicket of custom and ordinance required in modern society. Hence they had unfettered visions of epic possibilities, and some of them, like Hofheinz, had the drive and the swagger to match the vision. It was his role, an achievement actually, to memorialize them all, to build a monument to those who, for better or worse, fashioned the modern Texas out of energy and gall. And in that sense, of course, the Astrodome really does hold kinship with the Flavian Colosseum or the Rhodes Colossus, as sort of a boneyard of the Texas sensibility.
The Astroepitaph
“Any way you look at it that’s one helluva lot of dugout.”
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