Short Cuts: Episode I 
The Best of the Texas Century—Lifestyle
(Page 3 of 3)
Gift of the Century
Everyone knows that Stanley Marcus taught affluent Texans how to dress well. But his greatest contribution—the one that has had the most impact on Texas life, not to mention on the world’s perception of Texas—is the His and Hers gift, first featured in the 1960 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog. Even people who have no intention of ever setting foot in a NeimanMarcus store like to know what extravagant gifts Neiman’s is suggesting wealthy Texans bestow upon their loved ones each holiday season. The inaugural 1960 His and Hers gift was a $27,000 Beechcraft Bonanza airplane. Two of our favorites have been the fourteen-foot-long, two-person submarine that sold for $18,000 in 1963 and the $50,000 dirigible in 1979. This year’s item is intriguingly different: For $200,000 you can help preserve a piece of ecologically endangered land and then name it for yourself or a loved one. Runner-up: the Collin Street Bakery fruitcake. For generations Texans have been giving each other the famous fruitcake made in Corsicana. Now, if we could just find someone who eats it. Skip Hollandsworth
Restaurant of the Century
Texans today take fancy food and glittering big-city restaurants in stride. But fifty years ago, Texas was a provincial place. The restaurant that brought culinary sophistication to the state’s largest city was Maxim’s. Founded in 1949, Maxim’s flourished in downtown Houston at the corner of Lamar and Milam. In its intimate dining rooms, replete with red-flocked wallpaper and reproductions of French Impressionist paintings, overnight millionaires got a quick course in how not to embarrass themselves when confronted with three forks to the left of the dinner plate. Well-traveled Houstonians found a restaurant to equal those they knew in New Orleans and New York, with wine sauces and exotic specialties like pompano en papillote. But the genius of Maxim’s Luxembourg-born owner, Camille Bermann, was that he understood his customers. For the benefit of former roughnecks, he put a sautéed minute steak on the lunch menu and named it Oil Trash. Since 1981 Maxim’s has been located in quiet, posh quarters at Greenway Plaza, away from the busy downtown scene. Relative upstarts like Tony’s and Cafe Annie get the young society crowd these days, but Maxim’s hosts many private parties. Among its most faithful patrons are those who made their fortunes in the oil bidness. Runner-up: Mi Tierra, which successfully mass-marketed Mexican food to San Antonio and had the good sense never to become a chain. Patricia Sharpe
Trendsetters of the Century
Thomas Cronin and Frank Gerow, of course. You’re saying: Huh? In the early sixties these two doctors, working at the Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston, invented the silicone-gel breast implant, changing the Texas, um, landscape forever and giving Houston the wonderful title of Breast Capital of the World. Runner-up: In 1971 26-year-old Mariano Martínez, Jr., the proprietor of a popular Dallas restaurant, and his friend Frank Adams jerry-rigged a soft-serve ice cream machine to churn out vast quantities of frozen margaritas. The frozen margarita machine revolutionized happy hour, as Texans poured into bars and restaurants to freeze-dry their brains. Skip Hollandsworth
House of the Century
The Texas Classical, of course. You’ve never heard of it? Trust us, you’ve seen it. In the early eighties a young Houston homebuilder named Dennis Bailey transformed Texas when he started constructing what he advertised as the Texas Classical in the brand-new subdivisions west of Houston—three- and four-bedroom houses that were part gingerbread Victorian, part Georgian, part contemporary, part Boston brownstone, and part Colonial clapboard. Inside each house were towering foyers, expansive living spaces, winding staircases, floor-to-ceiling windows, bathrooms with skylights, and master suites with fireplaces and giant walk-in closets. Architects were disgusted: The houses looked like a disjointed mishmash of every style known to man. But Bailey’s home won sixteen awards at the National Association of Home Builders convention (including Best Home Design) in 1984, and today all the builders in the state’s newest suburbs seem to be doing their own version of it. You might see Bailey’s home as the ultimate symbol of the blandness of modern Texas, but for thousands of families, moving into a Texas Classical is their realization of the American Dream. Runner-up: the Big House at the King Ranch. The country’s first great ranch house, it doesn’t look half the size of the mansions being built by today’s new millionaires. But when you first see it as you come around the bend in the road, it takes your breath away, rising up from the South Texas plains like a castle. In her novel Giant Edna Ferber reportedly modeled the house at Reata, Bick Benedict’s ranch, on the King Ranch’s Big House. Skip Hollandsworth
Nightclub of the Century
From 1947 until the Texas Rangers smashed it to kindling in 1957, Galveston’s Balinese Room was the swankiest and most famous nightspot on the Texas coast. The crown jewel of the Maceo syndicate, the Balinese, with its South Seas decor, booked the top names in show business and attracted the highest of Texas’ high rollers. The casino was strategically situated at the end of a two-hundred-foot-long pier so that, in the event of a raid, there was time to fold slot machines into the walls and convert craps tables to bridge tables. On one occasion a raiding party was greeted by the band playing “The Eyes of Texas” and the announcement “Ladies and gentlemen, we give you, in person, the Texas Rangers!” Runner-up: The Starck Club, the great Dallas dance club during the go-go eighties, was always packed, especially its unisex restrooms. Then came the obligatory police raid in 1986, during which the upscale patrons threw so many drugs on the dance floor that the police dogs slipped on them. Gary Cartwright
Male Fashion Statement of the Century
In the fifties one of the great status symbols for Texas men was a pair of expensive dark-skinned Lucchese boots. The state’s first great upscale boot company, Lucchese was founded in San Antonio by six brothers, who made the boots Teddy Roosevelt wore up San Juan Hill. Luccheses were once so popular that you could park yourself at the shop in San Antonio and watch celebrities from around the country, among them John Wayne and Abbott and Costello, show up to get fitted. Runner-up: Although we’re finally past the era (thank God) when every Texas male thought he had to have a cowboy hat, the Resistol, first produced in 1927 in Dallas, remains part of the Texas myth. Resistol sells a million cowboy hats a year. LBJ was a contented customer, and J. R. Ewing’s Resistol sits in the Smithsonian. Skip Hollandsworth
Snack of the Century
The next time you bite into a “restaurant-style” tortilla chip, think of the salty little chip that started it all. In 1932 Elmer Doolin happened to eat an especially tasty corn chip at a San Antonio cafe, bought the recipe for $100, and went into business selling the chips as Fritos. (It was Doolin’s mother who earned her own place in history by pouring chili over a bowl of Fritos, thereby creating Frito pie.) In 1961 his Frito Company merged with potato-chip maker H. W. Lay and Company to become Frito-Lay. Today Fritos seem quaintly anachronistic, and their sales lag behind those of sister chips Doritos and Tostitos. But true Fritos fans don’t care. They just keep munching and eagerly await the January release of Frito-Lay’s microwaveable Frito-pie kit. Doolin would be proud. Runner-up: the irresistible chocolate-and-pecan candies called Millionaires, created by the Pangburn Candy Company of Fort Worth and now made (in Texas) by Missouri-based Russell Stover Candies. Patricia Sharpe
Soft Drink of the Century
If ever there was a soft drink that has made a virtue out of strangeness, it is Dr Pepper. Invented in Waco in 1885, it was named not for its inventor, Charles C. Alderton, but for the father of the erstwhile girlfriend of the owner of the drugstore where Alderton worked mixing fountain drinks. We’re sure you followed that. It also tastes like prune juice, although it doesn’t contain any and never has. Anyway, capitalizing on the drink’s strangeness, Dr Pepper was introduced to the New York market in 1970 with the slogan “Dr Pepper—So Misunderstood.” Today the soda pop that Forrest Gump drank at the White House is the number three soft drink in the country. Runner-up: Big Red, which tastes like liquid bubble gum and was also invented in Waco (in 1937). What’s with that city and its off soft drinks? Patricia Sharpe
Watering Hole of the Century
When Billy Lee Brammer wrote in The Gay Place about the fictional Dearly Beloved, an Austin beer garden where politicos and journalists debated affairs of state while seated at wooden tables under trees, he was, of course, writing about Scholz Garten. The venerable saloon a few blocks south of the UT campus has been a gathering place for generations of students and political junkies. Before liquor-by-the-drink, Scholz’s was the center of Austin’s intellectual universe every Friday night; in their drinking days, Bob Bullock and Ann Richards were regulars. Runner-up: the 90th Floor, Dick Harp’s New York—style jazz club on Dallas’ McKinney Avenue, where in the late fifties and early sixties Texans learned how to be semi-cool. Gary Cartwright
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