Greetings From the Eighth Wonder of the World
Happy birthday, dear Astrodome, happy birthday to you.
An Astrofable
The county commissioner was positively indignant at the way everybody, particularly the news media, kept calling the new county facility by the wrong name. “The county built it and the county paid for it,” he loudly complained to a packed hearing room, “and, dammit, the county owns it!” Growing purplish, the commissioner blustered that “People by God ought to start calling it by its right name: The Harris County Domed Stadium!!”
“Well,” soothed the agreeable Judge, “you can call it whatever you wanta call it.” With the temperate grace of a statesman he smiled amicably, puffed his cigar and added, “But the World is gonna know it as the Astrodome.”
The Astropresence
It rises alarmingly out of the flatlands, this enormous implausible igloo, like a misplaced Atlantis. One can easily imagine Billy Graham calling it, as he is said to have called it, “The Eight Wonder of the World,” thus putting it in the same league with the Babylonian Gardens and the Colossus of Rhodes.
What Reverend Billy really said, quoting exactly here, is: “It is in truth one of the wonders of the world”—a description clearly lacking that certain, shall we say, flair. Only after smelting in Judge Hofheinz’ solar imagination did the phrase come to resemble its current, much more compelling self. The Reverend Billy has never once cried foul at this modest revision. Perhaps because his ten-day draw during a 1966 Crusade still holds the attendance record for the Eighth Wonder of the World. He did remark, however, that most Houstonians will likely retire to hell.
In view of the company it keeps—those Gardens, the Colossus and the Pyramids, the Tomb of Mausolus—it seems a little surprising that the Astrodome has only been with us ten years. But that’s indeed the case: the official debut was April 9, 1965, making it a mere upstart as a World Wonder.
In just those ten years, though, the Dome, as the Astrodome is more affectionately known, has had quite a run. It holds the indoor live-gate records for just about every sort of event or affair you’d care to hold indoors, as well as several you probably wouldn’t, and has spawned a whole empire of Astrocolonies—Astroworld, Astrohall, four Astrohotels, the Astros themselves (allegedly a baseball team), and the soon-to-be completed Astroarena. It’s also been U.S. government certified (by the Commerce Department’s Travel Service) as the nation’s third-ranking man-made tourist attraction, just behind the Statue of Liberty and considerably out front of Mount Rushmore and Hoover Dam.
Amidst all the back-patting and record-breaking, it’s been easy to forget that the Dome’s humble raison d’etre is simply to be a stadium, and that it performs that role magnificently. There is, in droll reality, no stadium on the globe that so caters to its patrons, or that offers so varied (not to say bizarre) a selection of spectacles.
Houstonians—or Texans generally, for that matter—have grown quite complacent about the Dome, almost indifferent or, in many cases, actively embarrassed. This also is a mistake, for Astroconsciousness forms far too bulky a portion, good or otherwise, of our cultural baggage to be denied or disregarded. Subtly yet unavoidably, the Astrodome colors one’s perception of Texas and Texans, even our self-perceptions, and it’s long since assumed a place in the gallery of institutions that mark our heritage.
It may be irony, for instance, but it was certainly no accident that the Dome opened on Roy Hofheinz’ birthday, that John Connally threw out the first ball with Lyndon Johnson ensconced in the Presidential Suite, and that the South’s first major-league baseball franchise whipped the New York Yankees that day two-to-one.
Astrograffiti
“It’s the kind of place a pitcher dreams about going when he dies.” Satchel Paige, Hall of Fame pitcher
Astrotrivia
The world’s indoor boxing attendance record of 35,460 was set in the Dome on November 14, 1967, when Muhammed Ali decisioned Ernie Terrell in fifteen rounds.
There are 30 seats for blind baseball fans on the mezzanine level, with a radio outlet permitting them to listen to the Astros Radio Network.
An Astrotour
“Welcome to the Astrodome,” greets the pert, pretty tourguide. “You are now seated in the world’s largest room.” She pauses for the weight of that statement to sink in, while visitors stare numbly into the cavern looming before them, then at the spurious roof above them.
“How many of you are from Houston?” she asks, and two or three hands go up from the 40-odd available pairs. “How many Texans?” garners a similar showing. For every one of the ten years the Dome has been here, over 400,000 curious pilgrims, most of them outlanders, have paid a dollar each just to see the place. Among other things—many other things—they learn such essential information as:
· The 642-foot clear-span plastic dome is the largest ever built, bridges a gap five times the diameter of Rome’s Pantheon, and could easily accommodate an eighteen-story hotel with room left over for Madison Square Garden.
· There are 45,054 deep-cushion foam “first-class” theater-style chairs, all put in place at a cost of $1 million in “the largest single public seating installation in history.”
· Seats can be added or shuffled to suit the event, yielding 45,000 for baseball, 52,000 for football, 60,000 for boxing, and so forth, a transformation the ground crew can fashion in three hours.
· The Dome is air-conditioned at a constant 72 degrees by four mammoth refrigeration units supplying “approximately the amount of cooling given off by daily melting of enough ice to cover a football field to a depth of nearly five feet.” The air is also filtered to remove haze and smoke as determined by the ultraviolet-ray visibility detector.
· “The most modern sound system ever created for a public building” assures “stereo quality” in a Dome that was acoustically deadened with absorbent fiberboard, acoustical plastic, and 1078 miniscule perforations on the bottom of each seat.
· There are five successive seating tiers in “vivid, zippy colors”—burnt orange, lipstick red, royal blue—that not only “add an exciting air of festivity” but were chroma-keyed to look good on television without clashing with feminine make-up.
· “Paved parking areas surrounding the Astrodome provide parking space for more than 30,000 cars, which is more parking area than any sports stadium now in operation or on the drawing boards.”
Nobody mentions that it costs to get into one of those parking spaces.
Astrograffiti
Ernie Banks, epic shortstop for the Chicago Cubs, after his first game in the Dome: “Is this still the eighth wonder of the world?”
An Astro, glumly: “Yep.”
Banks: “I thought it might’ve moved up.”
Another Astrofable
John O’Connell had been working late in the Astrodome offices; it was his job to hustle conventions for the Astro-empire, and he was having trouble attracting one especially prestigious gathering. Despondently leaving the office, he came across Judge Hofheinz in the parking lot.
“You’re working late,” said the Judge. “Are you worried about something?”
O’Connell told him about the problems with the prospective convention, saying the biggest obstacle was Houston’s shortage of hotel rooms.
“How many more do you need?” asked the Judge.
“At least a thousand,” replied O’Connell.
“Tell them we’ll build a thousand across the street,” answered the Judge.
They did.
More Astrotrivia
It took 1,500 more tons of steel to build the Astrodome than the Eiffel Tower (where, you should know, it costs $2 to get a hamburger, as opposed to the Dome’s modest 65 cents).
Evel Knievel set the world’s indoor motorcycle jump record in the Dome, where it was later beaten by, successively, a fifteen-year-old boy and a woman.
Astrogenesis
Construction of the Astrodome began in the year A.D. 71, when Roman Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasian got it into his head he wanted the world’s greatest stadium. His 12,000 slaves took ten years to build it, for which apparent sloth Vespasian responded with the famous Hundred Days Games, a lop-sided contest between his erstwhile workmen and an assortment of large, angry beasts.
Two centuries after this gala inaugural, a Christian monk named Telemachus flung himself into the pits to protest the violence being carried on therein; he was roundly booed, promptly thumbed down, and sent to the showers. His profitless intercession, however, was a sure indication that Roman social mores were losing their edge (see Gibbon, Decline and Fall), and the Flavian Colosseum embarked on an irreversible decline in gate receipts.
By the time a Houston tourist named Roy Hofheinz appeared on the scene, the old stadium was little more than a rubble-strewn shell of its former self, with a bit of a boneyard. Hofheinz liked the feel of it, though, and admired the way Vespasian even thought of adding a roof—a huge awning, or velarium, made of papyrus and drug over by the second-string slaves—to guard against rain-outs. Being a man who knows genuine extravagance when he sees it, Hofheinz was mightily impressed. “I figured that a round facility with a cover was what we needed in the United States,” he patriotically declared, “and Houston would be the perfect spot for it.”
Hofheinz returned home in time to rig up a model for the National League owners meeting in October 1960 where two expansion franchises were being awarded. The team owners had some reservations regarding indoor baseball but, as Sports Illustrated noted, “Once Hofheinz began to talk, the National League didn’t have a chance.” The new franchises went to New York, where they became the Mets, and to Houston, where they became, temporarily, the Colt .45s, and later the Astros. It was the first major league franchise ever awarded a Southern city.
Efforts to secure a Houston franchise had been underway for several years, most notable those of George Kirksey, a public relations executive, and Craig Cullinan, Jr., businessman grandson of Texaco’s founder, both of them flat-out, all-weather baseball fans. During the 1950s the two men tried to buy just about every team in professional baseball—always without success. When plans were announced in 1959 to create the Continental League, they formed the Houston Sports Association (HSA) as the vehicle for building a team. The new league, however, was quickly aborted by the American and National Leagues’ decisions to expand themselves, thus leaving Kirksey and Cullinan once again, as it were, out of their league. They turned for help to Roy Hofheinz and his partner, R.E. “Bob” Smith.
