“Is this the eighth wonder of the world?”
No one among us knows for sure exactly when the names “Astros” and “Astrodome slid into place for Houston’s new MLB team. Some of us just assume that these new monikers for the club’s team and new domed stadium may have been incubating in the mind of visionary HSA leader Judge Roy Hofheinz throughout the team’s entire residence at Colt Stadium on OST as they played out their first three years as the Houston Colt .45s from 1962 to 1964.
Why do we think this way? What happened?
This is one of those historical questions that I have been kicking myself for over time now. For several consecutive years from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, I saw former Cardinal and Buff ownership president Marty Marion every year at an annual social function in St. Louis and never once pulled him aside to provide answers that he alone may since have carried to the grave with him. In fairness to myself, I wasn’t aware of the acrimony that sparked between Hofheinz and Marion as the former judge attempted to negotiate the purchase of Marion’s minor league territorial rights in Houston as a condition of HSA’s final approval of the new expansion franchise that had been awarded to the Hofheinz faction.
It couldn’t have been easy. Hofheinz was having to deal with Marion, who had been his active competitor for that precious franchise expansion award. There was no way Marion was going to win. He had Buff Stadium; Judge Hofheinz had the promised delivery of the new Harris County Domed Stadium.
Now I understand from more recent hints from some sources that Marion stuck it to the Judge pretty good for those can’t-move-on-without minor league territorial rights in a deal that also included the sale of Busch/Buff Stadium to the HSA (Houston Sports Association). And this was precedent to the Judge’s “contest” that gave fan credit for the new “Colt .45s” team name and the western theme and “Colt Stadium” name given to the uncovered temporary park in the NE corner of the OST grounds where the new domed stadium was set to undergo construction.
Here’s the point: Prior to the Marion “negotiation,” Hofheinz seemed open in the media to the possibility of playing MLB games at Buff Stadium until the domed stadium was ready – and maybe even keeping the “Buffs” nickname as the team’s MLB identity too. Now that was all off.
Now the Judge wanted a new identity for the MLB team. And he wanted people on site in the sun, watching the dome arise from the ground like some forever out of touch mirage of an oasis that was always just beyond reach on a hot Houston summer afternoon. Colt Stadium, “The Skillet,” provided Houston fans that perspective.
As fans, we thirsted for the promised cool relief of the dome. We collapsed in the heat from it. And some of us even wound up in the Texas Medical Center in a state of unconsciousness because of it.
My guess is that “1963” was the turnkey year for the Judge’s full awakening that the now active presence of NASA and Houston’s new “Space City” identity were both too big for promoting the domed stadium as a home for cowboys and six shooters. No, this new place needed a new name that would justify it’s newly proclaimed standing as “the eighth wonder of the world.” Now, no matter how much its origin may have been fueled by the issues that Judge Hofheinz had with Marty Marion, now this new identity was taking on a life of its own.
Astros. Astrodome. Eighth Wonder of the World.
Those names and that idea will never die within the soul of Houston. Now it’s just a matter of what kind of legacy we as a community plan to give them in our efforts to accurately preserve our history in ways that both give truth and mean something worth the protection and honor of all those generations which now follow.
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 