The Pecan Park Eagle

Our Phi Kappa Theta fraternity built and ran the annual “Foto Saloon”, a place to have your souvenir picture of that Frontier Fiesta visit captured forever with help from brothers like Pat O’Brien, Bob Murphy, Bernard Ciulla, and Bill McCurdy. (The girl with her eyes shut was a visitor that night.)

Humphrey Bogart came to see us one time. It was close to sixty years ago now, but it really happened.

So did lesser stars like Rory Calhoun, Clint Walker, James Garner, etc, etc., but they came too. Singer Kenny Rogers even got his start with us. So, who were we, anyway? Well, back in the post-World War II years, from 1946 to 1959, we were the University of Houston’s annual version of “The Greatest College Show on Earth”, a spring semester hard work, but lots of fun conversion of the north side of the UH campus into a little western town called “Fiesta City – Population 1,001.”

Rory Calhoun is welcomed to Fiesta City.

For that thirteen year period, every spring semester at UH was spent in rebuilding this small western town and putting on the musical shows that filled the walls of about ten separate, fully operating production houses for an entire seven-day run in about the third week in April of each year. Places like the Bella Union, the Silver Moon, the OK Corral, and the Bayou Queen stand out in memory, but there were others – so many others – and that’s to say nothing about the ancillary food and rink businesses and street entertainer shows that went on concurrently. It was also at a place called “Yosemite Sam’s” that the locally famous Valian’s Pizza Pie first introduced the City of Houston to that now taken-for-granted delicacy staple of the American fast food industry.

The difference was – Valian’s pizza was no dough clogging choker dish. It was pizza like no other since. Or ever. And, sadly, it is now apparently lost forever.

… and her comes Clint Walker.

Kenny Rogers pretty much made his Houston debut performing at the Frontier Fiesta in the late 1950s. And just about every television western star and hot female movie starlet showed up every spring to be photographed at “Fiesta” each spring.

The shows were pretty good too.

1957 may have been the zenith year for Frontier Fiesta. Life Magazine, a big media deal in the 1950s, came to Houston and did a story on the 400,000 people (I think it was) that came to see the shows that year. It may have been 1956, the same year that Bogart came to visit so late in his life. He died in 1957. I cannot remember and I have no time for exact time and attendance research this morning.

The problem ultimately was the academic toll that Fiesta took upon the student grade point average each spring. In spite of the fact that it taught more about business and time planning than any course offered, not one among us was getting tested on the basis of how well we handled Fiesta, but on how well we handled our academic courses in spite of Fiesta.

Fiesta is now back at UH in a more manageable form. And here’s an article you may enjoy reading about it.

http://app1.kuhf.org/articles/1363005187-UH-Moment-Frontier-Fiesta.html