The Pecan Park Eagle

“Having a wonderful time in Houston! Wish you were here!”

In spite of all the changes in technology we’ve gone though in recent years, communication is no longer a simple matter of lying through the teeth on a post card and dropping it in the mail box. Have you tried to find a mail box lately? They are few and far between. Most likely, you would have to take the thing to your nearest post office for mailing.

But that’s not my point today. My point is about the image of Houston – and what it’s become. Time was when we used post cards to express images of our city as we hoped the world would see it as a point of attraction.

Many of these Houston images projected our downtown skyline as a symbol of Houston’s dynamic business community. I suppose, and as a sign to the world that we were not the terrain of John Wayne’s Texas, the one shown especially in “The Searchers” – of a place enveloped in dirt-dry deserts and rocky mountains, rolling tumbleweed, jumping jackrabbits, and Native Americans hiding behind every rock and tree with bows and arrows.

Maybe if the drought keeps up we will be able to actually show them the deserts and tumbleweed that some newcomers still expect.

As a post card collector, today’s column is just about the mutating image of Houston. At least one of the following cards go off the expectation chart to raise this aside question: “What were they thinking?” I’ll save that one until last as we first examine the others.

"Houston at Twilight" bears the same message as our first card, except now, it's getting darker.

Sometimes Houston really lights up after dark. It just doesn't happen all that often.

This card says to me: "Houston is a modern muscle town with roots in the ginger bread days of the 19th century."

Houston once flew the image of NASA as its own. Those days are now done.

The Astrodome also once served as the major symbol of Houston as "Space City, USA." Now that image is also gone with the wind.

It's not hard to find the Houston-Heart of Texas image in this card, is it?

This card says: "We Houstonians are a people who don't mind telling you how we feel about our home town."

This was simply a photograph I took a few years back from the corner of Crawford and Texas. It never was a post card, but it could have been.

And, finally …

What were the designers of this card really thinking?

Holy cow! What is the message of this card, anyway? I found it years ago in a flea market card pile and just had to acquire it as a curiosity.

What do you think is the message here? A friend of mine offered that it looks like a sad young woman at the railing of ship, sailing on a City of Houston that is now under water from some recent flood, perhaps, Allyson.

That’s not what I saw. Because of the light in the background, it appears that dawn is coming on the east side of downtown. That impression of the time of day is slightly conflicted by the lighted area of certain buildings on the west side of downtown, but not enough to override the general impression that dawn has just come to the city.

In the main theme, I saw it as a young woman standing on a high-rise apartment balcony of a residential building located somewhere in the near Memorial Drive West area. What my friend saw as an ocean of water, I saw as the trees that forest easily from that area into downtown. – And here’s where my projections run amuck because the lady is obviously not dressed to go downtown to an office job at that early time of day.

Given the imagery that arises for me from those visual assumptions, my question forms as: Why would a sad, hung over young woman with regrets about the night before, and a short time left to dress for work, be the kind of picture we would want to portray to the world as “Houston?”

Help me out there, folks. Maybe I’ve simply listened to too many stories in my long professional life that move along the line that these images suggest to be really objective about what I see in the card.

The larger questions prevails: What were the graphic designers really thinking when they published this card as “Houston?”