The Pecan Park Eagle

Lindell Singleton and Bill McCurdy
UH Downtown, November 15, 2012

A couple of days ago, I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Lindell Singleton, Creative Director and Contractor for the Texas 28 Films company that is now in Houston, making a documentary film on our beloved, but most recently, more than often lamented – stagnant, but still standing Astrodome.

Singleton made me think, and touch, and feel what the Astrodome means to me personally. And when I later surfaced from my inner prowling, I came to a fuller discovery of a chain-like connection that I could not have possibly owned so quickly in the moment of discussion. It needed time to germinate and grow to full light.

For me, from my East End Pecan Park childhood through now, the layers of soulful discovery through baseball all have shared some transcendent moment of joy that linked forward over time as places in the heart that were really all understand in the end as being one and the same.

The first time I walked into Buff Stadium in 1947 as a nine-year old kid, I felt it. It hit me as a Technicolor scene of vast green ballpark lawn, framed by a twilight sky, the aroma of fresh bread, mustard, and hot dogs, and the sound of ballpark organ music, hopping to the beat of bouncing baseballs in pre-game practice.

It was there on the sandlot, on any of those endless summer mornings of all day baseball. All you had to do was look up in the sky to the northwest regions beyond far center field, beyond Griggs Road, beyond the cemetery, and far into the billowing clouds and on track with the flocks of birds flying up and away. There was a bigger, better world out there for those of us who played and worked hard enough to find it.

It was there in our unfolding lives so very often as we grew from the sandlots, in special first movie dates with beautiful little girls we would never forget. It was there in our first cars, our graduations, our wedding days, our special job moments, the births of our children, and, wow, was it ever again with us the first times we later returned to any kind of field to play baseball with our kids again.

And it was there too for those of us who were coming of age in the adult world at its birth in 1965 as the loudly proclaimed Astrodome, Houston’s “Eighth Wonder of the World,” made its natal passage into our daily presence and mindset.

The Astrodome came as confounding proof of that better world we forever harbored in our dreams.

Standing proudly on the plains that lined the southern pastures south of the Old Spanish Trail, the Astrodome was Judge Hofheinz’s delivery of evidence to Houstonians that we really did deserve better – and here it was.

The Astrodome stood proudly as Houston’s symbol of unique accomplishment, but it also served us internally as physical proof that Judge Hofheinz had somehow broken into the biggest toy store in the world and brought us the biggest gift he could find. In simple terms, it just proved, on so many levels, that we could all get to where we wanted to be, if we went for it – with all we had to bring to the table. You didn’t wait for the “Wizard of Ahs” to bring it. You had to be the wizard of your own home delivery by taking charge of the things you could control about the use of your own passions and abilities in your own life.

And that was the lesson of the Astrodome via Judge Roy Hofheinz. Not entitlement.

Now sadness.

Today the Astrodome still stands, as an old “tattered friend” reminder of what she once was as “the Belle of the Ball” in new stadium construction. The irony is – that is precisely who the Astrodome still is as an architectural icon that has no peer any place else on earth.

She was once the beacon of Houston’s hope for the future and she could be so again, as well as a repository for the rich heritage of this city’s history in all areas of human aim and endeavor.

Now all we have to do is find out which Houston we are: Are we the Houston that will preserve the memory of the Astrodome for all the right reasons? Or are we the Houston that will simply raze a building that is as vital to the history of architecture as the great pyramids and turn hallowed ground into an extension of the Reliant Stadium parking lot?

We’ll soon enough see. The time for finding out is at hand.

In the meanwhile, I would like here to rededicate my old baseball-rediscovered poem, “The Pecan Park Eagle,” to  the Astrodome in the hope that more of us, enough of us to matter, will rally to realize our potential loss before it slips into all of us the way certain nocturnal maladies cause some people to die in their sleep.

LIke the old baseball cover in my poem, the Astrodome once held a larger world within her that helped a legion of us to also find that same larger world in ourselves.

You just don’t throw away people or institutional entities that do that sort of thing for you.

OK, Astrodome, this one’s now for you:

The Eighth Wonder of the World!

The Pecan Park Eagle By Bill McCurdy (1993): Ode To An Old Baseball Cover I Found While Playing Catch with My Eight-Year Old Son Neal On an Abandoned School Yard.

Tattered friend, I found you again, Laying flat in a field of yesterday’s hope. Your resting place? An abandoned schoolyard. When parents move away, the children go too.

How long have you been here, Strangling in the entanglement of your grassy grave, Bleaching your brown-ness in the summer sun, Freezing your frailness in the ice of winter?

How long, old friend, how long?

Your magical essence exploded from you long ago. God only knows when. Perhaps, it was the result of one last grand slam.

One last grand slam, a solitary cherishment, Now remembered only by the doer of that distant past deed. Only the executioner long remembers the little triumphs. The rest of the world never knows, or else, soon forgets.

I recovered you today from your ancient tomb, From your place near the crunching sound of my footsteps. I pulled you from your enmeshment in the dying July grass, And I wanted to take you home with me.

Oh, would that the warm winds of spring might call us, One more time, awakening our souls in green renewal To that visceral awareness of hope and possibility.

To soar once more in spirit, like the Pecan Park Eagle, High above the billowing clouds of a summer morning, In flight destiny – to all that is bright and beautiful.

There is a special consolation in this melancholy reunion. Because you held a larger world within you, I found a larger world in me.

Come home with me, my friend, Come home.

“Because you held a larger world within you,
I found a larger world in me.”