Monday June 5th
It’s not as cool as it was when the power was out yesterday morning. The temperature this morning is 70°, the dew point is 68°. The only breeze is being supplied by the ceiling fans. The sun is trying to get above the clouds on the eastern horizon.. so it comes and it goes.
The chickens are quiet this morning… Excuse me, the cocks are quiet this morning. Monday morning traffic is a constant, but it’s not intrusive this morning. As a matter of fact the ceiling fans are making more noise.
Already this morning the buzz of the cicadas is building to its noonday roar. While around the edge of the yards.. where the remnant woods reside.. Cardinals are announcing their kingdoms to one and all.
Looking at the radar, there are thunderstorms scattered around this part of the state. Just no massive amounts of rain anywhere close. The forecast calls for scattered thunderstorms in the a.m. becoming even more scattered in the p.m. .
Way back in my growing up years in Pasadena, Texas, my Uncle Glenn worked for Brown & Root. He was a painter and spent the entire time that I knew about painting Champion Paper Mill on the ship channel. They would start painting at one end of the plant.. when they reached the other end they would just go back and start over.
The state’s first chemical pulp mill using southern pine wood for fiber was started by Edward H. Mayo in 1911 at Orange. The mill employed the sulfate process and at its peak produced about forty tons of kraft a day. This early attempt to produce paper from southern pine residues was relatively short-lived, however, as were other attempts over the next two decades. The modern era of large pulp and paper mills in Texas began in the late 1930s, when the Champion Coated Paper Company of Ohio constructed a bleached-sulfate pulp mill on the Houston Ship Channel at Pasadena. Pulp from this mill was shipped to Ohio, where it was manufactured into fine printing papers. The Champion mill has since been expanded to include paper machines and in the late 1980s produced 750 tons of bleached coated and uncoated papers a day. About the time the Champion Paper Company was constructing its mill in Pasadena, Charles Herty of Georgia was perfecting a process for making newsprint from southern pine wood. In June 1938 Herty and a group of Texas businessmen organized the Southland Paper Mills Company and constructed the first southern pine newsprint mill near Lufkin. The mill was formally dedicated in May 1939 and began full production in January 1940. Herty’s discovery marked the beginning of large-scale production of newsprint in the United States.
And it was this chemical process that led to the common nickname for my hometown… Pasadena was known as “Stink-a-dena” back in the day because every time the wind would blow out of the north it would carry the odor of the paper mill over most of the city… and to say that odor was rank would be an understatement.
My uncle’s actual employer was Brown & Root. They had a maintenance contract for Champion and many other plants along the Houston Ship Channel. It was a crazy coincidence because my step-father (Mom’s third husband) worked for years as an accountant and time-keeper for Brown & Root until he retired…
Brown & Root was founded in Texas in 1919 by Herman Brown and Daniel Root, with money provided by Root (Brown’s brother in law).[11] Root soon died and Herman Brown’s younger brother, George R. Brown, joined the company in 1922 (according to Robert A. Caro’s The Path to Power). The company began its operations by building roads in Texas.
One of its first large-scale projects, according to the book Cadillac Desert, was building a dam on the Texas Colorado River near Austin during the Depression years. For assistance in federal payments, the company turned to the local Congressman, Lyndon Johnson. Brown & Root was the principal source of campaign funds after Johnson’s initial run for Congress in 1937, in return for persuading the Bureau of Reclamation to change its rules against paying for a dam on land the federal government did not own, a decision that had to go all the way to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After other very profitable construction projects for the federal government, Brown & Root gave massive sums of cash for Johnson’s first run for the U.S. Senate in 1941.[12]
During World War II, Brown & Root built the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi and its subsidiary Brown Shipbuilding produced a series of warships for the U.S. government. In 1947 Brown & Root built one of the world’s first offshore oil platforms.[11]
According to Tracy Kidder‘s book Mountains Beyond Mountains, Brown & Root was a contractor in the Péligre Dam project. The project was designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and financed by the Export-Import Bank of the United States.[13]
Which is a longwinded way to get around to sharing this song video …
I’ve said it before.. I’ll say it again.. I don’t know how Rodney Crowell and his songs haven’t impinged upon my listening pleasure before the past few months. I know he’s been in my Facebook following category for years.. I was aware of a bit of his life history, if not familiar with it. And yet until I actually added him to my daily playlist on Amazon music, I had never really listened to the storyteller.
I would suppose it was my prejudice towards the country music of my father that kept me from discovering his words before this. I grew up with the country music of Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and others playing in the house.. and it wasn’t my style of music. And to be honest, it was until the Garth Brooks era of country music but I began to listen to the words and the voices. And still my listening pleasure seemed to lean more to singer-songwriters than two country performers.
Well, I’ve spent enough time sitting on the back porch.. talking to my blog.. and that’s the way I actually do post these things. I talk when my keyboard indicates.. “speak now”. Which, due to the intricacies a voice recognition leads to some interesting mistakes. Not all of which I manage to recognize and correct. So when you see something totally out of left field in these pages.. that is probably the reason.
Now to head on in and let the birds have the back porch.. I’m keeping them from the bird feeders.
So… Get out and enjoy the day and I’ll catch y’all on the other side.
When I moved to Houston in 1973, one of the first bits of doggerel I heard was “The air is always greener in downtown Pasadener.” Those days are gone; both the air and water are better than they were in those days. Granted, there still are signs advising “Don’t eat the fish from this spot!” in the upper reaches of the bay complex, but at least the guys who clean boat bottoms aren’t afraid to get in the water any more.
Linda by that time the malodorous stench was getting much better. I went to elementary school just about a mile south of the plants. This was before they air conditioned the schools and every time a norther would blow in in the fall the smell would almost overpower you.
That would also be when the old Crown refinery would flare off the excess whatever. Black clouds of smoke would flow across the town. Somehow that wind direction would evidently miss the air monitoring sites… Go figure.