A Letter From The Publisher, May 9, 1949

Perhaps you will recall some recent TIME stories about Texas: the opening of Oilman Glenn McCarthy’s $21 million Shamrock hotel in Houston; the successful financing of a 1,825-mile pipeline to pump gas from the Rio Grande to Manhattan; and a sketch of Oscar Holcombe, nine times mayor of Houston, where downtown property sells for $2,000 a front inch.

These are part & parcel of the Texas story, which TIME’S editors have been telling you about as the Texas boom has developed. Recently, Thomas Griffith, TIME’S Senior Editor for National Affairs, and Robert Elson, chief of TIME Inc.’s U.S. and Canadian News Service, went to Texas to see for themselves what is going on there. They were taken in tow by William Johnson, head of our Dallas bureau.

In seven days the three of them traveled 1,000 miles through Texas, getting an idea of its spectacular industrial growth, seeing TIME’S string correspondents on the local newspapers, and talking to all kinds of Texans. In Houston, the Mayor’s secretary told a lot about his city and Texas when he was asked how old the handsome City Hall was. He replied: “Oh, it’s ten years old, but it’s been well kept up.”

The shiny new Shamrock hotel was only one week old when Elson, Griffith and Johnson put up there for the night after lunching with Governor Beauford Jester in Austin. Owner McCarthy met them in the Shamrock’s mirrored and muraled Cork Club the next day, where they talked while workmen wheeled slatted crates containing the unmounted heads of prize steers—McCarthy’s latest trophies — through the upholstered premises. Ex-Wildcatter McCarthy, a lively man even by Texas standards seemed somewhat tired. He had been up most of the night fighting an oil well fire.

For another aspect of Texas, the three tourists made a shopping tour of Dallas’ Neiman-Marcus specialty store. In San Antonio they talked to Tom Slick, the young Texas oil millionaire who is pumping much of his fortune into three scientific research foundations. One of the foundations has worked out a new construction technique which Slick thinks might revolutionize the building industry; another has figured out a new method of artificial insemination which will permit scrub cattle to give birth to purebreds. All Texans—from college presidents to cattlemen—took their abundant energy and confidence for granted. Dallas Banker Bob Thornton had an explanation for it. Said he: “Energy is mostly habit. Take the way people in Dallas walk. Why, in St. Louis I trip over everybody, they walk so slow. That’s what’s wrong with St. Louis.”

A parallel between today’s Texas and the huge industrial development that began on the Pacific Coast a decade ago was apparent to Griffith and Elson, who are from the Pacific Northwest. Said Griffith: “No matter how much you think you are prepared for the Texas story by what you have heard and read, you are astonished by what you see. In a week in Texas, we heard not one real doubt of the future, no talk of recession. Businessman after businessman used the phrase free enterprise without putting quotes around it with their eyes. Texans are spending money as if they believed in free enterprise, as in fact they obviously do.”

For more about the Texas story, see the forthcoming issues of TIME.

Cordially yours,