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HomeMy WebLinkAboutHenry Mayo Transcription FINAL City of College Station Heritage Programs Oral History Interviewee: Henry Mayo Interviewer: Tiffany Gonzalez Date: June, 25, 2019 Place: Municipal Court Building Room 204, College Station, Texas Project: The City of College Station Oral History Collection Transcriber: Ian Seavey Abstract: Lifelong resident of College Station Henry Mayo discusses his time working as a surveyor in the city. He explains that through surveying he has become well acquainted with the city itself and many of its residents. Mayo has a passion for history and he highlights some of the local history organizations he is involved with. As a lifetime resident he also reflects upon the city’s growth throughout the years and where he sees future growth heading. 00:00 Tiffany Gonzalez (TG): My name is Tiffany Gonzalez, I am College Station’s Historic Records Archivist and the interviewer. It is 1:14 pm on June 25, 2019. We are conducting the interview at the Municipal Court Building. Today I am speaking with Henry Mayo due to his knowledge and work in College Station, Texas. The purpose of this interview is to get a better understanding of College Station’s history and growth over the years. To start this interview Mr. Mayo can you tell us where and when you were born? 00:36: Henry Mayo (HM): Yeah, I was born here in town, actually Bryan there wasn’t a hospital in College Station so St. Joseph’s in Bryan, the old St. Joseph’s on June 18th 1963. 00:52: TG: Thank you. 00:53: HM: My parents at that time lived in a rent house on Milner in College Station which is still there but I’ve watched because by the minute it probably gonna be gone. It’s one of those tiny, little houses on a big lot in between the Aggie Shacks. And so that’s what’s on my birth certificate, 12 something Milner Drive College Station. They didn’t live there but a few more months and moved to Village Drive. 01:22: TG: Thank you. To start off let’s talk a little bit about your family history. What did your parents do? Do you have any siblings? 01:31: HM: Yeah I have an older brother Kim David, Kim David Mayo and he is four years older. He was actually born in Tennessee when my dad was in the army and my mother was from Tennessee so he was born in Nashville. They came here when he got out of the army, I think in 1960, maybe close to ’61. And he wanted to finish his school at A&M and get his degree in civil engineering, so they moved back here and he worked for Mr. Orr while he was actually his student of Civil Engineering. Mr. Orr was a professor of civil engineering and hired a lot of his students for his surveying business and so my father was one of those. My mother came with my dad and she worked as a secretary on campus some and then just raised us after I was born in ’63 and I had a sister born in ’65. I think she worked a little for Mr. Fitch as a secretary. One time he needed someone and she worked part-time for him or something, other than that she was just a housewife the whole time I remember growing up. 02:48: TG: To clarify, what is your sister’s name? 02:49: HM: Her name is Mary Sanford but we called her Sandy. So my brother is Kim and my sister is Sandy and I’m Henry. I always feel I was the fortunate one on the names. 03:03: TG: And you only have two siblings? 03:06: HM: Yeah, yeah. 03:07: TG: Okay, do you have any stories that you want to share about your childhood growing up in College Station? 03:15: HM: Mainly with my parents and like I say, my birth certificate says I was born on Milner but within months they bought a brand new house or had one built or actually had one built on the lot on Village Drive it’s the second house from Glade 1203-1201 or something. And it’s the only house on that street that’s not on a slab. It was built brand new while all the slab houses were being built. Mr. Perkins that ran Woodson Lumber that built the house told my dad, “you need a pier and beam because the soil moves around, and your slab will crack or whatever.” So if you drive down that street you will see this one yellow brick house that has a front porch that’s about four steps to the front door. Everything else on the street is just modern concrete slab on the level but that was our house until I was five years old. So, I remember a year maybe or so of my life growing up there and all the houses being built on Goode Street and Pershing and south of us. We would all go over there in the evenings and used to play through the houses before they had the sheetrock up and things. And then we watched people moving in. The end of town at that time was Holleman St, it was a dead end. Glade St went down by Mr. Fitch’s house but the houses really just stopped at Holleman area right at the creek. The street sweeper, actually when the city first bought a street sweeper, I think they bought two of them at the same time, these big custom street sweeping machines. And they would dump all their dirt at the end of Holleman there on the dead end of Holleman. It’s where they would dump out every day. That might have been after we moved away from there, but I always remembered that’s where the street sweepers would dump their big piles of dirt and trash. 05:19: TG: You mentioned remembering people moving in, do you remember the demographics of the people moving in? Were they professors? 05:26: HM: Almost everyone when I was growed up, grew up here, was involved with A&M you know it was like I would say 8 out of 10 people either were a student. You know, all the kids I went to with at Consolidated were one of their parents was a grad student or still an undergrad maybe at least one of their parents or they worked at A&M or they were a professor at A&M or something. And it was, I don’t know the population numbers but man, I know my dad, I was always impressed because he knew almost everybody in town. And I have sort of gotten that way and I realize what it is, it’s from surveying because you survey homes when they get bought and sold and everything else so you sort of keep up with people’s names because every time I would start second grade or something, my dad would look at the little role of the kids in my class and he’d know about three-quarters of their parents and I thought, “how the hell does he know everybody.” 06:32: TG: That’s so right. Great, do you have any other memories? How about your teenage years growing up, you mentioned that you went to A&M Consolidated? 06:45: HM: Yeah, I started at South Knoll, it was brand new, I think only one or two years old, they had built College Hills Elementary and my brother his first few years were at the old A&M Consolidated which is now the Barbara Bush Center on George Bush. The whole school system was there, everything from first to twelfth was in that area. And then they built College Hills Elementary in the late ‘60s I think, the mid to late ‘60s. He moved over there like in third grade and then we moved out to Carter Lake out south of College Station on Rock Prairie about ’68, summer of ’68. So I had already gone a year or two at South Knoll and it was the new school so my parents I guess took us to school when we lived in town, so we could go to either one the school didn’t care you just picked the one that you want if you could get there on your own. Then we moved out of town, we were supposed to go to College Hills because the way the bus, everybody in the rural areas went to College Hills that’s where the buses ran but my parents took us to school. My dad would take me on the way to work every day so I just kept going to South Knoll. And then they built a fifth grade onto it when I was in third grade, so it added another grade, so I got to go through fifth grade at South Knoll and then moved on over to the middle school. And then the new high school was built in the early ‘70s, before I got over there they had built it. So I went to the one that’s the current, I guess they still call it A&M Consolidated High School. That was the only one at the time because the other one was on George Bush. So the town was growing fast you know back then, so the schools were being built literally while I was still in them they were building them so I was always getting to go to the newest one. 08:52: TG: That’s awesome. 08:53: HM: And the other thing I think about often is just how fortunate I was to grow up just after segregation and all in the late ‘60s when Lincoln School burned, when all the laws changed and they started integrating the schools. See I never knew any of that, so I just grew up with all the African American kids in classes with me and I never even had an issue with it. It was only a few years earlier though that they were all put into the high school and stuff. I don’t think College Station had a lot of problems with it but it was just a big social change that people had to deal with. But I was lucky when I was at South Knoll in Cub Scouts one year or two my den mother was Mrs. Thomas, an African American lady that lived over on Phoenix Street and we would walk over there and go to Cub Scout meetings at her house. And I got a picture when I won the pinewood derby and her son Michael was in there 2nd place winner with me. That little picture in like third grade me and Michael and I think that’s unusual that we just integrated without ever even thinking about that. We didn’t know the difference. 10:06: TG: It doesn’t seem like there was much resistance after Lincoln burned down? 10:09: HM: No, that’s what I hear. I don’t remember it burning, I was too small. In College Station that happened a lot not the burning down but they forced a lot of things to happen quicker than the law was making them happen. Because in Bryan they had the same kind of problems that my they had in my wife’s hometown of Rosebud, Texas was that way. She remembered when they forced them all together so it really wasn’t a problem she just remembers the change. 10:46: TG: Aside from the development of schools, can you recall what else going on that was affecting growth? Was the university bringing in the new population, new businesses? 11:00: HM: Yeah, Texas A&M since World War II it’s just never stopped growing and it was doing. That’s just the same as we are talking about now. Every year record enrollment, it was always the same back then too with new people. I know it brought a lot of international students, a lot more than most towns get. And I always thought you know there would be a new kid coming into fourth grade from like India and man I would just get to know him right away. And I still know the one I’m thinking of Shyam Bhaskaran. He works for Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California for NASA in charge of the big deep space projects. I just met him last year when I was out there visiting and there was a boy from Greece, Lucas Lacan that came in elementary school from Greece. A boy from Italy, I just thought, “man this is neat, I’ve lived in one spot all my life and here all these guys have lived all over the world.” And I would go talk to them and that kind of stuff. So that and other things I remember that really didn’t deal with the growth but something I think about in the elementary school days at South Knoll, it was during the Vietnam War. You saw all of that on the news every morning, before you go to school, all the fighting and all. But we would hear sonic booms regularly in Bryan/College Station. I remember it would rattle all the windows on the school and it didn’t hurt anything it was just like, “boom!” and the windows would shake. 12:29: TG: Where was this taking place? 12:33: HM: All over Bryan/College Station it was coming out of Ft. Hood I believe. They would fly those jets and I believe they would get supersonic when they got about here. Or they did it on purpose because of A&M they were former students or something. They would come blast the town but I sort of wish, man I would hear one again because that’s something that went away that you never realize they don’t do that anymore. Growing up at South Knoll I remember that clearly all the time, the sonic booms and stuff. Probably at least one a day if not more you know, “boom”. And the whole sky would rattle. 13:07: TG: That’s strange to me. Maybe because of more open land back then? 13:12: HM: It was, yeah I don’t know there wasn’t a restriction on it as far as I know. The pilots loved it, fly supersonic, so they were always doing that around here. 13:33: TG: That’s kind of strange for me to think about happening now. I just stuck on that. 13:37: HM: Not too long ago, I was thinking about it the sonic booms or something and you know how they stopped the Concord because it would do that, make those sonic booms, but they would do it over the Atlantic. And I thought, man they don’t hurt anything. It’s sort of neat, I wish I could hear one again or something. 13:58: TG: So growing up here you went to school here and then what about after high school, what did you do after high school? 14:03: HM: In high school I really never even thought about doing anything. I didn’t like, think about a career. I just thought I would do the exact thing my dad did and just go into civil engineering. I didn’t plan on staying in surveying all my life. Surveying is sort of a side job of civil engineering because we did all of Mr. Fitch’s engineering, you know, which is the street designs, water, and sewers planning and all that, drawing the plans. Well surveying was just like the field work that had to go along with that. But it sort of evolved where surveying is separated from engineering and today it’s more valuable. But I just kept working for my father, I went right into A&M and I made straight A’s in high school and didn’t have any problem, didn’t have to study it was just like math was just easy for me. Then when I got to A&M man, the drinking age was 18 so that didn’t help and I just didn’t have it, I didn’t have self-discipline studying. That wasn’t something I had to do in high school and all of a sudden my grades were like barely skimming passing grades. After three semesters I was like man this calculus and things, getting into the next calculus and I hadn’t mastered this one at all. And so I laid out a semester just working for my father full time and then I just never got back. So I only went three semesters at A&M but I did get a surveying license later when they started implementing a four year degree, a four year college degree to sit for the exam for surveying you could no longer just do it on experience. And so when that started coming down, they started giving a date on this I went ahead and applied and got my surveying license. So that’s served me real well since then and today they are actually relaxing it a little bit this last state legislature session this year, they actually relaxed some of the, you don’t have to get a four year degree anymore. You just do some trade school type stuff and a mix of things and education experience. 16:26: TG: That’s a good opportunity. 16:27: HM: It is, there is a big need for surveyors and there is not any people wanting to go into that, it’s such a specialized field. We restricted it by implementing that, we wanted it to sort of make ourselves more professional and be able to charge more than just you know minimum wages for our work. But we also cut out people wanting to be that because it was such a hard thing to do. People that want to work outdoors with their hands don’t want to go to a four year college before they go get a job working with their hands. But surveying, I’m really happy doing it, I really love the job but I didn’t really plan on just being a surveyor, I thought I would be more of an engineer, my brother did that, civil engineering. 17:27: TG: So talk a little bit about, in your biography you have mentioned that your father earned his degree in civil engineering but he also worked for a company that you worked for Joe Orr? It’s a surveying and engineering company? 17:41: HM: Mr. Orr was like an A&M student class of ’23, ’22 or ’23, 1922. And as soon as he graduated I think he went to work for a railroad and I think he worked in South America some in the 1920s surveying railroads and things. And then he came back pretty soon after that and got hired as an assistant professor or something. He never had a master’s or PhD, back then professors if you had a four year degree that was really enough to get you in the doors as a professor. So he stayed in there through 1968, so he was a professor at A&M for 40 years in civil engineering. He was also on College Station City Council, College Station you know incorporated in late ’38 and in ’39 they had their first Council set up. By the end of ’39 one of the Council members resigned and Mr. Orr replaced him and he stayed as a City of College Station Council member and he was reelected continually for over 25 years he was a City Council member until the md-‘60s when Mayor Langford stepped down and didn’t run and Mr. Orr got out at the same time but he just turned over and became a planning and zoning when they started things on the commission, he was one of the first guys with that I think and he stayed until his death. He died unexpectedly of a heat stroke/heat attack about 1970, either ’69 or 70. And he was still I think on College Station Planning and Zoning and stuff at that time. But a lot of his students were land surveyors all over Texas and I run into a lot of them and were my dad’s friends and several are passing away now these days. But yeah, Mr. Orr everybody in Texas surveying knew him and he never had his name on a truck or a vehicle or anything. Just here five years ago in the beginning of 2014 we sold, my dad had purchased ownership of Joe Orr in the late 1960s from Mr. Orr so it was just our family business basically. And everybody wondered, “Why do you call it Joe Orr Inc. when it’s the Mayo family?” But my dad did that for the reputation Mr. Orr had for forty years of surveying College Station the city limits when it was incorporated in ’38. So we kept that name and the company that bought us were wanting a survey business here in town they knew better than to come in and start one to compete with the five or six survey companies here. And we all get along and we sort of have our own specialties some work more for College Station, some for Bryan, some for private, some for some more TXDOT type work. Anyway they came and asked us and we really weren’t interested because we were happy being a family business but they ended up buying us and my father got to retire and me and my brother became employees of them. And I told them you need to keep the name as your Baseline Corporation in Bryan/College Station and it would serve you well to keep the Joe Orr name on your company. And so I’m the one that runs that company Joe Orr as a branch office of Baseline out of Houston. I’m an employee now, I worked my way to be president of it for a little bit and then we sold and I have been vice president again since the last five years. So I wear these shirts that have the name of the company and on the hoodies my crew wears out in the field and everything. And I think the people when they go to the surveying conferences they go, “Yeah, I know Mr. Orr.” And so I think he would really be surprised that 100 years after he was graduating from A&M or being a student at A&M his name is on maps and our trucks and everything else. So I hope we keep that, we actually got the Texas Treasure Business Award from the Texas Historical Commission and it’s on our business cards the little logo. 22:19: TG: That’s awesome! 22:20: HM: Seeing as we are an over 50 year continuous for profit type business that’s served the state of Texas. 22:29: TG: Absolutely, that’s awesome. Can you tell us a little about what is surveying? Explain that to me? 22:40: HM: Yeah it’s evolved a lot, it’s a whole lot more office work than it used to be. Originally you would take a transit and chain or tape out into the field and even my father would take a hand adding machine, you know the hand cranked manual type adding machine. And you would take your sine and cosine books and things with you and you would calculate how to survey someone’s land when you were measuring and now through a lot of iterations of computers and programable calculators and things that have happened over the years. My father always invested a lot of money into new technologies but now we use Autocad or Microstation where we draw up what we are doing on the computer. You can zoom in and you can see down to thousands of a foot of accuracy and drawings and things like that you measure. So we normally go out and do the field work with electronic equipment like GPS or robotic total stations which don’t require a person at the instrument, they run with robotically and they point at you and record. So we tap in what we are locating like a fence corner or a house corner or a property corner and it just records it electronically. And when we get to the office we dump the little memory card into the computer get all the little dots to come onto the screen and they will have the names on there like house corner and whatever. And then it’s like this old connect the dots where you do the one, two, and three. We literally sit there on the computer and connect the house corners, connect the fence corners, and then we get the copy of the deed for the property you know from the courthouse which is now all online and you can get it 24/7 over the internet. And the deed will actually describe how far in between the property corners so we actually draw the deed up like a little rectangle or whatever and then we bring that in as a little image and fit it to what we found on the ground on the computer that we have located with our GPS and things. And then you decide what missing corners you have, and what does fit and what doesn’t fit. You get the neighbors deed and see if it mismatches or if it matches well with what you are doing. So you make a lot of decisions by looking a graphical images instead of the old way where you had to draw so many sketches and calculate everything and stuff in the field. So we normally go out and do field work then we do a lot of office work then we finish the field work and then create the map out of the computer and stuff. I still have a few drafting tables in storage and ink pens and all the stuff we used through the 1980s and into the ‘90s we were still using some of that. But everything is electronic now and scanned. Most of my surveys are delivered by email as a PDF image so I don’t have to print out big paper sheets because people can get the large map and zoom in on the PDF and don’t have to have such a big piece of paper rolled up and delivered. So surveying, there is a lot to it and that’s land surveying, a lot of what we do now is topographic surveying which is where you get elevations of the ground for all the engineering projects like streets, street lines, utilities and anything being put in, new buildings. The engineers and the architects are so used to designing an electronic format also and they want their proposed building and parking lot and how it relates to existing ground. The parking lot doesn’t want to go on the side of hill, so if you have a hilly piece of land or a creek in it, we go out and survey all of that and give it to them as an electronic drawing model in 3D and they can see the hills and the valleys and where the water goes and where the trees are. Then they can decide how to fit their building and the software will actually calculate how much dirt what we call cut and fill. So if you are trying to put a fairly flat parking lot on a hill, well you cut in a certain amount on one end and you let that dirt be used on the other end so you don’t have to buy a lot of dirt or haul off a lot of dirt. So the software is really great at calculating the balance on the sides so you don’t end up hauling a bunch of your material off and bringing in new. And architects and engineers we do a lot of work for them. Our surveying company Baseline-Joe Orr is owned by Binkley and Barfield which is a big engineering firm out of Houston. And so their branch office in Bryan/College Station is in my office also, so we do a lot of College Station work and that. My dad used to do all of that as part of Joe Orr and now Joe Orr is pretty much surveying only for the Binkley and Barfield engineering. And it keeps me so busy I’m glad I don’t have to deal with the engineering. I’m not licensed as an engineer and my brother was and he was working for several years but I have enough to deal with surveying that I’m glad we have some engineers that handle that part of the work. 28:22: TG: Yeah, thank you. So to talk a little bit about your family, how many children do you have and how did you meet your wife? 28:33: HM: Yeah, I grew up working with my dad and just going to college, you know I never dated much or anything. You know in high school I liked hanging out and working on cars with people and always swapping engines, we would go to the junk yards. My brother started this and I got one of his good friends who was a mechanic and we started doing it. I started buying vehicles and we would put big engines out of them like a Ford Thunderbird into pickups and stuff you know. And I really never hung around with girls or anything and I don’t know when I got about 25 I started thinking this isn’t going to happen if I don’t get out there. Then I started going to the Texas Hall of Fame actually in Bryan on weeknights and that’s where I met my wife. She already had a kid and was married before and so I got married in ’89, 30 years ago we got married so she was 11 when we got married and now she is in her 40s. And then my wife Sandra, we had a son in ’91 so he is 28 this year and works out in California at NASA same place I mentioned my old classmate from South Knoll, Shyam Bhaskara works for Jet Propulsion Lab and John works their too. When I was visiting him is when I met up with Sean again. 30:10: TG: That’s neat. 30:11: HM: But, my son went through A&M and he got his degree in mechanical engineering and he never really, I didn’t take him out into the field and do a lot of surveying with him, he was with me a lot when we did things. But I had relatives, a cousin and my brother and we did things and fieldwork but I never pushed my son into that. I lived going out with my dad so, I just sort of became a surveyor and I learned a lot and my dad said when I was little on weekends he would go measure something and he would just tell me to stand there and hold the rod or hold the end of the tape when I was like three. And would say, “Just hold it right there.” And he would hold the other end and measure things and stuff, so I grew up being out there all the time doing that. My son was around it but I never took him out, I made him, when he was getting his Eagle Scout surveying is one of the merit badges and it’s a hard one to do. You have to do a lot of different things in surveying and it’s a lot harder than most merit badges. It’s not required to get surveying but I made him get that one before he got his eagle scout. So me and him did a little survey in our yard. 31:28: TG: That’s awesome. 31:29: HM: But he became a mechanical engineer and now he works for NASA and makes more money than I do and that’s his first job. And I don’t think I will ever catch up with him. 31:41: TG: Well he needs it for living in California. 31:44: HM: Yeah, yeah I know, he could have had a higher paying job elsewhere but he wanted NASA. Actually for his Eagle Scout they have a board of review where they interview and one of the questions the interviewers asked him and this is when he was a junior in high school was what he planned to do in the future? And he said, “I want to go work for NASA in the jet propulsion lab running rovers on Mars.” And he never deviated from that course and went straight through college, through MIT, straight out to NASA and he works on Mars rovers for the jet propulsion lab. He’s worked for Boeing and Space X in the summers and interns, but he never got any other job and just stuck with that. And I thought, “Man for somebody in high school and know what they want to do and then do it. It’s like you have the plan and implement it.” I’m real proud that he knows what he wants to do and does it because I see so many people that don’t and I was sort of that way. I was lucky that my dad had the company for me to get into otherwise I don’t know where I would have ended up if I had to go look for a job or something. It would have probably been some on the path of least resistance or something. 33:09: TG: So was there something at your dad’s company that led you to staying here in College Station? Or did you ever want to leave with your family? What options? 33:19: HM: No, my dad he is still living but he was never one to do vacations or anything. And growing up we had family vacation every summer but it was the same thing every summer, we would go spend one week with my grandparents in Tennessee. And the vacation was the day or two we took to drive to Tennessee. I never knew what a vacation was other than going to see my grandparents every year and that’s what we liked to do. We would go to the farm, my cousin’s farm and things but my dad, he never did any vacations until he retired five years ago. He went on one vacation to Big Bend for one weekend and came back and that’s the only vacation he’s had since 1950 or so. I just grew up thinking that I never planned to leave town and I just enjoyed the town giving me the surveying work and everything keeping us busy. And he made it easy by letting me work for him. So I never actually had a job interview or went and got hired by anybody in my life, I still got the job I was born into. I tell people it’s like a farmer, if you grow up and your dad is a farmer and you grow up with him you become a farmer unless you purposely go out and do something else. That’s how I became a surveyor, because I would eat breakfast with a surveyor every morning and in the summertime I was out working with him every day and I just became one. So I never had to get hired or train or anything. I didn’t have any problem passing the two day exam, I learned well by. 35:11: TG: [Interrupting] Hands on knowledge. 35:12: HM: Yeah. 35:13: TG: That’s fantastic, that’s awesome. So to move on to talk about involvement with College Station, in your biography you mention a lot of involvement with the city, so how did you start becoming more involved with the city itself? 35:29: HM: Mr. Fitch hired my dad and Mr. Orr back in the early ‘60s when he first started buying properties up along Glade St and buying little farms you know 10-20 acre farms and putting in a few streets and some houses and selling some lots. And we really didn’t work for the City itself, but the City was staff was very small, Public Works had like five guys maybe you know and things like that, there was like two policeman and so my dad knew them all. And so when the City needed some work they actually didn’t need a licensed surveyor very often and we would do little jobs for them but in the 1970s we really started doing some big surveying and engineering projects when they do streets like Southwest Parkway and stuff like that. Mr. Fitch would get them started and then the City would sort of buy the next property so they could extend it all the way to Wellborn Road or something. I know Lincoln Street, we are actually currently working on the Lincoln Street rehabilitation to rebuild Lincoln and the plans for it were done in 1972 by our company. The street that’s there, now we changed it from a gravel road with ditches to a paved street. We drew all the plans and all the water and sewage plans and that’s what is in the ground now. So we are sitting here now 40 years later modifying the same stuff that we drew back then. Into the ‘70s Mr. Fitch kept us busy but we would get these big City projects as the City started doing more work on their own and not just the developers. The smallest parts of the city, the residential areas the developers pretty much do it. They build the streets and everything City designs and specs but the bigger streets I’m trying to think some of them they have done. I know Emerald Parkway, Anderson Street some of these that I have worked on were totally City projects and City funded, capital projects, I guess capital improvement funds. But then we got really busy with Southwood of that with Pebble Creek when Mr. Fitch started all of that and we would always be doing some city work. But then the city projects now have gotten so big. That’s one reason I said I’m glad the engineers do it because we used to draw a set of plans on ten sheets of paper for a pretty good-sized street, water and sewer plans. Now it would be 150 sheets and computer generated is just unbelievable and people think we would use less paper now but I guarantee if you come to our office there is a whole lot more paper happening than ever before because they don’t combine everything. They are not so conscious of trying to get more information on one sheet of paper, they will put out a lot of paper and a lot of draft versions of everything on paper. I watched a lot of the city growth and just going to the City Hall and City Council meetings and everything since I was small. And I don’t know I just sort of enjoyed it, I don’t think I was bored sitting there next to my dad when he was talking to people and things like that. I always remember odd things about people, like the people who had missing fingers. Those are the things you remember when you are a kid and I can tell you city employees who have missing fingers or whatever you know and most people probably don’t know that the city attorney or whatever is missing fingers. As a kid I was just sitting and seeing his and wondered what happened to his hand. 39:39: TG: You mentioned the name Mr. Fitch a couple times, several times, could you talk about who he is? 39:45: HM: William D. Fitch the highway is named for. He came here and was a student class of ’46 or something at A&M and never finished. Went to war in the Indonesia area, Burma campaign area in Asia. He was an infantryman and came back, I don’t know if he came back to Bryan/College Station to get his degree but he came right back where he had left and went to war from A&M but he didn’t go back to A&M. As far as I know he didn’t even enter again and he started building houses at Northgate. And they just tore down the only ones I know he built the old Café Eccel which was the old city hall, he built that. I know he had some houses on First St that were concrete blocks with the iron windows and things and they were houses that he had laid. And Mrs. Holmgren had told me actually how Mr. Fitch had bought one of the lots and he built a little shack to live in and built the house on the lot and then he moved the shack to the next lot and built another house. And then he would sell those little houses so he literally started building the houses himself. And then he became more involved in the city and over the years he was on the school board, and the city council a few times off and on over the years. He was always involved and knew everyone real well and helped. In campaign times my dad said that he would donate money to anyone that asked on either side of the parties or whatever. He was always helpful and he would always try to get his friends elected or whatever just by word of mouth or stuff. My dad said one time he ran for some position, school board or something then the day or two before the election he decided he didn’t want it, so he started calling everybody and telling them to vote for his opponent and they did [laughs]. He said, “I don’t want it, so vote for him” so they did. But yeah, Mr. Fitch, he was a character, everyone called him W.D. and his family or Bill Fitch. But he was a chain smoker, an old gruff WWII veteran type guy. He didn’t need a contract, I mean even the city was that way, it was all veterans from WWII back in the ‘60s. And when they said they would get something done, they would get it done and that day they started work doing things. You didn’t have to wade through a lot of bureaucracy and make sure the insurances were in place and all that kind of stuff. So Fitch stayed up and I don’t think he hardly ever slept, he was up in his office all the time. When I started A&M and I had to do some work at night in our office which was in his building over on Southwood Drive I would be up there at two in the morning trying to get something done for class and he was still up there working away. And he drank coffee all the night and day and every morning the coffee maker would be dried up with a cake of black stuff and he would be washing it up putting new coffee in it and stuff. He would talk and have a cigarette in his hand between his fingers and it wasn’t lit and he would talk for an hour and keep flicking it like there was ashes coming off of it and he never noticed it that he never lit the cigarette he just talked. We used to go survey and if he wanted to put a street around Southwood Valley so many times he would be putting them through areas with large trees. So we would go locate all the trees and map them out for him on the paper and he would try to design it to where it would take out the minimum number of big trees but he always got them too close. You know you try to wind a street between trees you are going to end up messing up the roots on the trees during construction and there are so many winding streets that the trees didn’t make it. And everybody sees these streets curving and say, “why is there a curvy street there?” and they don’t realize there was a big oak tree here or there that the street was bent around and they didn’t survive. But he was always planning and working and trying to do it the best he could and money was not what drove him. Ever once in a while he might have thought, “This is going to be a good investment.” But for the most part it was just like, “I’m going to build a really nice subdivision in section six or whatever Southwood Valley.” And he had his own contracting crew and he would design how they would do all the concrete work for the sidewalks and ramps and everything. 44:37: TG: He has really made a name for himself here in the city. We have a street named after him. 44:41: HM: We were really glad to see that. I was glad that they have named that after him and I actually when they were taking nominations I was one of the few at least ten or so that used his name for it. We were so glad that they did that compared to some of the other nominations like A&M coaches that nobody remembers. I’m thinking it’s better to have the name Fitch Pkwy than some coach who is not here anymore. 45:16: TG: Let’s move to talk about growth, you have seen it through surveying and with the company. What are the major changes you’ve noticed happening in College Station regarding growth and perhaps in your line of work as well? 45:32: HM: The growth, I mean I think is like exponentially growing, which is because it’s like all parts of town west, south, east, everything. Even Bryan who was stagnant for years and didn’t have a lot of growth is growing in every direction. And it’s scary because I guess 20 years ago I was running for County Commissioner in 2000 and one of the big campaign things at that time was the railroad. They had talked about moving the railroad out west or something but it was also about growth. And one of the things I kept telling people was how we need to be sure we keep control of how we grow and the planning of it and not become an Austin. And I always said if you look toward Austin it has 400,000 people and we don’t want to be like Austin or else people will leave here. And at that time College Station was only like 70,000 or something and that was just 20 years ago. And now Austin, I’ve seen in the news just a week ago that their growth has really consumed them causing traffic issues. And we are trapped in between the Navasota and the Brazos Rivers and so as we grow we really need to think about how those don’t become a big obstacle for us or something. 47:02: TG: What’s pushing this growth? 47:03: HM: Well A&M basically. With like this RELLIS campus and just all this health science center and all the high tech stuff the A&M gets in here, the pharmaceutical companies and stuff. I think they do a real good job of keeping it growing and I hate to see my hometown grow so fast like that, but I can’t really complain because I have made my living in it all my life and it’s never ended. And I can see towns that don’t have any growth where the big industry closes and leaves town and they can’t charge enough tax just to hardly keep up the city garbage trucks and things in some towns. You really have to have a certain amount of growth to keep money flowing and stuff and to keep jobs. College Station, hopefully we will keep steady but with the Aggie Parkway or Aggie Highway or whatever they call it Highway 249 coming out of Houston/Tomball that’s coming up through Navasota. And that’s going to connect us a lot closer to Houston, so you will have a whole lot more people that now will move out of Houston and the surrounding counties and will live in South Brazos County as soon as that road is built. And it’s only a 40 minute drive into Houston and they will be all the way up here, so it will keep growing. All of the stuff you see south of town like Duck Haven and Bentwood and Pebble Creek was one of the first ones out that way but now they are a lot further south. That’s why I hate to see some of the big Houston developers move in but I guess it’s inevitable when they have enough of it. It used to be all hometown and local homebuilders that grew up and did the homebuilding in the area. And now it’s a lot of these bigger companies from Houston. You will see all the signs on the side of the road, there will be like 50 of them, the same little signs that say David Wheatly Homes or whatever. And now I’m thinking that’s all getting up here now. 49:21: TG: That’s here. 49:22: HM: You don’t see all the signs but the same companies are up here doing all the homebuilding and things. So it’s just not as much of a hometown feeling as it used to be. But when you are living at home you sort of knew the guy that owned the company that built it you know like D.R. Cain or Skrivanek or Mariott and Randy French and these kind but now it’s getting to be one of these names from these big builders or something. 49:51: TG: More commercialized? 49:53: HM: Yeah, I mean it’s good, it serves free market purpose, I just sort of hate to see my hometown get to where someday I come back, or go off and come back and high school classmates a lot of times come back and they can’t believe the town is so big. When I was in high school over here at A&M Consolidated on 2818 or Harvey Mitchell Pkwy. I would go to lunch, it was open campus so you could go for lunch. And the closest place to eat was Dominic. There might have been McDonalds already but there was a Dairy Queen at Brentwood there on Texas. But we would always go up to Pepe’s or Whataburger on Dominik and there was only one red light between the high school and there. It was at Highway 30, Harvey Rd and it was almost always green on Texas you know because it’s just a t-intersection. So it’s like now, I bet there is two dozen red lights between Consolidated and Dominik Drive, and they are fixing to put them on the street I live on which is Rock Prairie West, which was gravel when I moved there 20 years ago. 49:59: TG: Now it’s all developed. 51:00: HM: Now it’s going to have red lights on it. 51: 07: TG: Wow, I would like to talk about your city involvement. What organizations are you involved in College Station? And why did you get involved? 51:17: HM: When I was running for County Commissioner or about that same time in 1999 our survey business was getting slow we actually stopped work. Mr. Fitch had gotten out of Pebble Creek, so we had kept working a little bit for Mr. Young who took it over. And then we really just couldn’t do it fast enough it was just me and my cousin and my dad that was the only three working for Joe Orr at that time. And we were doing really good computerized drafting and all but we were having to work all day in the field and then try to draw maps at night trying to keep up with all the growth. And Mr. Young decided to get someone else and so I started looking for a job and when it came up for election time for the County Commissioner, I thought, “that’s a good job and I could still do some surveying and be County Commissioner.” I’m the only person born and raised in precinct one that was running for the race and all. So I entered but at the same time it just got me thinking about doing other things. Julie Shultz who I grew up with as Julia Maryfield through South Knoll and all through high school, she was on the Brazos County Historical Commission which I never even heard of. So they were needing some people and asked me to be on that. And at the same time the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History, I got involved with them because they had an antique surveying compass that I was interested in seeing and went up there and met the director and became a board member of that. And since then, that has been 20 years ago and since then I have been President of the Brazos Valley Museum about three different terms and been chair of the Historical Commission for the last ten years. I’ve been president of other things a little more regional like El Camino Real National Historic Trail Association which goes along the upper end of the county. I’ve been the past president of that organization and we have meetings around the state with Texas Historic Commission and the National Park Service on that road. A lot of surveying stuff I’m involved with, even nationally I go to what we call rendezvous for the Surveyors Historical Society. We go and meet at different places around the country and learn about surveying like George Washington surveying, Lewis and Clark, Mason Dixon and all of these kind of famous surveys that were done. We go to those locations and study and learn what they were doing. But locally one of the fun things I like doing is with the Museum of the American GI, which is history but it’s not really local history it’s just military but I like getting in army tanks once a year and driving those around and having reenactments and stuff. But by being involved I’ve got to where I got so many connections with the other museums and the directors at the other museums don’t really reach out and don’t really know them. Like the Museum of the American GI’s has a different purpose than the Museum of Natural History well I’m involved with both and I am good friends with Warren Finch at the Bush Museum and things. So I just seem to be interconnectional, when we need something at one I can always contact the others. But one thing that has served me when as far as knowing local history is really not being involved in those is more of the surveying. You know we are all part of Stephen F. Austin’s colony, this land when it was all Native Americans here they didn’t have deeds or anything they lived on the land and considered it all belonging to God or whatever. And so it was the Anglos that came in the 1820s and Stephen Austin was allowed to start giving out the land by the Mexican government and so Bryan/College Station is one of his colony areas, his first colony. So by knowing surveying when we go survey a piece of land for someone one of the first things we do is read their deed or write a description for a piece of the land they are selling we always say what league it’s in or what original survey we are surveying in, it’s an indexing thing. But that also tells us what Austin’s colonists got this piece of land. You always identify the land your surveying by who was the original person in Austin’s colony who was given that piece of land in the 1830s. And so right now we are in the Morgan Rector League which a league is a large land grant that he would give out 4,428 acre land grants. And one league which is a linear distance which is about 2 ¼ miles on each side so they would call them a league if they were the full 4,428 acre land grant. And so I just got to know who these land grant patentees were, these colonists who came to Austin’s colony from Tennessee, Connecticut, and everywhere and ended up in Brazos County. And so, knowing how that got divided up, like where we are right now out here in College Station on Krenek Tap Rd. This whole part of the Morgan Rector League here in the 1800s started getting sold to these immigrant families from Poland, Czechoslovakia and things. So the Kreneks, Kapchinskis, and the Bartas, Mrs. Barta owned this land. And so reading the deeds when we do the surveys I would go, “oh yeah Mr. Stastny’s daughter that had this piece.” And we were surveying and she lived right over here on Krenek Tap and so the city was buying her land, in my mind I had like a puzzle with little pieces missing. But when I hear somebody’s name like a certain family name and I go, “I think I know where they used to live in College Station.” The African American families are that way like the subdivisions up here across from Target were restricted only to black families. It says in the deed, “restrictions on the plat, cannot be sold to white people.” And then there are white subdivisions that say, “Can’t be sold for black.” But all that kind of history and then reading the census records and stuff. Then you start realizing who lived and had big farms, a lot of people had their home on what’s now Texas Ave and owned all the way to Carter Creek and that was their cattle ranch and their home was up here on the front corner. A lot of those were taken out in the 1970s that were still up here. 58:39: TG: So the organizations you mentioned, El Camino Real, the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History, the Brazos County Historical Commission, you’re the chair of it, the president? 58:49: HM: That one I still am chair of but the others I was past president and now just involved with as a board member. 58:56: TG: You mentioned also that you ran for County Commissioner in 1999? 59:02: HM: In ’99 I entered the race, actually December 1, 2000 [note that this should be January 1, 2000], like the new millennium or whatever. It was on the front page of The Eagle that day that I had entered the race. Tony Jones was the commissioner at that time and he was running for reelection and there ended up being three of us running against him in the primary as Republicans all in the primary. And me and another guy that I still know well, we didn’t make it to get to the runoff and so another member had a really hard election and spent a lot of money and still Tony won reelection. My stand on it, I liked Tony but I would tell people at the campaigns. I know one guy that still tells me that he was so impressed that I would tell people that I wasn’t against the incumbent that if you liked Tony go ahead and vote for him but if you want a hometown person who has lived here all their life then I’m available if you don’t want to vote for Tony and keep him in. I would tell them that I’m the next best choice don’t pick one of the other two guys if you don’t want the incumbant choose the hometown person. I came in last place mainly because of the runoff early voting, they had started early voting and it was fairly new back then that you could vote early instead of on Election Day. And I hadn’t gotten all of my stuff together and didn’t do any campaigning really in time for early voting. 1:00:40: TG: And why did you decide to run for County Commissioner? 1:00:42: HM: Yeah that’s what I was saying earlier our surveying, we had lost the Pebble Creek Job that Mr. Fitch had started retiring and getting grid of a lot of his vacant properties and things. So I was sort of needing it as a second job and it was paying at that time I think $60,000 a year and it’s not required to be a full time job. It was a good salary for part time work and I knew the precinct very well because you are dedicated to a certain precinct and it was the south end of the county into College Station where I was born and raised. And I knew so many of the people and I thought it would be fun to represent them at the county level and still can do some surveying as needed. But I didn’t even make it through the primary, most of the voters are in town and most of them are not lifetime people who have lived here and it really didn’t mean a lot to them. “Why do we need to vote for someone who has been here all of their life, we haven’t? We are citizens too.” I guess I don’t know, but they don’t consciously think about it, they go for the name they recognize and Tony won reelection, he was very recognizable and most people were very happy with him. I just thrown my name in and I couldn’t win if I didn’t get in the race, you know you have to buy a lotto ticket to win. So I just entered to see what would happen but I got a long way with it as far as people, knowing more people. I met a lot of friends I still have today through political, I mean I had never been involved politically or anything before then. 1:02:24: TG: How do you foresee College Station changing from here on out? 1:02:34: HM: I know it’s going to keep growing, I mean we are involved in planning. I have helped Lance Simms at the city who just retired at director of planning lately. We were always working with him when we have annexed big parts of town, new parts of town and stuff. So in the 1980s Bryan and College Station had gotten together and decided where they would meet at, instead of having a race together to grab up all of this rural property before the other one gets it. They just decided let’s draw a line across the county from river to river and this is where we decide were are not going to cross. And basically it was Highway 60 or University Dr. until the Brazos River and then it went out to Highway 30 out toward Carlos. So Bryan that was as far as they would go and College Station would take the rest as they grew. They had to update that so I was helping Lance do the GIS mapping and we have actually updated that all the way to Lake Sommerville, we went all the way out Highway 60 to Lyons community, past Snook and everything. So we went through Madison County and I don’t remember how far we went over that way. And so I sort of drew up where I think was a county line so I don’t know if Bryan/College Station have adopted that as their new extended basis but it is part of this growth. I mean your ETJ, College Station is over 100,000 they are waiting for the official 2020 census. Then they can jump their ETJ boundaries from 3½ miles to 5 and start controlling, all of a sudden that puts them into Grimes County, deep into Grimes County and into Burleson County. And so as they keep growing it keeps moving out and we are not landlocked. Take a look at Houston, there are so many communities around them that they stopped growing but Bryan/College Station doesn’t and the few little towns around like Kurten, Snook, and Wixon Valley and things will just be an island inside the growth Bryan and growth of College Station. We don’t have the interstate but we are working on getting one. We are going to have the Aggie Highway to Houston, high speed rail we are going to be the only stop over here you know Madison County if it gets finished. And with these pharmaceutical companies slowly realizing that this is a centrally located place that’s not far from everything. Houston is not going to close doors but they may have issues with subsidence as far as flooding and things like getting worse and the land is actually sinking. The surveyors in Houston cannot use elevation benchmarks because they move, they’re sinking into the ground and by measurable amounts each year, the whole ground is sinking. So that kind of stuff is sort of making us more appealing as a high and dry area and it’s just an hour north. It’s going to grow forever, if I could come back in 300 years there is no telling what would happen. They may call it a different name instead of Bryan/College Station it might be one big new name or something, I don’t know. But I think it will be a spot on Google Earth that you will see, [laughs]. 1:06:31: TG: [Laughs]. 1:06:32: HM: There won’t be a lot of green around. 1:06:32: TG: I just hope there is a highway [laughs]. 1:06:37: HM: Well as far as roads we won’t be driving around in four wheel gas guzzlers I guarantee. I think about that some because I am involved in the surveying of the cemetery for College Station. We did the older one and doing the new one, the Aggie Field of Honor and all that did all the surveying. We still have a lot of areas we have to add into the fringe of it. But I think ahead on that surveying, I think 200 years out what are we going to need in the cemetery. The cemetery is not going away, in 200 years it’s still going to be there and in the older cemetery we kept running out of grave spaces and adding some. We ended up closing some dead end streets they had they would use them for funeral parking areas and stuff. And so the new cemetery wasn’t getting ready quick enough and so we had to scrounge around and I had to help the parks department survey it out and they took the pavement off of a few dead end streets and we fit in some graves. And it was hard to fit them in a uniform pattern because the adjacent lots or blocks had their own unique diagonal pattern so there is this gap in between them where the street was. You can’t match both of those because they had their own directions and stuff. So you end up with a lot of triangles you can’t use, a lot of wasted space. In the new cemetery, I purposely told them, well I want to play like there are no streets here even though you have these big loop, flower loop petal streets in the Aggie Field of Honor at the Municipal Cemetery. I said, “Lets layout the graves like there are no streets here because there is no telling how many streets we are going to need in the future.” And I was told, “What do you mean not need them?” I said we aren’t going to be driving around in cars and hearses in 200 years we will still need the cemetery but we can do away with some of the streets out here. And we want to be able to fit the graves in as soon as you take the pavement out you can have the same block number instead of stopping and putting new patterns and thinking of the problems we had at the other one. I think, “What’s going to happen in 200 years.” The bad thing I think about is an airplane crashing into the cemetery because it’s in line with the runway at Easterwood and I think one day a plane is just going to come in short and just plow right into the cemetery. And I was told, “The chance of that is pretty slim.” Yeah but the chance of it over 200-300 years is pretty good, one did it in the ‘70s before it was a cemetery and came in right out in that same place. And it could happen again if they were flying planes not bringing in hovercraft or something like that. If they are coming in gliding they will end up crashing into the cemetery someday. But the town I think about it and I think about my old house, what will happen and what will end up being your house in town will it be dozed out for an Aggie shack or will it be preserved as some kind of historic thing someday or what. The town will someday need that and I always wonder how long it will last and what will end up happening and things like that. 1:10:12: TG: So we are almost to the end of our interview and so my last question is do you have anything else you want to say before we conclude? 1:10:21: HM: Mainly I just enjoy studying local history. I read a lot of it on the old newspapers, newspapers.com I found five or six years ago. They had The Eagle scanned and you could OCR and search back to the 1880s in the The Eagle, so I started reading through that weekly and putting out emails like, “100 years ago today this happened here.” That’s where I got a lot of credit with people thinking I know everything and it’s really just from searching in those newspapers and then looking for the back stories and you will find little tidbits about something that you never heard of and then I start researching that using the internet or whatever and all of a sudden you find things. I was reading through The Eagle four years ago or something and here on the front page of The Eagle in 1958, it might have been ’54, was four men getting the Distinguished Flying Cross at the Bryan Air Base. And they had come back from Korea, they were U-2 pilots and one of them was Virgil I. Grissom who became one of the first astronauts, the Right Stuff, and it had their addresses and The Eagle instead of putting your age now if they interview anyone they put their age, they used to put their address, their whole address. So it would say Virgil Grissom of so and so Nagle Street and then it would have the next guy with his address. And then I realized that all four of these guys live at Northgate and then I started thinking what’s called Culpepper Manor or North Oakwood, Mr. Culpepper built all that in the early ‘50s when Bryan Air Base became activated for married people that were in the Air Force. And so one of the first astronauts, he ended up dying in the Apollo 1 fire but Gus Grissom lived there three years in a little house that’s still there today and it’s rented out to students you know on Nagle Street. And so that was something that I put out in an email to a bunch of friends, I said, “Here is a picture of Gus Grissom and he lived here and he lived at Nagle Street and I put a little picture of the house off of Google Street View and it turns out Bob Rudder owns the house and he has owned it since the ‘80s, his dad was Earl Rudder or General Rudder. And I know Bob so I emailed him and said, “Bob you need to raise the rent on that old house you have on Nagle, Gus Grissom lived in that thing for three years. And so when I sent out the email one of the friends that got the email was Jarvis Miller who had been president of A&M for some time in the 1980s and he emailed me back and said, “Me and Alma moved into that house in the mid ‘50s and I think it was a week or two after the Grissom’s moved out and we never knew that they lived there before us.” And just lately they were doing the history of the RELLIS campus and they got Gus Grissom’s son to come back to town and he was born when they lived in that house. And they were asking if he remembered growing up and he said that he didn’t because he was just a toddler when they left. But he remembers his dad talking about being a trainer pilot at Bryan Air Base and stuff. But yeah I just like finding all these tidbits. Project HOLD of the City of College Station is a great thing and I am hoping you all are still adding to that. And The Eagle right now is running ads for older history. They are trying to do a Brazos County and Bryan and try to find things pre 1930s and I don’t really have anything they don’t. My family wasn’t here until the ‘50s but I hope they turn up some really good stuff that they haven’t seen before. 1:14:20: TG: Well this concludes our interview, so I want to thank you for your time, your contribution, and dedication to the City of College Station, we really appreciate it. From City Hall to Project HOLD to sharing your story and keeping up the history of College Station. This concludes our interview, thank you very much.