Sand and Sun

It was pleasant living in Galveston. I turned in about one story a day. Marie and I went to the beach in the afternoon and splashed in the surf. About once a month we went to the Balinese Room and ate well and watched the gamblers lose thousands. The only problem was that we did not have a future. The Galveston News did not pay much and we were not making a reputation in the news business. Ambition can be the ruination of a young couple's existence, but we knew that we were going to have to make a move. And so we applied to the Houston newspapers, Marie to the Chronicle and me to the Post. We were both hired and so we moved to the Big City, although Houston only had a population of about 400,000 in those days. Soon Marie became a copy editor and I became a roving reporter. We were working on two large daily newspapers and there was a career satisfaction in that. The only difference was that Houston was a dull community compared to Galveston. Most of the city closed at sundown. There was only one all night pharmacy. We bought a house in a new subdivision and started raising our daughters. Houston continued to grow, although you could stand in front of the downtown Rice Hotel and meet visitors from East Texas on any weekend. It was still a provincial community.