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Article: How Houston Slipped On the Oil Patch
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- January 17, 1988
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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What a difference just half a decade can make in the life of a
city.
With the sort of bad timing that is the result of bad luck, the
bad timing that any journalist can understand, Jan Morris, the travel
writer, picked 1982 to celebrate Houston as "the best hope the time
can offer."
She compared it to Queen Victoria's London, or New York or
Chicago in their salad days. Houston was, she marveled, a city of
centripetal forces, a city metastasizing, where the vocabulary "is
habitually in the future tense" and the Sunday papers carried 40
pages of help-wanted ads. Few boomtowns ever boomed as Houston did
between 1973 and 1982.
With the sort of bad timing that any politician can sympathize ...