Word: houstons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cost considerations are giving some localities pause. Last summer Houston voters resoundingly rejected a $2.35 billion bond issue for mass transit, despite the fact that it would have meant no new taxes for the first leg. As a result, the city lost all but $5.5 million of the $110 million in federal aid it had been allocated from the gas-tax fund, and its proposed 18-mile heavy-rail system appears to be on permanent hold. "It's a humbling experience to take a licking like we did," admits Alan Kiepper, general manager of Houston's Metropolitan Transit...
...More than 700 water mains broke in Fort Worth, causing the system to hemorrhage water twice as fast as the city uses it. In New Orleans, upscale new Canal Place Mall was awash because of broken pipes, while city streets were flooded by rain. The Crown Plumbing Co. in Houston hired 150 workers, doubling its staff, to cope with 3,000 emergency calls a day during the four-day freeze...
...trying to do so, money managers run the risk of drowning. Fayez Sarofim, an Egyptian-born pension-fund adviser based in Houston, did remarkably well for his clients in the mid-1970s by holding stocks of international oil companies. But when oil prices started sagging in the 1980s, so did the market value of Sarofim's investments. He has lost several big clients and perhaps $1 billion of the $9 billion or so he was managing...
...enough savvy to sell off energy shares from his portfolio before the oil glut drove down their value. Day, however, still has a huge personal stake in the industry. Through his mother, Willametta Keck Day, he is one of the heirs to the Keck family's holdings in Houston's Superior Oil, a 25% share worth about $5 billion...
DIED. Jimmy Demaret, 73, fun-loving golfer who was the first man to win three Masters titles ('40, '47, '50); apparently of a heart attack; in Houston. The Professional Golfers' Association's top money winner in 1947 (his total: a now laughable $27,936), Demaret often sported garish garb that scandalized sartorially conservative fellow athletes but blazed the fairway trail for today's multihued golfers. Said an admiring Sam Snead of his hard-partying contemporary: "No telling what Jimmy would have done if he'd toed the line and gone...