Free God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright Page A

By 1913, there were a dozen oil companies located in the city, including Humble Oil, the predecessor of ExxonMobil. “Houston was a one-industry town,” Stephen Klineberg, the founding director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said over coffee at a French bakery. “We did oil the way Detroit did cars.”
    Klineberg has been conducting an annual survey of the city for the last thirty-five years. When the study began, oil and gas accounted for more than 80 percent of the city’s economy; now, it’s half that. The medical center alone—the largest medical complex in the world—has more than 100,000 workers, in fifty-nine institutions, occupying an area larger than Chicago’s Loop. Houston’s port is the second-busiest in the country. The city added more than 700,000 jobs between 2000 and 2014, almost twice the number of jobs created in New York City. “People complain about the weather and the flying cockroaches, but the latest survey shows that eighty-one percent say life in Houston is excellent or good, even with the downturn,” Klineberg told me. “They say that Houston is a crappy place to visit but a wonderful place to live.”
    When I was growing up in Dallas, we looked upon Houston as a blue-collar cousin, a fine place to go if you liked country music and barbecue. That’s still true, but Houston is now rated (by The Washington Post ) as one of the five best restaurant cities in the United States. It has an excellent opera, and claims to have more theater space than any city except New York—achievements that mark Houston’s aspiration to be an international cultural center. “There was this ad in Texas Monthly ,” Lynn Wyatt, the long-reigning queen of the Houston social scene, told me. “It said, ‘Houston is’—what’s that awful word? Funky . It said, ‘Houston is funky .’ I called them up at once! I told them, Houston’s not funky ! You make it sound like Austin or some such place. Houston is a world-class city.”
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    I SPENT SOME TIME in the early 1980s writing about the space program, so I hung around the Johnson Space Center, which is in the Clear Lake area of Houston. A massive Saturn V rocket—the kind that took the astronauts to the moon—reclines on its side at the entryway, like some fallen colossus of an ancient world.
    After the glamour days of the race to the moon, the space program had become more prosaic, more workaday, more lunchboxy. I remember seeing the Columbia —the first of the shuttle fleet to fly into space—as it passed over our house, in 1981, piggybacked atop a 747, on its way to Cape Canaveral. It was exciting and pitiable at the same instant. That’s a rocket ship?
    A new generation of astronauts had arrived, and the tone of the space center changed. For one thing, they weren’t all white men. Franklin Chang-Diaz was a plasma physicist from MIT; he was born in Costa Rica and was part Chinese. He showed up on his first day at the Johnson Space Center driving a rusted-out Renault sedan, its doors held shut with ropes, and occupied the same spot where the legendary Wally Schirra, one of the original Mercury Seven, once parked his Maserati. There were still some dashing test pilots among the new group, drawn from the military ranks, like Charles Bolden, a cheerful Marine who would one day become the first black administrator of NASA. Sally Ride, a physicist, was the first American woman in space. Judith Resnik, the first American Jewish astronaut, was a classical pianist and an electrical engineer. Ronald McNair got his doctorate in laser physics from MIT; he had a black belt in karate and played the saxophone. What really impressed me was that he had integrated the library in Lake City, South Carolina, where he grew up, refusing to leave until he was allowed to check out books. His mother and the police were called, but he was finally allowed to become the first black child to borrow books. He was nine years old.
    I was a little