Houston in Story

In the early 1980s, as the oil bust plunged Houston into a quiet depression and the Oilers played boring, lifeless football, a new team exploded into the Astrodome. They were the Houston Gamblers of the upstart USFL, and for two glorious seasons, they were the greatest show in town. This is the story of a team that was a generation ahead of its time, unleashing a revolutionary "Run and Shoot" offe...

For the first time in forty years, Sundays in Houston were quiet. The Oilers were gone, having taken the team, the colors, and even the city's history with them to Tennessee. But a quiet, determined, self-made billionaire named Bob McNair refused to let that betrayal be the final word. This is the story of Houston's comeback. Learn how McNair, the polar opposite of Bud Adams, built a powerful coal...

The party was over. The shocking firing of beloved coach Bum Phillips ripped the soul out of the Houston Oilers, just as the oil bust of the 1980s ripped the economic heart out of the city. But just as the city began to find its footing, a new star rose in the Astrodome: Warren Moon. A legend in Canada, Moon came to Houston to prove the NFL wrong for its prejudice against Black quarterbacks. He be...

By the mid-1970s, the Oilers' championship glory was a faded memory. The Astrodome was quiet, the team was mediocre, and Houston had lost its football soul. Then, a cowboy walked into town. This is the story of coach Bum Phillips, a sheepskin-clad folk hero who gave the team an identity, and Earl Campbell, "The Tyler Rose," a running back who was more a force of nature than a football player. Toge...

In the late 1950s, Houston was a boomtown of unapologetic new money, but to the old guard of the NFL, it was a backwater. This is the story of how a stinging rejection from that private club pushed a young, swaggering Texas oilman named Bud Adams to do the unthinkable. Fueled by pure revenge and a bottomless bank account, he and another spurned Texan, Lamar Hunt, didn't just knock on the NFL's doo...

In 1900, as the city of Galveston was being washed from the earth by a monster hurricane, a one-armed prophet named Pattillo Higgins was chasing a fool's dream on a stinking mound of dirt near Beaumont. While the undisputed queen of Texas saw its future end, Higgins promised a new world would erupt from beneath his feet. This is the incredible story of how one of the deadliest natural disasters in...

The sun rose on Sunday, September 9th, to a clear sky and a city that was gone. In its place was a graveyard, a three-mile-long mountain of debris, and the sickening smell of death that hung over the island for weeks. The survivors faced an unthinkable task: disposing of thousands of victims, a horror compounded when the sea rejected the dead, washing them back ashore. In the final part of our ser...

On Saturday, September 8, 1900, the show began. What started as a "grand sight" for curious onlookers quickly turned into a fight for survival as the bridges to the mainland were destroyed, trapping nearly 40,000 souls on the island. As darkness fell, the city was assaulted by winds so powerful they ripped the Weather Bureau's measuring instruments from the roof after clocking a gust at 100 miles...

In a city that had dismantled its own natural defenses for the sake of progress, there was one man whose words sealed its fate. Isaac Monroe Cline, the chief of the local U.S. Weather Bureau, declared the idea of a catastrophic hurricane hitting Galveston "an absurd delusion". His scientific certainty provided the ultimate justification for the city's elite to dismiss the need for a protective sea...

Before the storm, there was the Queen. In the final years of the 19th century, Galveston wasn't just a city; it was the "Wall Street of the Southwest," a beacon of wealth, culture, and unstoppable progress. From its bustling, magnificent commercial district known as The Strand to its grand Victorian mansions lit by the state's first electric lights, Galveston was the most sophisticated and importa...

It was February 1974 in Houston, a city on a rocket ride of oil-fueled ambition. Inside the Astrodome, Elvis Presley was commanding the stage of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, creating a cultural earthquake. But the real story wasn't under the spotlights. It was outside, in a cold, muddy parking lot. There, on a rusty flatbed trailer, an Oscar-winning movie star and a feared food critic sat...

The chance discovery of a Tyrannosaurus rex with its skin miraculously preserved, unearthed not by a paleontologist but by a Montana rancher, ignites a Houston museum president's audacious dream. This launches a high-stakes, multi-million-dollar quest for money and scientific innovation, culminating in a revolutionary exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science that would forever change how w...

You’re one of millions, a single drop in a river of steel and glass, heading into the heart of the city. You look up at the familiar, grimy railroad bridge you pass under every single day. But this time, something is different. Two words, painted in giant letters, simple and clean, seem to speak directly to you: BE SOMEONE. The story of those letters, today in Houston: In Story.

A dismissive glance across a dusty arena that told a group of proud Houston area cattlemen everything they needed to know: they weren't welcome. And that insult ignited a flame that grew into the largest livestock show and rodeo mankind has ever seen, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

How did a cargo of peace become a weapon of mass destruction? The search for that answer would pit a group of grieving citizens against the full power of the United States government. Join us for the final installment of our special three part series on the Texas City Disaster.

They stood on the deck of a burning ship, heroes facing a fire. They had no way of knowing their fight was already lost...that beneath their feet, 2,300 tons of fertilizer were turning into a bomb. Their world, and the world of Texas City would vanish in a flash of light and a roar that would echo through history. Part two of our special three part series on the Texas City Disaster.

The story of how a ship on a mission of peace, carrying a cargo meant to heal the scars of war, became the instrument of the deadliest industrial disaster in American history...this is part one of our special three part series on the Texas City Disaster of 1947.

Before the skyscrapers, before the traffic, before the very idea of Houston existed, there was a lie. In today's episode, how the Allen Brothers and the unsung "Mother of Houston" birthed a city.

In business, science, and industry, Houston was already playing in the major leagues. But in the one arena that often defined a great American city, the world of professional sports, Houston was still stuck in the minors. Today, how Houston gained a Major League Baseball franchise that became the beloved Houston Astros.

Before the roar of jet engines, there was just the lowing of cattle and the whisper of prairie grass. The story of Hobby Airport begins not with a grand design, but with a muddy field, a handful of believers, and a city so desperate for a future in the clouds, it was willing to bet its very name on a living legend.