Astros learn from their past

If youre old enough, you might have groused all those years ago when the Colt .45s changing their name to the Astros. Colt .45s was a distinctive name, and it nodded to Houstons roots. It was a roughneck town founded on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou, a ways west of where they fought the Battle of San Jacinto. They found oil in 1901. Yeah, the Colt .45s. That was it. That was Houston. Thats how pitcher-turned-manager Larry Dierker felt. He didnt like the name Astros. It was the only baseball team named after a stadium, he said. Bricks and mortar. And that was true, but there were a lot of things named after the Astrodome in those days. Hotels, theme parks, the playing surface itself. Buildings all around town were Astro this or Astro that. It was an Astro world, and you were just living in it. So as hokey as it might have seemed at the time, the Astro thing stuck. It became Houstons identity. At that point in time, it was hard to say Houston without the Astrodome, said Chuck Poole, a longtime Houstonian who worked for the Astros in the 1980s and now works for Rice University. NASA and the Astrodome. I dont think its any stretch of the imagination to say so. That identity, whatever is left of it, faced a threat when Jim Crane, who recently bought the Astros, said he was considering changing the name. Crane got some headlines during the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, the public cried out, and after a few days the Astros name was saved. We received strong feedback and consensus among season ticket holders and many fans, Crane said. Sentiment and nostalgia defeated business. The Astros will remain the Astros, and a city remains symbolically tied to the most significant period in its history. The Astros dont play in the Astrodome anymore. Astroworld is long gone. The space shuttle program is over. It is a different city than it was in the 60s, but the 60s, in so many ways, put Houston on the map. From 1960 to 1980, Houston's population went from 900,000 to 1.5 million. "The housing market was booming, jobs were plentiful," said Willie Loston, a native Houstonian who is the executive director of the Harris Country Sports and Convention Corporation. "You could tell. You could tell from the traffic. It was kind of a boom town feeling." Crane, with the help of fans, might have been able to come up with some other name that felt deeply Houstonian, like the Colt .45s or the Astros. I get the sense there is a certain generation of the electorate here in Houston that would have said gosh darnit there ought to be something in this town that wears powder blue and is called the Oilers. But I also get the sense Houston is one of those cities where everybody is from someplace else. There are jobs here, and people flow to jobs people from all over the world. There are more than 90 international consulates in Houston, which is the third most in the United States. It has become an international city. It is easy in Houston to feel like youre just living within a generic modern American metropolis. So much of the city feels like it kind of popped up here in about 1965, which is because so much of the city did pop up here in about 1965. All three major professional sports established franchises in Houston between 1960 and 1967. The Johnson Space Center opened in 1961, the Astrodome in 1965, The Galleria in 1970. The old oil town on the Buffalo Bayou suddenly was a place where anything was possible. We were playing baseball in air-conditioned domes with fine dining inside them. We were ice skating at the mall in the summertime. We were shooting people into outer space. Houston mattered, and it still does. And if you didnt know that; if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of Houstonians who didnt grow up here, or the millions who have never lived here, and you asked somebody why the baseball team here is called the Astros, there is a good chance youd learn something. Which is why, long after the baseball team moved into a new bricks-and-mortar palace, the Astros name still means something.