July 19, 2019 | UHCL Staff
Back in 2007, when Deborah Griffin was at a neighborhood pool party, taking a neighbor’s suggestion to have a 50th anniversary homecoming party for the neighborhood sounded like a fun idea. After all, Timber Cove, a secluded neighborhood located on the banks of Taylor Lake in Taylor Lake Village, was no ordinary subdivision. Timber Cove had been home to four of the seven original Mercury astronauts, as well as countless engineers and others who moved to the area to begin working on the newly-established manned space flight program in the early 1960s. Apollo astronauts soon followed.
“The idea for a 50th anniversary homecoming party was brought up by a neighbor who had grown up in Timber Cove,” said Griffin, director of operations at University of Houston-Clear Lake’s College of Human Sciences and Humanities. “We knew there were still people around who would want to come back and see where they grew up. We thought it would be great if we could organize some kind of homecoming event for anyone who used to live in Timber Cove, whether they were astronauts, NASA employees or anyone else.”
Griffin said she and four others began to plan the event. “There are still people around who moved to Timber Cove very early. We reached out to former residents, who went through their old Christmas card lists,” she said. “We had one former resident who was living in a nursing home in Ohio who still had her Garden Club directory from those days. People began corresponding and telling me about the Timber Cove they used to know.”
Soon, she said, they’d had so many responses to their invitation that the one-day party turned into a homecoming weekend with several events. “We gathered a lot of information for a Tour of Homes. The current owners of the homes that had first belonged to Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Jim Lovell and Pete Conrad were going to open their homes for people to tour,” she said. “We were collecting historical information and building fact sheets for each home, looking into each of the missions the men flew, finding photos of the house and the family in the house.”
That’s when Griffin said she realized she had collected so much material, she didn’t know what she should do with it. “I began talking with my historian colleagues at UH-Clear Lake and with the archivist in the Alfred R. Neumann Library on our campus,” she said. “The archivist suggested we do oral histories. She taught me what to do, and we got the equipment, set it up, and began reaching out to people who were longtime residents of the neighborhood to share their stories.”
Through the oral history contributed by the son of one of Timber Cove’s original builders, Griffin said they learned that the development had nearly gone bankrupt. “We learned that the original concept for the neighborhood was to be a weekend home for busy Houston executives who wanted a lake house that was closer than Galveston,” she said. “By 1961, the only lots in Timber Cove that had homes were the ends, which were nearest the water. The middle part was all empty. Interest had died down and sales had dropped off. Then, to make it all worse, that September Hurricane Carla hit.”
Just days after Houston and Galveston were devastated by Hurricane Carla, NASA Administrator
James E. Webb announced that the site of the NASA center dedicated to human space
flight would be Houston. This became the Manned Space Flight Center, renamed Lyndon
B. Johnson Space Center in 1973.
“People from Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, were told to relocate to
this area,” Griffin said. “They were looking for a place to live and that’s when El
Lago and Nassau Bay also started to develop. Almost all the original seven Mercury
astronauts lived in either Timber Cove or El Lago. When the second astronaut class
was named, many of them came to Timber Cove, or to El Lago or Nassau Bay.”
Developers and builders saw that the area was experiencing a resurgence and the lots started to sell again. “Had it not been for NASA’s decision to put the Manned Space Flight Center on NASA Road 1, Timber Cover would have developed much more slowly,” she said. “People started moving in and they were interested in getting to know each other since they were all working on the same project.”
Griffin said her former neighbor had worked on calculating re-entry orbit and trajectory of the capsule during splashdown. “His wife had sewn the prototypes of the first space gloves in secret because we didn’t want the Russians to know we didn’t have a space suit yet,” she said. “She practiced making the gloves, and he would take them to work, they’d try them out, and he would bring them back for alterations. So it’s important to note that wives also made their contributions.”
In collecting historical anecdotes from former residents, Griffin learned that in the earliest days of Timber Cove, there was no police presence at all in the area. “The closest sheriff was over in La Porte,” she said. “The men in Timber Cove volunteered to be deputies, so they went to La Porte, got deputized, received uniforms and a police car and a gun, and began patrolling. The men would work at NASA or wherever all day, then come home and patrol. When one shift ended, he’d park the police car in the driveway of the next man, and then when he came home, he’d do his patrol.”
Safeguarding the neighborhood became a priority as the astronauts became famous. “They didn’t intend to become famous. They were guys in the military,” she said. “Pretty soon, tour buses and carloads of people would come to the neighborhood. And in those days, the mailboxes were lined up out on Old Kirby Road. When the astronauts moved in, people started going through the mailboxes to look for those names.”
She said she continued consulting with UHCL’s archivist about oral histories, and they had designated a home in which anyone could drop in during the homecoming event and take the time to tell their personal story of life in Timber Cove. “I also asked (Professor of Graphic Design) Stuart Larson to work with his Illustration class to create a 50th anniversary patch that was similar to the patches the astronauts wore for their missions,” she said. “It was a great student project. We got several designs and the neighbors voted on their favorite. The students came up with a wonderful patch acknowledging the seven original astronauts, four stars for those who lived in Timber Cove, connected by stars and stripes.”
Then, Griffin said, disaster struck. “Our homecoming party was set for October 2008 and we had about 400 responses,” she said. “But in September, Hurricane Ike came along and destroyed everything.” The neighborhood pool house, which would have played a major role in the weekend’s events, took in over 7 feet of water. The neighbors who would have participated in the Homes Tour also flooded.
“We had so much money sent in. Everything was ready to go. We had obviously struck a nerve with hundreds of people who wanted to return to their old neighborhood, and we didn’t want to give it up, but we had to cancel the event,” she said. The event was rescheduled for June 2009. “Jim Lovell’s children came, and Jane Conrad Dreyfus, who is Pete Conrad’s former wife, came and even gave an oral history,” Griffin said. “John Glenn sent a note with his regrets, and told us a wonderful story about how his wife Annie would often jump off the family’s boat and swim up the canal to the house.”
One of the current neighbors, astronaut Megan McArthur, flew the Timber Cove patch created by Larson’s class on STS-125, a space shuttle mission, which flew in May 2009. “To this day, Timber Cove is still a piece of midcentury America,” Griffin said. “Just like in the old days, we still organize a Fourth of July parade for the kids. We will have pool parties, and every Christmas we put out the luminaries, gather at the bridge and have cider in the pool house.”
The archive that Griffin collected is available for public use in the archives and special collections section of Alfred R. Neumann Library at UHCL.
