Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

What happened to the statue of Christ in the bay?

Questions & answers & comments as we say goodbye to January. The possibilities for the rest of the year stretch out before us, but sometimes we can't see them past the daily tasks snapping at each other's heels:
  
   Q. Many years ago on a trip to Corpus Christi (in the early '70s), I believe I saw a statue of Jesus in the bay. I could not find it last September when I was there, and I can't find any information that it ever existed. Can you help me? It's important to me to confirm that I really saw it.
   -Karen Prigmore,
   Euless, Texas
   A. There was no statue of Jesus in the bay, but there could have been. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, proposed erecting a 32-foot bronze statue of Jesus in the bay. That was in 1928 and it was part of Borglum's bayfront design plan. Borglum's model had Jesus with uplifted hand, calming the stormy waters.
   There was a fight over the idea of putting up a statue of Christ and the shortsighted City Council rejected Borglum's plan. There was no money at the time to build a seawall. Ten years later, the city used a seawall design plan by a Dallas firm, Myers & Noyes, but much of it was based on Borglum's creative vision.
   Borglum was unlucky here. His statue of Jesus was turned down. His bayfront design plan never came about. His idea for an airport in the bay was rejected. His plan for a broad esplanade, lined with 10,000 palm trees, that would stretch from Corpus Christi to Brownsville, was also rejected. Borglum thought big - perhaps too big for Corpus Christi.
   By the way, there is a beautiful statue of Jesus looking toward the bay. The statue "It is I" was sculpted by Kent Ullberg and graces the front of the First United Methodist Church. But as for a statue of Jesus in the bay, it only existed in the fretful foam of history.
  
   Q. I'm editing a book by Juliet Wenger for Eakin Press. I've come across a question I can't seem to resolve. Apparently, Hobart Huson was the attorney for a border dispute case, but was the border between Refugio and Aransas counties, or between Nueces and San Patricio? Sorry to send a random question out of the blue, but thought you might know.
   -Angela Buckley,
   Austin
   A. Aransas County hired Huson, attorney, historian and "Refugio" author, to help with its legal battle with Nueces County in a boundary dispute that was more about oil tax revenues than land. San Patricio, Nueces and Aransas counties all share boundaries in the Aransas Pass area. The battle went on for 14 years until it was finally settled in 1971. Nueces County also had a boundary dispute with San Patricio and Huson was involved in that case as well. The author died in 1983.
  
   Q. Your column "When Corpus Christi went to war" brought back something I heard about two years ago. A woman (her name escapes me) was giving us a tour of the old courthouse and she said she lived at the courthouse in the '30s and '40s. Her dad was the jailer. She told us there was a woman trusty who befriended German POWs housed at the jail, and that she managed to help them break out. Our guide didn't know what became of the woman or the men. She also told us of how a young man would pick her up for a date by coming up the elevator to the booking desk. Her apartment was next to the desk.
   -Karen Howden
   A. The POWs I wrote about escaped from a camp at Mexia, 300 miles north. They were returned to Mexia the day after they were recaptured here. I've never heard that POWs escaped from the courthouse jail, but it's certainly true that several families did live in the old courthouse, apparently as late as the 1950s. There were living quarters on each floor above the first floor.
  
   Q. In your column "When Corpus Christi went to war" you mentioned that two radio stations went off the air during the blackouts. If I'm not mistaken, present radio station KRIS was then named KRYS.
   -Chuck Stewart
   A. No, it was KRIS in 1940. The city's first radio station, operated by the Caller-Times, was KGFI, which some wit interpreted as, "Kome Get Fish Immediately." It went on the air in 1929 and it was sold in 1936 and became KRIS. It was the only local station until KEYS was licensed in 1941. KRIS-Radio was sold in 1956 so its owners could concentrate on KRIS-TV. At the time of the sale, the radio station's call letters were changed to KRYS.
  
   I have several comments on recent columns that are not questions:
   An interesting note on the blackouts. During drills Navy aircraft would drop bags of flour on small parachutes. If the flour bags hit a roof or tree they would burst and leave white flour spots. This was used to test how quickly a neighborhood air-raid warden took to report a bomb hit.
   -William F. Kopecky
  
   Your column on "When Corpus Christi went to war" reminded me of a friend who told me that his uncle was turned down for service, so he and a buddy had a few Jack Daniels and got on the phone and tried to call Hitler to raise hell with him. Of course, they didn't get him.
   -Fred Sission,
   Portland
  
   The column about home remedies reminded me of my grandfather. He had a terrible scar on his hand where a cut had been sterilized with kerosene. It must have pained him horribly, because at 80, the scar was still raw looking.
   -Sara Sladek
  
   Your column on home remedies got me to thinking about the home doctoring I received as a boy in Kingsville in the '30s. For redbug bites, my mother used a mixture of salt and butter. For thorns, she used a bacon poultice. We could go barefoot after the first scissortails arrived, and we picked up a lot of grassburrs and worse. Mom would go over our feet with a needle, and what wouldn't come out got a bacon poultice. My mother, who lived in Ricardo as a girl, once had a bad time with boils. She took enough gunpowder to cover a dime, but it had to be black powder, not smokeless.
   -D.A. Crossley Jr.
   Athens, Ga.
  
   Q. You recently mentioned the mineral water in Artesian Square. Do you have any other information on this?
   -Jim Stever
   A. The well was dug in 1845 by Zachary Taylor's troops to a depth of 380 feet. They found a sulphur mineral well, with water too smelly to drink. It was closed up. In 1853, during a drought, the city's founder, H.L. Kinney, tried to drill another well on the site. Halfway down, he stopped and gave the well to the city, providing the city would finish the job. When it was completed, the water was still undrinkable.
   In the 1880s, J.J. Turpin and Thomas Southgate, who operated a drug store, bottled the water and sold it. The label claimed it would cure catarrh, rheumatism, stomach trouble, and would grow hair on bald heads.
   In 1906, George Washington Grim got permission to clean the well and lay an underground pipeline to his Natatorium in the bay. The photo above could have been taken anytime between 1892 and 1904, while Oscar Lovenskiold was mayor. The last well in Artesian Square was drilled in 1935 and closed in 1953 on orders of the health department. There's more, but that's the basic outline.
   In an earlier column, we left a question hanging about who built the tunnel under Ocean Drive. Many callers, including former City Manager Marvin Townsend, helped to solve this mystery.
   The house at 2757 Ocean Drive was built by a local oilman, A. Douglas Corgey. The tunnel, dug and the walls built in the summer of 1940, is 250 feet long, four feet under Ocean Drive, and measures six by eight feet inside. The concrete slab tunnel was lighted. Corgey owned the property on the bay side of Ocean across from his residence, where he had a swimming pool and boat dock. At that time, Cole Park did not extend past Louisiana and Ocean Drive, south past that point, was a two-lane county road.
   When Corgey moved to his ranch at Pleasanton in 1949, he sold the house to attorney Ben Vaughn Jr. Vaughn in turn sold it to former Mayor Farrell Smith. The tunnel was sealed off in 1967 when the city acquired additional land for Cole Park. The house today stands unoccupied.
   (Murphy Givens can be reached by phone at 886-4315 or by e-mail at givensm@caller.com.)
  
  

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