"Jesus H. Jones": That was what Franklin D. Roosevelt used to call Jesse Jones, the Houston developer who reigned over the New Deal's deep-pocketed Reconstruction Finance Corp, dispensing what would be, in today's dollars, hundreds of billions intended to pull the United States economy out of the Depression. [...] what Jesse Jones wanted was a fitting way to mark Texas' Centennial, the 1936 celebration of its 1836 independence from Mexico. What Jesse Jones wanted was an ornament that would make the entire state proud and that would provide much-needed jobs in his own beloved Houston. The chief architect was Alfred Finn, who in the course of his career designed so many buildings for Jones that they conducted business with a handshake rather than contracts. In the Houston Metropolitan Research Center's archives, you can see Finn's early sketches for other versions of the monument - among them, a long, low building with no obelisk; and an obelisk topped not by a star, but by a statue of a soldier. The photo of Charlie's father, Karel Kubin, shows a man in a hat, working inside what appears to be a rebar cage dizzingly high off the ground. [...] it turned out that not one piece of stone in the strange star would be set either plum or level. Karel Kubin wanted something to remember it by, so he asked whether he could take home the final little plywood mock-up that they'd stuck up on the water tower.
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