by Julie Hatfield

Created on: November 09, 2008   Last Updated: November 17, 2008

HOUSTON, TEXAS The mayor looks as ridiculous in bike shorts as the rest of us do.

Those tight, shiny, neon-colored thigh- and butt-revealing pants make nearly everyone look as if they're nothing more than a bunch of bulges, but at least it was dark outside the Hilton Americas Hotel where we four dozen travel writers - gathered for a pre-dawn bike ride with the mayor of this city in October before our convention meetings.

Bill White probably looks mayoral in a suit and tie, but he is an avid cyclist, and early-morning bike rides and biking clothes are part of his routine. The Harvard-educated mayor is a delightful man with a sweet personality, and a very popular one (he received 97 percent of the vote in the last election and is now in his sixth and final year as mayor of this town noted for its medical center, its museums, its space center and its moniker as energy capital of the world, among other honors.)

He took us through beautiful Glenwood Cemetery, which has perhaps the only hills in this flat Texas countryside, and stopped to show us the elaborate graves of Howard Hughes and his parents. The cemetery is one of Houston's many city public parks, and, less than a month after the devastation of Hurricane Ike, in which Houston lost thousands of beautiful old trees, he pointed out places in the cemetery that a month previous had been dark glades of forest density that provided cool resting places in a town that broils in summer, but are now bare open spots with the hot sun shining through. With his typical sense of optimism, the mayor had written in the September 15 Houston Chronicle, that "for all our achievement, nature has its way of reminding us that we are not in controlbutwe can mend our city quickly with the same spirit that helped us build it." And he soon had put another positive spin on the mess that Houstonians found after the storm, by telling us that "we will turn all those downed trees into useful wood chips to use all over the city." Enough wood chips, incidentally, to fill five football fields each six feet high!

In the course of the ten-mile ride through a variety of Houston sites, the mayor pedaled with us into the Rice Military neighborhood so that we could see the famous Beer Can House created by the late John Milkovisch, who began cutting apart all of the beer cans that he used and putting them into a most unusual form of aluminum siding on the house, as well as hanging garlands made of beer can tops that actually lowered the family's energy bill. The garlands actually "sing," that is, when the wind blows, they sound like jingle bells, but the house itself, surrounded as it is by attractive homes and condominiums in this nice neighborhood, is so different from its neighbors, and, to be honest, so garishly ugly, that it is a shock to the tourist coming from, say, proper Boston with its carefully zoned historical and architecturally pure buildings.

Mayor White explained the theory behind the city's love of this funky architectural monstrosity, and in fact the architectural mishmash of the whole city, by saying that "in Houston, we leave esthetics to private individuals, not to the government. Whatever a person wants to build, that's his right. Besides, Milkovisch's neighbors never once complained about the house hurting the value of their homes, possibly because he shared his beers with all of them!"

By the time the sun rose we were heading back downtown on Allen Parkway with views of Buffalo Bayou and the downtown skyline, and we left the mayor for our meetings and he, presumably, to get back into being just another "Suit," albeit one in charge in the office of the mayor.

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