Houston, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated Al Smith for the presidency in 1928, is said to be dominated by conservatives who give the welfare state no quarter. Yet William S. White, writing in _Harper’s_ in 1959, said Houston “was ... the first large community in the United States to feed the depression hungry with no questions asked, no kind of means test, no social worker’s cross examination, no stigma, and no nonsense.” [Illustration: _Longhorns at E. H. Marks’s ranch, near the western edge of the city limits._] Nothing about Houston is more enigmatic than its weather. The weather long ago made Houston the site of one of its principal experiment stations. W. D. Bedell has written that Houston, more than any other big Texas city, is a crossroads of weather. “Here we can have Dallas weather or Caribbean weather or Colorado weather or Arizona weather,” he wrote. “Houston gets more Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico weather than any other major Texas city. That is the steam bath kind of weather.” Houston gets more steam bath weather than any other kind. In 1952, when the Prudential Insurance Company transferred scores of employees from New Jersey to its new Southwestern Home Office in Houston, it prepared an immigrant’s guide. The question “How’s the Climate?” was answered: “To be perfectly frank about Houston’s weather, even a Texan wouldn’t brag about it in the summertime. It’s hot and it’s sticky.” [Illustration: _On February 14, 1895, Houston received what may have been the heaviest snow in its history—twenty-two inches. The old Burns house, shown on the day of the snowfall, occupied the site of the twenty-one story Texas National Bank Building._] After the St. Louis Cardinals played their first games in Houston in 1962, Stan Musial said the city has only three seasons—“Summer, and then July and August.” Members of the British diplomatic service are paid an extra allowance when they serve in such equatorial places as Aruba, Burma, Indonesia, Panama, the Persian Gulf—and Houston. Houston’s Christmases, on the other hand, are mostly mild and green, a climate’s benedictions, decorated by nature with holly, yaupon, and roses. Houston nearly got a White Christmas in 1929, when 2.3 inches of snow fell on December 21 and 22, but in fact the last White Christmas appears to have been in 1859. A legend says Houston gets really cold only once every ten years, and many big storms do come in that pattern. Of modern cold spells, the big ice show of 1951 was the most severe. From January 29 to February 3, Houston had 123 hours—more than five days and nights—of below-freezing temperatures. Most of the city’s few freezes last less than a day.