It is one of our enduring family photos from youth baseball: my sister dutifully in attendance, my father in a tie, my mother with a confectionary meringue of a bouffant. She looks like Peggy from “Mad Men,” and she is holding neither peanuts nor Cracker Jack but a can of bug spray.

Then the Astrodome opened in 1965, and we took a couple of eager vacation trips to Houston from south Louisiana, where the temperature and humidity seemed surpassed only by the cholesterol count.

We were excited and astonished to sit in air-conditioning to watch a baseball game, free of the need for any lotion, suntan or calamine. Finally, we could satisfy our itch for big-league ball without the itch of swarming mosquitoes.

The Eighth Wonder of the World, as the Astrodome was nicknamed, with its 200-foot-tall roof and nine-acre footprint, became the most important, distinctive and influential stadium ever built in the United States.