Waco History Podcast

Waco History talks with Justice Matt Johnson on the history of the McLennan County's Courthouse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The mission of Historic Waco is to preserve the heritage of Waco and McLennan County, Texas for future generations and to present enriching diverse historical experiences for audiences of all ages. Our mission is fulfilled through educational programming, community lectures, diverse exhibitions, and through our three interpreted house museums that are open to the public: Earle-Napier-Kinnard House, East Terrace House, and McCulloch House. President of Historic Waco Eric Ames Executive Director: Erik Swanson https://www.historicwaco.org/strategic-plan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Waco.. A Fantastical History with Ashley Bean Thornton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Sloan talks to Waco Civic Theater Interim Executive Director Kelly M. about upcoming and past events Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In August 1910 on the corner of Fifth & Austin in downtown Waco, construction began on a state-of-the-art, steel-frame office building. Founders and board members of the newly formed Amicable Life Insurance Company had originally planned a structure with eight stories, but that number soon rose to seventeen and then twenty-two. Construction on the building, known as the "ALICO Building," lasted a year and was the talk of the town, with crowds of onlookers common. Lee Lockwood remembers being in those crowds: "They would carry those big steel beams clear up to the top of that building, and we'd just stand there with our mouth open." Mary Sendón recalls the town's attitude toward the structure: "My dad said, ‘That's crazy! What are they going to do? Put up one skyscraper in this little town?' And everybody made fun of it right at first because it was so tall. And when Will Rogers came to Waco and spoke at the auditorium—the old auditorium—he said that Waco was a tall skyscraper surrounded by Baptist churches. (

During the Great Depression, newspapers struggled alongside other businesses throughout the country, as many of their customers were having to pinch pennies like never before. At the time of this 1974 interview, Harlon Fentress was chairman of the board of directors of Newspapers Incorporated, which owned the Waco Tribune-Herald. He recounts his days in the advertising department of the Waco News-Tribune during the early thirties: "We had a good many promotions because business was bad in those days, and we would create events which would supply advertising. Well, let's say we had a Father's Day coming up. Most of the merchants didn't pay much attention to it. We would create a Father's Day special edition or a special section of the paper. Things of that nature." In addition to the Waco papers, in the 1930s Newspapers Incorporated owned several small-town newspapers in Texas. Fentress recalls the challenge of collecting payments in Breckenridge, where the bulk of distribution was rural: "Our circulation man

Even with its dry spells, wind, and blistering heat, Waco has enjoyed a bounty of flowers over the years. Mary Sendón recalls the Cotton Palace expositions held in the early 1900s in the Bell's Hill area: "They kept the grounds so beautiful. You never saw so many chrysanthemums in all your life as you would see at the Cotton Palace. They planted those things early. Every row that led up to the new—there were several different areas—they led to the main building—and every one was bordered with chrysanthemum flower beds. And they had the flower building, the florist building there, with all of the flowers. Florists came together even from outside and had beautiful arrangements." Florist Harry Reed describes a few of the local flowers his family sold before it became common to import flowers from all over the world: "We raised a lot of marigolds in the summertime. That's a crop that you can—an outdoor crop that you can grow. We grew dahlias, a lot of dahlias, because we couldn't get much else. And the flower now

This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Mazé. In 1881, Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Co. formed with the purpose of operating exchanges in Arkansas and Texas. The company took over exchanges in Galveston and Houston and started several others across the state. Waco's very own telephone exchange opened in the fall of 1881 with 45 subscribers. Robert Lee Lockwood remembers the calling situation in the early 1900s: "We had two telephones in Waco. There were two different and separate telephone systems. We called it at that time ‘the old and the new phone.' And they were just as separate and independent as could be. And we had two telephones, and I remember our phone number: 2-2-5. It was a low number. And that's when—when we got our phone, that was how many phones were in the city of Waco on that system, and then the other system came in. And it was really—you almost had to have two phones if you wanted to reach everybody

Dr. Sloan talks with guest Rick Tullis about Wacoan WD Custead and his claim of being the first in flight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Sloan chats with Sean Sutcliffe about the history of the Waco Fire Department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sport of basketball was created in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith, a teacher at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Since that very first game that involved a soccer ball and two peach baskets, the sport has undergone many changes. Baylor football coach Grant Teaff recalls when a high school coach in Snyder, Texas, drove him to basketball tryouts at San Angelo College in the early 1950s: "We go to the gym, report in. Then they take us into the gym, and Coach [Max] Baumgardner, who was a UT guy, and his assistant was Phil George, a UT guy, and brought us in there and said, ‘Looks guys.' Said, ‘We got five scholarships. They're actually partial scholarships. You have to work if we give you one. We give you a job and give you a partial scholarship. Only have five of them. And so we're going to have a tryout for those five.' And I'm thinking, Well, I wonder how this is going to work. Said, ‘Okay, guys. In a moment, Coach George is going to come up here, and he's got two big boxes

The wedding industry, movies, and TV have created fantasies about lavish proposals and ceremonies that will ensure lasting marriages. But if the love and compatibility are there from the start, simplicity will get the job done. Gloria Young of Waco started dating F. M. Young, the brother of her best friend, the summer before she went off to college. She reflects on their courtship: "Used to, I was kind of - I would really like a boy until he liked me, and then I wasn't interested anymore. I'd like somebody else, you know. And I was never sure he liked me. So, I think that was part of the thing, that he was kind of a challenge, you know. (laughs)" Young explains when marriage came into the picture: "I'm not sure that he ever officially proposed to me. I think we just kind of, you know, knew we were going to get married. What he asked me was, 'If I buy you a ring, would you wear it?' (laughs) Actually, when I got that ring, I was a senior in college. I had had my wisdom teeth - I had embedded wisdom teeth, and

The 1911 Texas Almanac reported that approximately 15,000 automobiles were in service in the Lone Star State. The Almanac went on to say, "Although the automobile is counted a luxury and in the majority of cases, is used for pleasure, or as a means of transportation from the home to the office, the automobile is found in practical everyday life in all parts of the State." Businessman Robert Lee Lockwood remembers his family was one of the first in Waco to own a car: "We bought an E-M-F 30. And I doubt if they—many people ever heard of such a car. Course, we had to crank it with hand. It didn't have an electric starter. And we had a carbide setup where the water was in the top and the carbide below, and you'd loosen the valves so the water would drip on the carbide and create the gas for your lights. Course, the taillight was an oil lamp that was used." Lockwood describes car trips in the early 1900s: "Your tires were a constant problem. You wouldn't go to Dallas and back very often without having a puncture.

Dr. Sloan continues talks with Ryan Holt, Assistant City Manager about the History of the Waco Police Department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Traveling by train has become something of a novelty for most Americans, as the routes available from surviving lines are quite limiting. But during their heyday, passenger trains, with service offered in most cities, were the go-to mode of transportation for many Americans and offered the excitement of new faces and experiences. Mary Sendón of Waco describes a notable train ride she took with her husband, Dr. Andrés Sendón: "We were sitting there, and there was a family with a—two other children, but one of them was a little girl, cute little girl. Well, my husband liked kids, and he started talking to her. Well, she wouldn't leave him alone. She just wanted to sit with him and talk and talk and talk. So finally, two little boys came up and said—wanted to get in on the conversation. They had a book with the ABC's. Sendón said, ‘Can you say the ABC's?' They did, you know. They started off saying them. And then they told him, said, ‘Now, you say them.' Well, Sendón, to tease them, he would say, ‘A, B, D, F,'—y

Three years in to World War I, a $5 million construction project began on the northwest side of Waco. A few months later in September of 1917, the new training headquarters Camp MacArthur welcomed 18,000 troops from Michigan and Wisconsin. Throughout the rest of the war, the thousands of soldiers stationed at Camp MacArthur became a part of Waco's culture. Mary Sendón remembers the impact the camp had on her father's shoe business: "The soldiers began to come to town and have their work done in town. They'd come to my dad's shop. He had a nice big shop where you could sit around and read newspapers, or maybe he'd have magazines there where they—they'd wait. And he always had that place full of soldiers. In fact, he had one of them come in there wanting to work for him one day. (laughs) But he would work late on Saturday night. He'd work day and night, not only on Saturday nights but on weeknights to catch up. Then pretty soon, the—the government gave him a contract to take care of the officers' boots. They al

The worst drought in Texas in recent memory belongs to the 1950s. The seemingly never-ending dry spell started in '49. By the time it came to an end in 1956, all of Texas's 254 counties, save 10, had been declared federal disaster areas. Jess Lunsford, the founding administrator of South Texas Children's Home, describes how the dire conditions threatened the new campus near Beeville: "We hauled out thirty tremendous oak trees out of that campus that died because of that drought. Well, I found an old rancher friend, Wiley Green, in San Angelo. And he had fought a water problem all his life out in that semi-arid country. And someone had told me about Wiley Green, and I went out and told him what we were up against. I spent the night there at his invitation. And the next morning I got ready to leave; he said, "I have a little check here for you." And he said, "You go back to that campus, and you get a good well dug and a good submersible pump or whatever kind of pump you think you need, and you start irrigating

Dr. Sloan talks with Ryan Holt, Assistant City Manager about the History of the Waco Police Department Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Sloan wraps up his conversation with Historian John Kamanec about The Case and Execution of Roy Mitchell in Waco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before their vaccines were made available, measles and rubella swept through towns every few years, mostly infecting young children. Everyone was expected to suffer through them at some point. Waco native Mary Sendón recalls her and her siblings' experience with the more serious of the two illnesses: "All of us—four of us—got measles at the same time. I was even in grammar school; I didn't get it till I was in grammar school. And I remember that my grandfather and my dad—you know, the men really worried about the kids a lot. You'd be surprised how much attention they gave to them. But I know my grandfather got worried because my fever was way up high. And, you know, it was so high that my nails peeled off. And he got up and went to the drugstore and tried to get something from—there was an old Kassell's drugstore down on Eighth Street, and he got the druggist to give him something to get the fever down. And there were little powders. You had to mix them in a teaspoon of water and then drink a glass of water.