Stay ConnectedDr. Stephen Sloan of Baylor’s Institute for Oral History and Department of History explores the people, places, and stories that have shaped Waco, Texas.
Through interviews, local-history insights, and narrative storytelling, the podcast highlights both well-known events and lesser-told community histories—helping listeners learn more about Waco and its place in broader Texas history.
Dr. Slaon talks with Rev. Dr. Malcolm Foley about the barbarism of lynching and Jesse Washington in Waco Texas.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Mazé.
Everyone loves a good ghost story, especially when it involves their neck of the woods.
Around the summer of 1915, South Waco found itself with a resident ghost. Mary Kemendo Sendón, who was in high school at the time, recalls when her aunt first spotted the other-worldly figure:
"She had been sitting by the window that night. And the next morning she told my mother, she said, ‘You know, I saw something down the street last night. I think I saw a ghost. I was looking out the window,' and says, ‘I was half asleep, and all of a sudden I saw this figure in a long, flowing, white robe coming down the street.' And she said, ‘I got up to get a better look, and by the time I got up, that figure disappeared.' Well, my mother thought maybe it was a dream that she had, you know, and no more was said. Well, and another night or two passed, and the same thing happened."
News of the mysterious appearances got out, and the Waco newspaper covered the story:
"It said ‘Ghost of South Tenth Street' and had our address. It said across the street from our address. And it was—it really was a sensation because that night people were coming, sitting on the curb in front of our house up and down the street. They lined the entire street, sitting on the curb, waiting to see [if they] were going to see the ghost. It went on for two or three nights. They didn't give up. Well, it got to the point where they were bringing their lunch and eating their lunch and even—you know, of course, they—thank goodness they didn't have radios in those days because they would have—we would have had music all up and down the street. But it was noisy. They would bring bedrolls and sleep out there until early hours of the morning because when my aunt saw this, it was around three o'clock in the morning. So they wouldn't come in until about ten, just when we were ready to go to peace, and there they were."
Interest gradually dwindled, and people stopped flocking to their address at night. But Sendón describes what happened one night a little later on when she and her sister were sleeping in the front hall:
"We had hardly gone to sleep when there was a tap on the door. I jumped up, and my dad heard it at the same time, and he was right behind me. And there stood this figure in a white robe—white nightgown it was—with a teacup in her hand. My father said, ‘What do you want?' She said, ‘Do you have any whiskey?' My father said no. Well, she started down the steps with her teacup."
It turned out that the ghost of South Tenth Street was a neighbor's alcoholic cousin who was visiting from Chicago. The neighbor finally confided in Sendón's father that he could not keep her from roaming the streets at night in search of whiskey. So the mystery of the ghost was solved, but with a heartbreaking finding.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson.
For more than a century, the majority of American women were denied the right to vote. Scores of determined suffragettes who wanted to reverse this injustice spoke out through publications, lectures, rallies, and appearances before legislators. Finally, these efforts paid off with the ratification in August 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment, which states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."
Anna Gladys Jenkins Casimir was a student at Baylor in 1920 and recalls events surrounding the ratification:
"I remember parades they had in Waco, and there were a lot of women dressed in white on a float, and they were carrying banners or saying, ‘We want the right to vote,' or something like that. I remember how thrilled my mother was that she got to vote in the 1920 election. She was interested in voting in the gubernatorial election as well as the national election. She was thrilled that she could vote."
Martha Lena Emmons, also a student at Baylor during the amendment's adoption, describes an editorial cartoon concerning women's suffrage:
"But I remember one cartoon that I saw one time (laughs) where there was a lady policeman in Chicago—I believe was the newspaper that had it. And a cartoon came out, showed an old bum with a lady with a policeman's costume on, and she had a hat pin. And she said, ‘Now, get a move on.' And this old bum said, ‘Who say that the pin ain't mightier than the sword?' (laughs) And she was prodding him along with a hat pin. But, oh, that'd been the latest/there'd been the ladies(??) movement always, you know."
Emmons explains her reaction to the new law:
I remember very well here in Baylor that Mrs. Russell, who was an aide of Mrs. Claypool, was lecturing to us one time or talking with a group of us about how to vote and where to vote and the responsibility of voting. She said, ‘I did not seek it, but it's our responsibility now,' and that was sort of—oh, it's always been my attitude: (interviewer sneezes) I didn't seek it, but we had it, and it's our responsibility. And the tragedy of it has been that a great many have not bothered to exercise this privilege which they fit, bled, and died to get and all that sort of thing. But so is true of any of our privileges."
Interviewer: "Do you recall your first vote?"
"Very well! I don't know how I would have made it if Pa Davis hadn't shown me what to do. I was teaching in Calvert, Texas, and we went down to the city hall to vote. And Mr. Davis, whom we called Pa Davis because we took our meals over there and they were just such a sweet old couple that looked after us and called us 'our kids,' their kids and all that. And when I saw him over there helping run that thing, oh, I just felt so relieved. And I dashed over, and I said, ‘Pa Davis, show me what to do and where to go,' and he did, you know. Yes, I remember very well my first vote, um-hm."
The court case Leser v. Garnett, which reached the Supreme Court in 1922, argued the Nineteenth Amendment was not valid. But in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court stated the amendment was constitutional on all points brought into question.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Mazé.
At one time, the approach of cold weather signaled for many rural Americans in the South the time to begin planning for the annual hog-killing. It wasn't pretty but provided food for the coming winter months.
Louise Murphy, who grew up in Falls County in the twenties and thirties, describes some of the preparations involved in a hog-killing:
"We would have to get the old pot full of hot water and get us a barrel and get us a place to hang this hog. We had to have a cold day to get it so we could get our meat cold."
Thomas Wayne Harvey recalls what his father did before killing a hog in October of '44 in Waco:
"He had to dig a pit. And what he did, he went and got a fifty-five gallon drum and he dug a pit and he put the drum in there at a forty-five degree angle. And at the bottom end of the barrel, he built a fire pit that would heat that drum, and he'd fill it full of water until it was almost level of coming out at the top. After he built his pit, he built an A-frame directly above the barrel."
While many hogs were struck down with a single gunshot, Murphy, along with Estelle Pederson, explains what her father did:
Murphy: "He would take the ax, the back of the ax, and hit the hog in the head. And this would idle the hog until he took the butcher knife and just nearly sliced his head off."
Pederson: "It's awful how it was."
Murphy: "And, in the meantime, he would get a little singletree that come off of the wagon. Singletree. First thing we had to do was hang that hog up by that singletree and let all the blood come out."
Harvey relates the next step in the process:
"And then they gut it. And after they gut it, then they put the hog in this boiling water head first. They'd pull the hog back out, and it was so hot you had to have gloves to touch the hog. But what they did, they'd take a piece of board with a sharp edge on it, and they'd scrape the hair off the hog. And that hog would turn to a real pretty pink, and they'd do that—if the hog was too big, then they'd turn it around and stick it in the barrel backwards, you know, until the hog was completely hairless."
There was an art to scraping a hog, as Murphy explains:
"We'd start scraping. I—anybody that could get around that hog had a knife, and you'd scrape all that hair off. And you don't cut the meat. You got to know how to do it or you get—you get a little spanking. You got to know not to cut the meat."
The hog was then ready to be disassembled, processed, and stored, with no part being wasted. Nowadays, pork items can be found year-round in grocery stores, thanks to refrigeration and freezing. But once upon a time pork was on the dinner table only during certain months of the year.
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Dr. Sloan talks with Dr. Bracy Hill about Waco Hunting History
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson.
Pirate radio stations in the U.S. were born when President Taft
initiated federal regulation of the airwaves in 1912. Navy ships had been complaining that unlicensed broadcasters were interfering with their transmissions. Even with the new laws in place, pirate stations continued to pop up all over the country, for radio was still relatively new and full of magic and possibilities, and equipment was easy to build.
Charles Armstrong recalls the influence of his after-school stops by a local radio store in Waco in the thirties:
"There was a little shop down on the corner of Thirteenth and Clay, and I'd just go by there on the way home from school and go and talk to him. I was real interested in it. And when they'd have the boxing matches they had, you know, way back there, well, a lot of people was interested in them, and I despised them. And so I made me an old device I could knock them off. The local people right around here close within a block or two of me, I could put them off the air. It's kind of like (laughs)—kind of like scrambling it, and it worked. And I'd get a kick out of—they'd all be sitting around there getting ready for it, and it'd come on. I'd turn my machine on, and it'd sound like static—like an electrical storm. So that went on for several years. But I finally built me a station, and the kids come up and talk back home, talk to their mama on my radio. And we'd sing songs and stuff like that out in my garage."
He had to sign off when his life of crime caught up with him:
"And it took them about, oh, I guess a year before they caught me. And they come out—the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] come out and Bob [Robert] Van Wie. He was captain of police. And he came out, and they loaded my stuff up in the back of an old touring car. It was about 1929, 1930 model, A Models, and load my stuff up and carry it off. Mama said, ‘What are they—what are they going to do to you?' And I said, ‘I don't know.' And she said, ‘They're going to send you to penitentiary.' (laughter)"
Goodson McKee, longtime announcer on WACO, explains his involvement in pirate radio while at Waco High in the 1940s:
"I was a member of the Radio Club. And a good friend of mine, Mr. [Raymond] Franks, he and I were in the Radio Club together, and he was an electronic whiz. And we put together—I had a record player, played records in the mornings before school. And he was smart enough to put together an electronic transmitter, and we went on the air. It was the first pirate radio station in this area. But anyway, we had the radio station on the air for a while, and he could hear it clear across the river. We decided we'd better not get in trouble, so we shut it down."
Pirate radio stations continue to broadcast, with many streaming over the Internet. For some owners, these stations are a way to rebel against the high costs of proper licenses and to denounce authority. Pirate stations are able to hide from the law because equipment is easy to come by and the space required to transmit, minimal.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Mazé.
The origins of Americans riding the rails in search of work trace back to shortly after the Civil War, when ex-soldiers and others sought work on the frontier. Their numbers rose sharply during the Great Depression, when jobs and money were scarce. These hobos became common sights in transportation hubs like Waco.
Charles and Ruth Armstrong, both longtime Waco residents, explain their impressions of hobos during the thirties:
C. Armstrong: "Most of them was good people. They was kind of like the homeless. They wasn't out to hurt anybody."
R. Armstrong: "At that time, see, it wasn't anything unusual. I mean, everybody was in about the same boat because everybody was having a hard time."
C. Armstrong: "And, see, they called them ‘hobos' regardless. Some of them was hobos all they wanted to be, kind of like the homeless. There's some of them that want to be. And some of them was traveling south to get out of the cold or get them a job."
Mr. Armstrong describes how hobos communicated with each other:
"And what they'd do, they'd venture off from the tracks down there and come through the neighborhood and come to your house and knock on the door and said, I'm going to so-and-so. I'm catching a train down there, and said, I need something to eat. And Mama never turned nobody down. They'd go down as far as they could. And what they'd do, they'd mark—they'd have them some chalk, an old chalk rock—they'd mark a spot on a house, you know, on the—not on the house, but on the curb, if they had a curb, or a sidewalk. And as they'd go back they'd keep it marked. And the guys would come in and they'd know where to go get something to eat. They'd know that woman there or man would feed them, and they'd keep it marked. And one guy might feed ten or twelve guys a month. And nobody else would never get—they'd go to a house and they didn't get nothing, they wouldn't mark them—or put ‘0' or something like it."
The way families treated hobos made strong impressions on their children, as Waco philanthropist Bernard Rapoport recalls:
"We lived by the railroad tracks, you know. We were very poor. And these hobos in the—in '29, thirties, you know, early thirties, hobos would come by the house, and Mama would give them a peanut butter sandwich. And one day I said to Mama, ‘I mean,' I said, ‘Mama, some of these people don't deserve that sandwich.' She says, ‘It's better to feed all than to miss one that needs.' Now, I mean, now she imbued that kind of philosophy within me. And so if somebody needs help and I help them and they fool me and I lose, that doesn't discourage me. I know—I say, ‘Well, the next guy won't do that.'"
Although the railroad industry has dramatically changed since the thirties, with faster trains and fewer lines, hobos still exist, although the stringent security measures put in place after 9/11 nearly wiped out the practice. The current economy has seen hobos on the rise again but to a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.5 million men, women, and children who rode the rails during the darkest days of the Great Depression.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson.
White lightning, hooch, mountain dew, firewater—all names for moonshine, or distilled spirits made in an unlicensed still. Although moonshine is most often associated with Prohibition in the U.S., the practice as we know it began shortly after the formation of the country, when people were attempting to avoid the new federal tax on alcohol.
CBF missionary Earl Martin recalls his encounter with a moonshine still in the late forties, when he was teaching in eastern Tennessee:
"I was traipsing in the mountain trails in an area that wasn't too well-known to me, and I suddenly came on a moonshine still. And it was—it was—the fire was going, and it was smoking. But I didn't see anybody because they heard a stranger coming, and I suddenly realized the danger of the situation because to discover a moonshine still back in those years—and since I was from Washington, DC, I could have been perceived as a federal agent—"
Interviewer: "As a G-man."
"—even though I was a young man. So I moved quickly out of there, suffice—(laughter) I never did see anybody, but I wondered if somebody had their shotgun trained at me."
Avery Downing, former superintendent of Waco ISD, describes the prevalence of moonshine in East Texas during Prohibition:
"It was available. Everybody knew it and knew some of the places to go to get moonshine whiskey. Now, I never knew where any of those so-called stills were, but that doesn't mean that some of those wooded areas, which were extensive—I remember a place called Scott's Farm. Scott's Farm included many, many square miles of uncultivated, wooded area, and I'm sure that there must have been stills operated in such a place as that."
Once experienced, moonshine was difficult to forget:
"I remember how it—what the stuff looked like. I remember how it tasted. It was just almost like kerosene. It was white and extremely powerful to the taste buds and, I'm sure, other ways, too."
Downing explains the dark side of moonshine:
"The horror of the bootleg world is that somebody would get ahold of some bad liquor and come up with the jake leg. There were people accused of having the jake leg that I wonder now if they weren't victims of some sort of a paralysis or polio-type thing, I don't know."
Today, moonshining has waned, as large companies can produce alcohol in large enough quantities to make its cost competitive to that made secretly without taxes. However, there are still those who wish to defy the government's authority by producing the liquid themselves.
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Prior to the days of refrigeration, people the world over relied on ice to keep perishables fresh as long as possible. The ice business was certainly alive and well in the American South, especially in summer months.
Waco native Helen Geltemeyer recalls the trips she and her sister would take in the twenties and thirties to keep their house outfitted with the frozen substance:
"What Allene and I did, went up Seventeenth to Ross, and they had a man who sold ice. And he had these little two-wheeler things that he would let you take home if you brought back. So Allene and I would go get that little old piece of ice and take it home, and we'd fight all the way there and fight all the way back. But that's the way we got our ice."
Geltemeyer remembers the event leading up to a new contraption in their kitchen:
"Then when I was fourteen or maybe—yeah, I'd say I was fourteen and going to South Junior, my daddy said, "We're buying an icebox because I'm tired of wanting a cold drink.' And he'd been working in the yard because we had hedge all around our place, I mean, and he would trim that just perfect. We just had all that yard fixed. And he wanted a drink of water, and he said he wanted ice-cold water. So he bought an icebox. He didn't buy it for us; he bought it for himself. But we enjoyed."
Thomas Wayne Harvey discusses the ice industry in Waco in the 1940s:
"We had Geyser Ice and Southland Ice, two different companies here in town that would go by up and down the street in their ice trucks. And if you had a Geyser card in the window, well, you could get Geyser ice that day. If you had a Southland card in the window—and the cards was twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, and a hundred. And whatever you wanted, you'd set it where you could read a hundred from the street, and they'd bring in a hundred pounds or twenty-five pounds or whatever you wanted from the street. And the men packed the ice in on their backs with ice hooks and things like that, in those days."
He explains that finding an iceman in your kitchen was no cause for concern:
"They came on in. In those days, you never locked your door. You knew them; they knew you. They was just basically, "part of the family' because you could be in there eating supper and they'd come in: "Hello, how are you doing?' Or they'd knock at the door: 'Hope you're decent; iceman coming in,' you know, things like that. You'd get your ice, and they would come once every two weeks and collect for it."
Since the advent of electric refrigerators, the demand for ice has drastically decreased for the typical kitchen in the South, and gone is the need for a nearby company like Geyser or Southland. The bags of ice for sale in convenience and grocery stores today serve as a reminder of the business that ice once was.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Maze.
When KWTX-TV first went on the air in 1955, it was without a network affiliation, a situation no one in the industry envied. But being an independent station was in some ways a blessing in disguise, as it forced KWTX to focus on local creative talent for programming. One of the resulting series was The Harley Berg Show, a wildlife program that became a staple for many Central Texans during its twenty-four-year run.
Former KWTX-TV news director Win Frankel describes the show:
"Everyone in Central Texas knew Harley Berg. He was on for many, many years. It may have been about snakes or raccoons or whatever it was, and there was always one there. Whatever he was talking about, was a live one there. He explained all about the snakes and all the wildlife that ever came around here. It was very well done."
One particular episode of The Harley Berg Show stands out in Frankel's memory:
"And one time, rattlesnake got loose and got on the floor and wiggled around like a rattlesnake does, and we spent some time trying to get that snake under control. But that was funny."
Frankel explains that the camera followed the reptile - not Harley:
"The snake was there. There was a story. You know, you don't knock yourself out from the story. Mmm. And it was a poisonous snake. Well, that was good, but that doesn't happen every day. Thank goodness. (laughs)"
KWTX founder M. N. 'Buddy' Bostick, a long-standing force in broadcasting and the Waco community, discusses the program's popularity:
"The television industry at that time had developed two ratings services: Nielsen and ARB [American Research Bureau]. And they rated the popularity of the programs. CBS had the most popular programs on the air. And the most popular program was I Love Lucy. And we had a program on the air at the same time I Love Lucy was on the air. And it was called The Harley Berg Show, and Harley was a lovable guy. Everybody liked him. He had a jillion stories, and he told those stories on his Harley Berg Show. And Harley Berg out-rated I Love Lucy. We'd go to New York or our New York reps would go talk to agencies about advertising on our station, and they'd say, What's this Harley Berg Show? Said, It out-rates I Love Lucy. That's right."
Shortly after going on the air, KWTX-TV garnered both ABC and CBS networks, dual affiliations it kept until KXXV went on the air in the mid-eighties. But it was the immediate success of its early independent programs like The Harley Berg Show that helped the station forge lasting relationships with advertisers and its viewing audience.
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