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.
Waco History talks with Justice Matt Johnson on the history of the McLennan County's Courthouse.
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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
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Waco.. A Fantastical History with Ashley Bean Thornton
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Dr. Sloan talks to Waco Civic Theater Interim Executive Director Kelly M. about upcoming and past events
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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. (laughter) And I think somebody else mentioned that it was a lonely spire surrounded by Baptists. Of course, the Baptists always got the brunt of the jokes. But my dad finally—they finally realized that Waco did need some growth. And, you know, they began to build other buildings, some six-story buildings. And they thought it was pretty good. Then they began to be proud of it. And the fact that it withheld the tornado was another thing. They thought, Well, that was a good contractor. He knew—he knew what he was doing."
During that devastating storm on May 11, 1953, Victor Newman was in his office on the 4th floor of the ALICO Building with business partner Floyd Casey. Newman describes their experience:
"Well, I looked up and, oh, the wind was blowing, and it was getting bad. But I'd been in storms, but I had never been in a storm like that. And Mr. Casey and I—he was there, and we were sitting there and looking. And I said, ‘Look, Mr. Casey,' and a telephone pole come down the street. It wasn't turning over or anything, but all the wires were hanging on it. And it was just floating just about right by our office, just going down. And when Mr. Casey saw that he said, ‘Vic,' said, ‘We have a tornado.' And so I said, ‘Well, what are we going to do?' He said, ‘I'm going to get under my desk.' And I said, ‘Well, I believe I'll get under mine,' and so we did. And we could hear all the noises upstairs. I thought that the building had broken in two, people just running down the stairs screaming and this, that, and the other. But when we—it was over—well, you know, that was plastered walls and things. But when it was over, there were no cracks in there, but it was just little sand, plaster, all over the top of our desk[s]. In other words, it was shaken that much. And they said up above that—up on the top floors—it was swaying enough that the desks was going from one side of the office to the other."
The building was one of the few downtown to survive the tornado. Portions of its façade were altered in the 1960s, and today the ALICO Building continues to tower over downtown Waco and serves as the home office for American-Amicable Life Insurance Company of Texas and its corporate family, in addition to offering rental office space. It's also a comforting landmark to locals, its neon lights visible for many miles at night.
The ALICO Building remains the tallest structure in downtown Waco.
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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 would start out with some old model car—it was probably an old Willys-Knight or something like that—with a half stock trailer on behind it. He would come back in the evening with a couple of sheep, a dozen chickens and four or five dozen eggs and slab of bacon. (laughs) They paid for their subscription that way."
Longtime Waco newspaper editor Harry Provence describes the Waco Times-Herald, the afternoon paper, during the Depression years:
"The staff was trimmed to the very bone, and the people who were still there, who'd been there during the early thirties, recalled 10 percent salary cuts more than once just to keep the thing going. As a matter of fact, in 1938 we had a 10 percent salary cut—out of a clear blue sky in June of '38. I got married and got a salary cut all in one easy operation. (laughter) They never got to the point of requiring us to buy our own pencils, but they doled them out like they were selling them to us. And it was just against the rules to spend any money that you could possibly get out of. The papers were small; there wasn't enough advertising to—well, if we got a sixteen-page paper we just thought the millennium had come. Most of the issues, if you go back through our files, are eight, ten, and twelve pages, year after year, during—all during the thirties."
Provence explains the journalism term close editing and its importance during the thirties:
"The minimum number of words to convey the—the story. As I said awhile ago, we had small newspapers; our standing orders were to get all the news in the paper, and that meant that the superfluous language just had to go. And we wore out a—many a black pencil marking through whole paragraphs and sentences and words."
The Waco News-Tribune and Waco Times-Herald weathered the economic slump of the 30s and merged together in 1973 to form the Tribune-Herald. No doubt Fentress and Provence could have drawn parallels between the Great Depression and the recent Great Recession concerning their impact on the newspaper industry.
Throughout the 1930s, newspaper employees had to make do with a shoestring budget and no-frills work environment.
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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 known as lisianthus, grows wild down around Willis, Texas. And we used to ship those wildflowers. About the only two flowers we had during July and August, that time of the year, was bluebells and marigolds, and we sold lots of them. (laughs) But now nobody would think about using those things."
Alva Stem, former director of Waco Parks and Recreation, tells about some of the vegetation added to Cameron Park during his tenure:
"The vinca vine that grows wild on the slopes, we transplanted that into various hills for soil erosion as well as color because in the springtime it would come out with a beautiful blossom. And then we would plant bluebonnets out there; these would be along the scenic right-of-way. One of them was going up toward the Cameron Park Clubhouse. That was one of the big areas that we put the bluebonnets. And it bloomed for years until the drought just got it all."
With funding from former Congressman Bob Poage, Miss Nellie's Pretty Place was created in Cameron Park in the 1980s. Max Robertson was Waco Parks and Recreation director during that time and describes the implementation of the site:
"I remember the first year had the most magnificent show of wildflowers, and I've not seen it look anywhere near as good as it looked that first year. [In] fact, we had, in our research—and Mr. Poage was highly involved in that—we were hooked up with, at the time, one of the top wildflower persons in the state, a fellow by the name of John Thomas who owns a company called Wildseed. This John Thomas came in and seeded the park. It was a beautiful red—it was a poppy that actually was not a native species that Mr. Thomas said, ‘This is going to be a sure-fire flower so you'll have it when you open.' And he was absolutely right; it was a beautiful sea of red over that Miss Nellie's."
Perhaps because of the frequent harsh weather conditions in Central Texas, residents can enjoy the contrasting beauty of the area's flowers all the more.
Texas bluebells, once a popular item at Reed's Flowers.
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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.
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 that had a phone because some had what we called ‘the new phone' and some had ‘the old phone.' But on account of the various work my father was always in, why, he felt he needed both phones, and we always had that."
Mary Sendón recalls the first telephone installed in her family's home:
"Was one of these that hangs on the wall; you know, you had to crank it. We hadn't had that telephone a week until it was raining hard one day, and they had lightning and thunder. And lightning struck that telephone, and it started burning. (laughs) I wish we could have had videos in those days. Everybody in the family was running for a pan of water or a glass of water trying to put the fire out."
Sendón explains the ins and outs of using an exchange during that era:
"Telephones were kind of hard to get in the first days. You had to take a party line. The first one we got we had to take a party line. It was very ineffective because I would get on a line with somebody else, and somebody else would start talking to me like he thought that was the person he was talking to. And, boy, you'd just be surprised how much gossip we heard! (interviewer laughs) I solved a scandal there on the telephone one day because I was calling my plumber, and the plumber's daughter was having an affair with some important man downtown. And when I got the line, it was the plumber's wife talking to that man, and so I found out the whole story. (laughs)"
She describes a great-aunt who worked at the telephone building at Fourth & Washington:
"She made a—quite a hit with all the businessmen because she had a beautiful voice and she had such a kind voice that the businessmen said she was the perfect telephone operator. And my mother used to tell me that on Christmas Eve she would take my mother and another one of the cousins with her to work so they could help her carry home all the gifts that the businessmen would send her up there at the office."
In 1949, the Waco exchange, which comprised nearly 26,000 telephones, switched over from a manual switchboard to the dial system. With this new setup, customers could dial a number themselves and no longer had to go through an operator.
With early crank telephones like this one, users turned the handle on the side to ring for an operator.
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Dr. Sloan talks with guest Rick Tullis about Wacoan WD Custead and his claim of being the first in flight.
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Dr. Sloan chats with Sean Sutcliffe about the history of the Waco Fire Department.
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