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.
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. Those boxes are filled with boxing gloves. And you pick you a pair of boxing gloves, put those on, and this is a basketball,' he said. ‘Now, we're going to just split you up. Half of you take your shirts off and half of you leave your shirts on. We'll be shirts and skins, and we're going to have a basketball game.' He said, ‘All right, when Coach George throws the ball up, we want to see who the last five standing are.' So there was my chance for an education. And you better believe I was one of the last five standing. And I got the scholarship. Had nothing to do with basketball. It was brawl."
Interviewer: "A fight broke out, yeah."
"It was brawl. That's all you can say about it. Now, of course, you'd be in twelve thousand lawsuits, and the NCAA would send you to somewhere else. (laughs)"
Wilma Buntin played on the girls' basketball team at John H. Reagan High School in Houston in the 1920s. She describes the uniforms:
"We had a sweater that came over, and it had to have long sleeves. And then we had these black bloomers that were box-pleated. And I spent every Saturday getting that attire ready for the next week. We had electric irons by that time, but it would have been rough if it'd been before that. Let me tell you, before it was all over we began to have the shorts, but they came right here at the knees. I imagine they'd call them clam diggers now."
Buntin explains how the court differed for girls during that era:
"It was divided into thirds. When it was divided in thirds, that was much more difficult for us because the stops and starts were so sudden. There were certain lines you didn't go over; it was called a foul. But they soon realized that was harder to play than what the boys were playing because the boys could get stretched out, and there we had to observe all those lines. And then they had the toss-up, and if you happened to have somebody tall as you are, well, this poor little fellow on the other team never had a chance. So—and you had to stay on your side of the line. The ones who were standing waiting had to be quick enough to know where that person was going to tip the ball, and they'd try to get around there and get it. And they've come a long way in kind of evening that out. They thought they were making it easier on us, and they weren't."
Over the years, many new rules and regulations have been put in place to make men's and women's basketball the sports they are today. Who knows what changes are in store for the future.
In the 1920s, as Buntin explains, female basketball players wore significantly more clothing than their male counterparts.
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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 I had had them taken out. My jaws were all swollen up kind of like a chipmunk. And one of his best friends was getting married to a girl that her parents had a big ranch out of Walnut Springs. And they were having the wedding up there, and he was the best man. And he had come by. He was late. And we got in the car, and we were driving up there. And, of course, I had the chipmunk cheeks and could barely open my mouth to talk or anything. And the romantic way I got my ring was he said, as we're driving about a hundred miles an hour down Highway 6 headed for Walnut Springs, 'I think there's something over there in the glove compartment you might like.' And so I open up the glove compartment, and there was my engagement ring."
Cathryn Carlile of Waco describes her marriage in December of 1947 to Woodrow Carlile, the brother of a close friend in Edgefield:
"I think we planned a June wedding. And I know I went to work and told my boss that I was going to get married in June. And he said, 'Well, I don't want you to be off in June.' He said, 'It'd be better if you took off (laughter) now.' We went ahead and we had our wedding, and I married at home by choice. For some reason, I was - had never been really interested in the big, traditional, formal wedding, although some of the things that I remember most were beautiful weddings that I had observed at Edgefield. I wore a tailored suit. Woody and I decorated our own wedding cake. We were probably thinking about the cost and the money. Richard Philpot, who was pastor at Edgefield for a long, long time, probably one of the - if not the most, the second-most admired preacher down there through our years, performed the ceremony. And we had family."
In 2011, the Youngs celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary, and the Carliles their 64th, proof that simplicity can stick.
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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. And you usually had your extra tire or you'd have your patch to put on it. But they wasn't hard to get off in those days. (laughter) They wasn't—it wasn't difficult to do it. Course, you'd have to pump your tire up, and you'd carry your pump with you if you didn't have an extra. But going up there, why, it would take about four hours. The roads would—winding, and it would probably—well, you'd probably stop a time or two to get water in your car and to possibly check your oil or something. I know we drove up there many a time, but that was quite an event to drive to Dallas, and we'd usually spend the night up there and then would come back the next day. A little too much to go up and back the same day."
Waco civic leader Jack Kultgen talks about his first job selling cars in Dallas in 1921:
"It was a whole lot different than it is now because you took cars out and demonstrated them to people in their homes, and you had to make a dozen calls on them. And I had a little money. Where—I don't know where I got it, but I had it. And I paid list price for my own automobile to demonstrate with with this dealer. That was, it turns out, the only way I could get the job. He didn't give me a dime discount to buy a demonstrator."
Many people in the 1920s were buying cars for the first time, and Kultgen recalls that salespeople often had to show customers how to operate them:
"If you never taught anybody to drive a Model T, why, you got something to learn yourself. You had to throw it in low, and then you had to let it fly back, and then you—that was the left pedal, and then the right pedal was your brake. Your middle pedal was reverse. And you had to be manipulating those hand things all the time. Took a lot of coordination until you got used to it. If you got somebody that was a little clumsy—it was pretty hectic teaching anybody to drive."
Once considered a luxury, automobiles soon became part of the American Dream and are now difficult to live without.
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Dr. Sloan continues talks with Ryan Holt, Assistant City Manager about the History of the Waco Police Department.
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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,'—you know, he'd skip around. And the little boy looked at him and said, ‘I thought you were a college professor.' (both laugh) Well, this little girl fell in love with my husband. Her name was Kathy. She was going to Wisconsin, and they lived in Weatherford, Texas. We got off at Detroit. They went on to Wisconsin. And when we came back we didn't see them anywhere around. I said, ‘I wonder if that family is on this train again.' Sure enough, I looked up, and there stood the father with this little girl. He said, ‘You know, I walked through every train [car] on this thing here trying to find you all. She wanted to know if y'all were here.' (interviewer laughs)
"So we got her name and address, and that started a correspondence. She would write cute little things, you know. Her mother would write some for her. A friendship started there between them and us and the little girl. And she asked my husband what his name was—and they were still with the ABC's—Sendón said, ‘Oh, call me XYZ.' Well, she'd write him letters—I still have them—‘Dear XYZ.' Well, do you know, to this day, those people write to me. That was the strangest friendship that we ever made. The little girl would come to see us once a year. She always had her—make her mother make cookies to bring him cookies. And now she's married, a nurse, has children, but they're still our friends. Isn't that strange how a train will do that for you? (interviewer laughs) That was our train friendship."
Marcile Sullins of Woodway recalls train travel during WWII with a trip she made to see her husband who was stationed in Colorado:
"I had never been away from home; I had never been out of the state of Texas. So I caught a train at Katy Depot with a six-weeks-old baby. (laughs) And during the war they put everything that they could find on the lines. I traveled in a chair car with windows that would not close, and at that time they still had coal-driven engines, steam engines, and the coal smoke came back into the car. And when we got to Colorado Springs, he had been waiting on us eight hours. We were dirty from smoke (both laugh) and tired."
Interest has renewed lately in passenger rail service, due in part to rising fuel costs and growing concerns about the environment. Perhaps one day in the future trains will flourish once more across the American landscape.
Streamliners first appeared in America during the Great Depression.
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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 all had to have so much done to their boots all the time. (laughs) Of course, the enlisted men would just come and have their own shoes fixed, you know. But he had a contract for those officers' boots. He made a lot of money during the war. That was a bonanza for him. And that's where he got really established."
During the life of the camp, strong ties were formed, as Sendón explains:
"So many of the soldiers that came to Waco at that time married Waco girls when the war was over. And some of them are still living here in Waco. I noticed two or three in the paper the other day at some reunion. And there was one of those Michigan soldiers that had married a Waco girl."
Less than two months after WWI ended, the government ordered Camp MacArthur's buildings to be dismantled and reused for such purposes as the construction of US-Mexican border stations. Cathryn Carlile recalls some of the remnants were used in the Edgefield neighborhood in Waco where she grew up:
"The houses in the 1C block of Hackberry were built in the early 1920s from the surplus lumber from the barracks from World War I. And all of these houses were exactly alike except the two older houses, one at 1C, which was part of the dairy, and the house next door to it. So there were ten houses just alike. And they were very sturdily constructed. Four rooms and a bath. And we did have the utilities. We had utilities."
Frank Curre Jr. bought a house on former Camp MacArthur grounds and tells what he and a neighbor did soon after:
"Was a black man come down the street. Had a mule and a single-disc plow and a homemade rake that they'd made. We asked him what he'd charge to plow up all that back lot all the way across and rake it down smooth. He got out there and did all that. He dug up old hard rubber tire wheels, buckets full of them brass teardrop caps off them old trucks. And we threw all that away. Look what they're worth right now."
Camp MacArthur officially closed on March 7, 1919. Since 1966, a historical marker has stood at the intersection of Park Lake Drive and Nineteenth Street as a reminder of the camp's brief but indelible existence.
Base Hospital, Camp MacArthur, Waco, TX. (Photo by Gildersleeve)
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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 those trees." And it was [a] check for ten thousand dollars. And at that time that was the largest check I'd ever seen, and I remember how—how big it looked, you know. And I thought I was a pretty brave man, but I cried. It meant just that much to me because I knew this campus had the natural beauty, but it wouldn't have if you took those trees out."
Interviewer: "That's right."
"And they were dying. But it saved those trees. And the only reason they have a beautiful campus today is because Wiley Green gave me ten thousand dollar[s]."
Interviewer: "And the idea."
"Yeah."
Alva Stem, former director of Waco Parks and Recreation, recalls the attempts to maintain Lover's Leap during the drought:
"There wasn't any water out there from anywhere until we ran a two-inch water line from North Nineteenth and Park Lake Drive out to Lover's Leap. But by the time that two-inch water line got to Lover's Leap, there wasn't much of a trickle coming out of it because it lost all of its pressure during the distance that it had to come. And I think that since that time it has been remedied, but we weren't able to water that. And we had beautiful plum trees up there in Lover's Leap, and every year the white native plums would bloom there on Lover's Leap, going around the circle at Lover's Leap. They produced fruit, and the people would go out there and pick it. And I think you had to use about twice as much sugar as you had plum pulp in order to make some jelly or jam out of it because it was—it was so tart. They were the wild plums, but they were beautiful blossoms. And it got so dry so long that we never could keep them watered, and they all died."
Welcome rains began to fall throughout Texas in the spring of 1956, ending a seven-year drought that had devastated agriculture, parks, lakes, and reservoirs.
Austin Lake in the 1950s. (Courtesy of LCRA Corporate Archives)
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Dr. Sloan talks with Ryan Holt, Assistant City Manager about the History of the Waco Police Department
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Dr. Sloan wraps up his conversation with Historian John Kamanec about The Case and Execution of Roy Mitchell in Waco
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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. Fever powders, that's what they were called. And he went down and got that.
"And, I tell you, we were sick for about a week. And we had to stay in a dark room, you know, because—to protect the eyes. And my grandmother was there, my great-aunt, and my father and mother, and everybody was taking care of all the sick kids. But it did affect my brother's eyes. That's why when he went into the service, he—they wouldn't take him because of his eyes. Of course, then the draft took him and put him in the air corps."
Dr. Howard Williams of Orange tells how rubella, commonly known as the German measles, possibly saved his life during WWII:
"I went up to Camp Atterbury [Joint Maneuver Training Center] in Indiana and finished my basic training there as a rifleman. And then we were all packed to go—we were in the 106th Division—and we're packed, ready to go that very week. And I got up with splotches all over me. I had measles—German. They put me in the hospital there at Camp Atterbury, and the 106th left. And then after ten days, they—the day the division's gone, they reassigned me. They sent me to a artillery observation battalion, and that was down at Camp Gordon, Georgia.
"Well, the 106th that I was—would have been with, was one that was totally destroyed in the [Battle of the] Bulge. They were all pre-college type, and the Germans burst across the line there, and—gosh, a division is like fifteen thousand people. And out of fifteen thousand, I think like seven—six or seven thousand were killed, and another five or six thousand were captured. So had I not had German measles, I don't know what would have happened to me."
Interviewer: "A lot of people you trained with, too."
"And all these people I'd trained with and all. I mean, they just disappeared."
Vaccines for measles and rubella were licensed in the U.S. in the 1960s. Since then, the number of cases has dropped by 99 percent, ending the role of these illnesses as anticipated life events.
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