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. Sloan talks more with Historian John Kamanec about The Case and Execution of Roy Mitchell in Waco
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Each autumn in the early part of the twentieth century, many Southerners made time for hog-killing. The slaughter offered a change in diet but more importantly, yielded enough food to help families get through the winter.
Longtime Waco resident Louise Murphy recalls that hog-killing was a family affair, with even children given responsibilities:
"They give me the intestines. I had to go get me some water, put them intestines in a pan of water. Then I had to get me a—a jar of something, get water in, hold his intestine up, and pour till it was clean on the inside. Then I put him on the table, and I would scrape him. I'd scrape him. I'd get a hairpin and put over, and I'd bring all that stuff out until you could see through that intestine just as clear as it could be. And that's what we stuffed our sausage in."
Murphy describes a few hog delicacies:
"The brains. I had a brother-in-law that had to have them brains and scrambled eggs. And my dad would save the liver and the lights. And my mother would go in and put her big pan on. And she put liver and lights, cook them together."
"Lights" refers to the lungs of the hog. Thomas Wayne Harvey of Waco remembers how his father handled the meat:
"Dad would hang the hog up, and he would quarter it out. And he had a wooden fifty-five-gallon barrel there, and it was—about four inches in the bottom was full of salt. And then he'd put a slab of bacon and then cover that with salt and then another slab of bacon and cover that with salt. And it was always all salt, pork and salt, hog all the way up to the top. And then his hams, they put all kind of seasoning on the hams they got over there. And he had a brand new tow sack bag. And they put that ham in there, and they hung it up. He'd go out there and tend to that ham. And by the time Christmas got there, you could take a ham and cut the tow sack off, and you could eat the ham raw because it was cured. It was really definely or divinely(??) cured."
The attitude in a hog-killing was waste not, want not, as Harvey explains:
"Most of the hide they made pork rinds out of—hog hides, nowadays you call them, but back then you call them cracklings. And then, of course, they used the meat out of the head for mincemeat. Even the—the feet was put in a solution, and the hooves was taken off of them, the hide was taken off of them for pig's feet, and they'd pickle pig's feet. About the only thing was left of the hog that was never (laughs) cured or treated was the tail, as far as I know."
Hog-killings as performed in the early 1900s have largely disappeared over the years. But some enthusiasts of homegrown, old-fashioned hog products still carry out the tradition.
Neighbors work with various parts of a slaughtered hog spread out on a table.
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Dr. Sloan talks with Historian John Kamanec about The Case and Execution of Roy Mitchell in Waco
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Junior high and middle school are not days that most people would want to relive. But awkward though they may be, these years influence the rest of our lives and hopefully provide some cherished memories.
Woodrow Carlile of Waco reflects on his days at South Junior High School:
"I'm left-handed, and I went in this class and I went to the blackboard and started writing with my left hand on the board. My teacher hit me a lick across the shoulder or something and said, ‘Quit playing around. Write with your right hand.' And, you know, to this day, I can't write on a blackboard with my left hand. I—(laughter) I guess I may have explained to her."
Carlile's wife: "So I guess some of that—"
"But I appreciated that teacher. She was—she had her problems. (laughter) But she was a good—and I especially enjoyed the woodworking and the metalworking shops and the harmonica clubs and the gym classes. And I may have related that the brother who is next to me, older, won the history medal. When he went up on the stage, they requested that he wear shoes if possible. (laughs)"
Hewitt Mayor Pro-Tem Charlie Turner recalls an early experience that helped shape his outlook on life:
"When you're 5' 5" and weigh 108 pounds, football—you're closer to the weight of the football than you are the other players. And the old story goes, you know, the first time I suited out for football, they snapped the ball—they had a guy against me; Kelly Smith(??) was his name, I believe. It was at West Junior High School. And when they hiked the ball, I took the ball. Coach had said, ‘Hit him hard as you can.' I did, and I'm exaggerating a little bit but not much. When I woke up, probably an hour later, I realized I was a lover, not a fighter, and so I joined the band, and I played drums ever since."
Dr. Clifford Madsen, respected music scholar and educator at Florida State University, describes the impact of early mentors in Price, Utah:
"In junior high school, I was kind of adopted by a couple of people in the community by the name of Brown, Dorothy Brown and her husband. They were both music teachers. Dorothy was kind of the mainstay of the community. She used to be the person that would get the Messiah together every Christmas—or parts of it. And I—I can't remember—Deene Brown was his name, and he was the junior high school vocal person. So when I got into junior high school and playing in the band, he wanted me in the chorus, too. And he was the one that first started teaching me about theory. I can remember going to his house one time and his teaching me "this is dominant, this is super dominant," you know, those kinds of things. And I thought, Goodness, you know. This sounds strange and funny, and why do they have all those names? And I guess he was thinking also that somewhere along the way I'd be a musician or whatever. And those kinds of experiences, of course, are very nurturing musically for young people."
Junior high and middle school experiences leave lasting impressions. As adulthood inches ever closer, young teens are looking for answers to who they are and what that means in the big picture.
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In the early 1900s, Texas enjoyed nearly 500 miles of electric interurban railways. The bulk of the mileage, about 70 percent, was in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A line to Waco opened in 1913. Interurbans provided frequent passenger service between urban centers, setting them apart from what existing steam railway systems offered.
Interurban lines were highly sought after, as Martha Howe recalls:
"My great-grandfather, W. D. Lacy, started the—was instrumental in starting the interurban railroad that came to Waco. It was going to go in another direction, but he was very instrumental in getting it to come here."
Howe remembers traveling on the interurban with her sister:
"When Florence and I were little girls—and I'm thinking eight and ten or maybe a little bit older—Mother would take us down to the train station here in Waco and put us on the interurban and pay the conductor five dollars and say, ‘You watch these little girls.' We had matching suitcases, and we wore little hats. (laughter) And, 'You watch these girls, and when it—when the train gets to the big Union Station in downtown Dallas, make sure they do not get off. Let them stay on the train till you get to Highland Park station, and their grandparents will be right there waiting for them.' So. And we would go and spend like ten days to two weeks in the summer."
Mary Sendón explains how important the interurban was to the annual Cotton Palace:
"We had lots of visitors to Waco. Fort Worth had a day; Dallas had a day. But we had an interurban, an electric train, that ran from Waco to Dallas and Fort Worth. And you could go for a dollar and a half a round trip (laughs) on the interurban. And a lot of that—all of those people would come in on that interurban. It was stationed—the headquarters were stationed on Fourth and Washington. And that old interurban would come in loaded with people, you know, and then—because they ran on the hour. Every hour there was one leaving, so they could go back home at night. But I remember the Fort Worth and Dallas days were—oh, those were big crowds then. Had huge crowds. Clay Street—I know—you know where Clay Street is. That is such a quiet street now, (laughs) but you just couldn't go down Clay Street during the Cotton Palace; people were coming and going and coming and going."
As highways improved and private car ownership escalated, electric interurban railways faded. By 1942, only two lines remained in Texas, which included the Dallas-Waco branch, but these finally succumbed in 1948, bringing an end to the interurban era.
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In the early 1960s, many Southerners fed up with racial discrimination were participating in restaurant sit-ins, hoping to change the status quo.
Robert Cogswell of Austin, a social justice activist, recalls taking part in the movement in Houston:
"It was customary for black people who were demonstrating to have a token white among them to show that they weren't exclusivists. And I was often the token white. My activism had to do with a small group of youth in the NAACP who challenged the idea that Houston restaurants were already integrated. We spent our Saturdays driving around to restaurants and walking in and sitting down and not being served. We received a lot of responses that bordered on the absurd. A waitress would ignore us for a long time and then come to our table. In one case, the waitress said to me, "Are your friends Africans?" And it developed that if they were Africans, she was willing to serve them, but if they were American blacks, she was not.
"In another case, I went into a restaurant with a young man who was a—in a pre-medical program in the University of Houston. He was well-dressed and clean-cut-looking young man. And we sat down at a table, and there was a booth near us which contained a drunk old man who was abusing the waitress verbally, using language that neither I nor my friend would ever use, telling her in no uncertain terms that he would like to be having sex with her. And the waitress was polite to him and served him politely and refused to serve us because my friend was black."
Arthur Fred Joe was a spearhead in the integration of Waco restaurants. He explains an early sit-in on the Old Dallas Highway:
"So I sat there for three hours in this restaurant and refused. But they didn't have the volume of trade that I thought that we could march in and sit in to hurt their business. See, my angle was to hurt you in your pocketbook, and this is what the program was all about. If you couldn't hurt them in their pocketbooks, you wasn't doing no good, not far as the civil rights concerned."
Joe describes his first victorious sit-in at a restaurant on Austin Avenue, where he went during his break from work:
"Something said, ‘Don't you go home this morning for breakfast; go there.' I just drove my car up there and parked and got out and went in there. I sat there, and they kept walking by me, these little waitresses. So I took a newspaper in with me. And all—this the way we—I started my movement: you always have something to read so it wouldn't just—you just wouldn't look stupid."
Restaurant sit-ins such as these were instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended legally-sanctioned racial segregation in the United States.
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Dr. Sloan and Rick reflect on the Crossroads series
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Guest: Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Topics:
McNamara Family
Sheriff’s Department
Early Law Officers
John Wesely Hardin
Sam Bass
Judge Gerald Shootout
Brann Shootout
The Reservation
Lorena Riots
Bonnie and Clyde
Kenneth McDuff
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Dr. Slaon continues his talk with Dr. Kenneth Hafertepe who is a professor and chair of the Department of Museum Studies at Baylor University about buildings around Waco.
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Guest: Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Topics:
McNamara Family
Sheriff’s Department
Early Law Officers
John Wesely Hardin
Sam Bass
Judge Gerald Shootout
Brann Shootout
The Reservation
Lorena Riots
Bonnie and Clyde
Kenneth McDuff
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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