Native Texan's farewell column: In Waco, dark skies have given way to sunlight and 38-year-old mayor works to revive city
Foster Pavilion, Baylor’s new $183 million basketball arena on the Brazos, is scheduled to open next year.WACO – When I was a kid eons ago, I’d spend summer mornings sprawled in the dirt beneath two backyard live oaks, busily building a town. I’d line cast-off bricks and prop up foot-long “skyscraper” 2-by-4s along palm-smoothed, dried-mud streets.
Over lunch recently at George’s Restaurant, a venerable Baylor-area hangout known for a two-fisted mug of beer called “the Big O,” we talked about how the tornado was the beginning, not of a temporary bust similar to what Houston has endured off and on, but a decades-long slough. An old town that, when I was growing up, rivaled Austin in population and prosperity settled into a restless slumber.
And then a storm of another sort hit the city. For 51 days in early 1993, a “sinful messiah” – to use the Tribune-Herald’s description of David Koresh – and his followers held off a combined army of some 700 ATF and FBI agents, Texas Rangers and DPS troopers, National Guard units and local law enforcement surrounding their Branch Davidian compound. On April 19, the whole world was watching when Army tanks advanced on the building and it burst into flame.
These days, a new Baylor basketball arena is going up across the river from McLane, scheduled to open next year. “It’s close enough to downtown,” Meek said, “that after a game fans will be able to stroll downtown and have a beer, or, since this is Baptist country, a fizzy Dr Pepper.” People also are moving in, Meek said, not only folks spilling out of fast-growing Austin and the Metroplex, but also arriving from around the country. Californians in particular come to town with cash for houses like the ones Chip and Joanna transform.
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