What makes Waco – Waco?
It’s a question we’ve been asking people at our recent public events. Cameron Park comes up a lot. So do community schools and Dr Pepper.
You could ask the same question about any town. What makes some cities cutthroat and others kind? Why do some beckon you off the highway, while others make you want to take the bypass loop?
My own answer begins with identifying the city’s “builders” – the visionaries who persist over decades shaping their communities.
Hint: they aren’t all mayors and millionaires.
I got a chance to appreciate two Waco builders this past week, one on the weekly radio show I co-host, the other at a funeral.
I interviewed legendary urban minister Jimmy Dorrell on “Friday Forum with The Waco Bridge” on KWBU-FM 103.3 about his decision to step down as pastor of Church Under the Bridge, which he and his wife Janet Dorrell founded 33 years ago. His last service will be on Easter Sunday, when he will turn his portable pulpit to ministerial student Kevin Brown.
He is also well-known as the retired founder of Mission Waco, where he has played a key role for decades in housing the homeless and revitalizing the North 15th Street corridor – and summoning other Christians to see these issues as their own.
Then on Friday morning I attended the funeral of Bill Falco, the former Waco city planning director. Over more than 40 years with the city of Waco, he helped shape Waco’s growth as well as its downtown revitalization and historic preservation. He died Feb. 19 at age 82, having spent the last few years in a memory care facility.
I got to know both men soon after I moved to Waco in 1997 to be a City Hall reporter. It was clear that they both believed in Waco’s promise at a time when it was better known for decline. And I saw how for decades they stayed true to their vision of a more flourishing city, and brought others along.
I first learned about Church Under the Bridge on a long-ago Sunday morning when I saw a huge crowd gathered under the rumbling Interstate 35 overpass on Fourth Street. I called my editor at the Tribune-Herald to share that some kind of protest or excitement was going on downtown.
It turned out the excitement was a makeshift church that welcomed all kinds of people: Those who were homeless, mentally ill or formerly incarcerated; college students trying to understand life outside the “Baylor Bubble”; and middle-class folks who had never missed a meal or paycheck.
Jimmy recounted last week that he and Janet had no real plan when they started the church, and no idea it would last more than three decades. The couple had been educated at Baylor and involved in various ministries while living in what was then a blighted neighborhood on North Fifteenth Street. They were eating breakfast at Taco Cabana one morning in 1993 and observing the hard-luck lives around them.
“We saw these guys under the bridge and said, We know there’s homeless, but we don’t really understand the issue,” Jimmy recalled. “Let’s go and invite them over for breakfast.
“And we did so. And they came, and we said, you don’t have to tell us your story, but we’d love to hear your background. How did you end up on the streets?”
The strangers were happy to tell their stories and asked if they could have breakfast again the following week. After a few weeks, a hungry crowd had grown.
“They said, well, come under our bridge where we live and do a Bible study,” he recalled.
“They invited us. And that’s our model in community development. The people with the problem need to be part of the solution.”
I recalled my interview years ago with a veteran who was wounded in Vietnam and drifted into years homelessness and drugs before finding stability through a federal housing voucher program.
He told me that when he returned to Waco in the 2000s after some years away, it had become a more friendly place to struggling people like him. He attended Church Under the Bridge for a while, and he said Jimmy Dorrell had helped change attitudes in Waco.
Jimmy said he hopes Waco is a kinder place than when he started.
“When we started working under the bridge, there was a downtown group of business people who did not like the poor, the homeless that were under the bridge,” Jimmy recalled. “They were loud. They caused problems. We heard ugly statements of, ‘We just need to get the fire department to get them with water and put lights up there so they couldn’t sleep there.’ So it really was an atmosphere that was pretty ugly.
“Through the years we advocated for them, other people began to see them more as persons, but there were so many gaps in services.”
Dorrell was instrumental in creating homeless shelters and the Meyer Center for Urban Ministry, and he continues to be a fundraiser and booster for Mission Waco’s Creekside Village, which will soon provide tiny homes for rent at a site off University Parks.
But he has been more than a minister to the have-nots. To the haves – complacent white Christians tempted to think of homelessness and urban despair as someone else’s problem – he has been a prophet in the tradition of Isaiah, challenging them to see the image of God in the broken and dispossessed.
An eye for Waco’s past, future
Bill Falco was another builder who helped make Waco Waco. He too believed in the city’s future when it seemed its best years were in the past.
As a reporter, I had Bill’s number on speed dial. In 1998, I covered the raucous fight over the city’s annexation of the upscale subdivisions along the West Highway 84 corridor.
The slight, soft-spoken planning director was the designated lightning rod for residents’ ire at countless public meetings and council sessions. He later chuckled about how the city was accused of sending him out to the neighborhood to “intimidate” Highway 84 residents.
I soon learned that Bill was a wealth of knowledge on Waco history and preservation, born from his doctoral study of environmental design and urban planning, as well as his decades in Waco since he attended Baylor in the 1960s.
It’s hard to name a downtown improvement of the last 50 years that didn’t involve Bill Falco. He worked with civic dynamo Frances Sturgis of Keep Waco Beautiful to create Indian Spring Park and Heritage Square.
His sense of design is reflected in the Riverwalk, the landscaped sidewalks of downtown and downtown buildings renovated through local tax incentives.
As assistant planning director in the 1980s, it took real faith to see hope in the pigeon-infested buildings of downtown Waco.
“There were no restaurants, no retail,” he told me upon his retirement in 2012. “The statement that you could fire a cannon down Austin Avenue was pretty true. You could blame that on the pedestrian mall, but it was happening all over the place, even in big cities.”
I saw a different side of Bill Falco in 2010, when my wife and I moved to an old house in the Brookview neighborhood next door to Bill and his wife, Phyllis. Over the years, we had many long conversations about life and urban planning while standing barefoot on the driveway.
My kids grew to love “Mr. Bill,” who let them climb his giant live oak tree and pet his beloved dog, Pepe. We had keys to each others’ houses and took care of each others’ pets.
I was one of many people who benefited from Bill Falco’s vast knowledge and insight. I was one of a few who got to be his neighbor. I can’t imagine a better one.
