Today we’d like to introduce you to Louis Moore.
Hi Louis, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was a graduate student and editor of the school newspaper at Baylor University in Waco when I first visited Garland 58 years ago while courting my wife, Kay Wheeler Moore, whose family members lived here and were active in the Garland community. I never really thought about being a resident then, as my mind was filled with thoughts of traveling the world, writing for various world-renowned publications, and building a life and marriage filled with excitement and adventure.
I look back now from our comfortable historic home in the heart of downtown Garland and marvel at all I have seen and done in nearly eight decades of life. I’ve traveled in some 54 countries on six continents and had my works published in more than 100 different publications besides the Houston Chronicle, where I began my career and stayed for nearly 15 years.
After 56 years of marriage and homes at various times in five states, Kay and I have traveled the world, reared two incredible adult children whose talents and abilities continue to amaze us, and who have blessed us with four grandchildren who are being prepped for a bright future as jet-setting, well-traveled and well-prepared citizens of the world ready to tackle all the challenges that lie ahead.
But as our son, Matthew J. Moore of Phoenix, told a large Garland audience in the city’s historic theater downtown not long ago, “My parents are not done yet.”
Our days and calendars are packed with new adventures, new ideas, and new pursuits. Recently I was appointed by Garland City Council to the city’s Library Advisory Board after serving 10 years on the Garland Plan Commission. Simultaneously Kay was appointed by City Council to the city’s Parks Advisory Board. Meanwhile, I serve on the Journalism, Public Relations and New Media Advisory Board at our alma mater, Baylor University in Waco, and on a national church committee, In Deed and Truth (IDAT for short), that works to help make Protestant churches across the country more open and welcoming to ALL people of all races, creeds, colors, and persuasions.
All of these involvements pale in comparison to the work being done by the nonprofit we formed in 2017, Friends of Garland’s Historic Magic 11th Street, to make Garland a better place for ALL its citizens by spotlighting the community’s incredible diversity of nationalities, languages, and ethnic backgrounds.
When Kay and I left Garland after our wedding at First Baptist Church on August 30, 1969, in the rearview mirror was a suburban city much smaller than the quarter-million population today with a dominant white majority and small percentages of Blacks and Latinos. We returned 25 years ago this past August to supposedly “retire” to a town where Latinos at 42% are now the largest people group, followed by Anglos (38%) Blacks (11%), Asians (10%) and people from around the world speaking more than 50 languages.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
We returned to Garland in 2000 after selling our home in Richmond, VA, and planning out a “retirement” career of publishing single-focused books about and by people whose careers and callings had taken them to “the four corners of the earth” as Christian missionaries. Ever since I was an elementary student, I’ve been fascinated with people willing to give up the American dream to live overseas in less-than-ideal conditions to help other people. My high-school hero was Dr. Tom Dooley, who wrote “The Night They Burned the Mountain” about his life as a Catholic missionary doctor in the war-torn Laos of the 1950s and early 1960s before the United States fully entered the Vietnam War, which engulfed Laos and nearby Cambodia. I was spellbound by Dooley’s descriptions of the primitive conditions, especially medical care, in the impoverished mountains of Laos.
Our stated purpose for returning to Garland was to care for Kay’s aging mother Mable, Kay’s childless Aunt Frances, and Kay’s childless Uncle Buford. A hallmark of Kay’s family was infertility for a variety of reasons, leaving Kay, an adoptee and only child, with responsibilities we knew we could not shirk and would have to face head on. Before the last one died in 2009, we learned more about caring for aging relatives and the struggles of old age, dying, and death and settling estates than we ever thought possible. Kay’s mother was 93, her Aunt Frances was 102, and her Uncle Buford was 101 when they passed. Meanwhile, my own mother was living near my sister in Broken Arrow, OK when my mother died at 93. Those first 10 years living in Garland formed quite an era for us filled with obstacles and challenges like we had never encountered previously!
Transforming our neighborhood, which was Kay’s growing-up space, into Garland’s first National Register Historic District was not on our radar at first. We had moved to Garland’s 11th Street to be near Kay’s mother. Neither she nor we really wanted a situation where the three of us lived together in the same house. Our living across the street and two houses further north was a much better arrangement. We were, however, concerned about the condition of some of the homes in the neighborhood and soon purchased several that were in deteriorating condition to renovate and use as rental property. Our own home was the first reno. In foreclosure, the house had once been occupied by a Garland mayor (and banker) and his family, but in the intervening years subsequent owners allowed it to deteriorate severely and fall into foreclosure. We bought it in a VA auction; when our adult children saw it inside for the first time, they reacted in horror at the poor condition. Kay and I poured our hearts and souls (and equity from our Virginia home) into restoring the home, which, by the way, we now dearly love—and so do our adult children.
We never thought of becoming involved in historic preservation until the day Garland Mayor Doug Athas knocked on our front door bearing a stack of heavy books he was reading on the subject. After I finished reading all the material Doug brought us, he asked me to chair the Mayor’s Special Committee on Historic Preservation. Earlier Kay and I had spoken out about the City of Garland’s plan to demolish two of its most historic homes to make way for more downtown Garland apartments. That itself is a whole different and long story. To put it mildly, historic preservation was not on the radar of many in Garland at that time.
Simultaneously and coincidentally I was becoming more and more involved in what was happening in Indian Country across the Red River in southern Oklahoma. By birth I was a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation through my paternal lineage. Thanks to some Supreme Court rulings and new laws passed by Congress as well as outstanding tribal leadership, the tribe was emerging from poverty and rapidly becoming an economic powerhouse in southern Oklahoma and North Texas. (Think WinStar. the largest casino in the world, for starters, but the prosperity didn’t end there with that economic engine working full throttle.) In 2008 I was selected as a delegate to the tribe’s “Listening Conference” in Oklahoma City, where for three days we mapped out the road ahead for investments and benefits for our people.
Part of the master plan was to turn southern Oklahoma into “Adventure Road” and wonderland of places to vacation or just spend a few days away from the bustling cities in the DFW Metroplex. One small tourist attraction was the restoration of our pre-Oklahoma statehood Chickasaw Governor’s Mansion outside Ada, OK. In an article written for the Chickasaw Times, I likened architecturally that Governor’s Mansion to Garland’s Pace House, which Kay and I had rescued from the City of Garland’s bulldozer, refurbished, and turned into a centerpiece for our downtown neighborhood.
That article caught the attention of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. I was invited to attend the National Trust’s Annual Conference in Chicago in 2017 as a “Diversity Scholar” and study the need for more preservation projects for ALL people groups in the United States. To say Kay and I were motivated by that program would be a major understatement. We were truly inspired with the idea of telling the full story of Garland and not just fragments as was being done at that time.
Back in Garland after the convention, Kay and I set about reshaping Friends of Garland’s Historic Magic 11th Street to include putting the spotlight on all of Garland’s history and all of its people groups.
The struggle became, how do you show a formerly predominantly White citizenry somewhat paralyzed and frightened by the changes swirling around it, the advantages and joys of its marvelous diverse population that was blossoming here?
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Kay and I met while journalism students working on the student newspaper, the Lariat, at Baylor University. Shortly, our partnership in so many aspects of life began. We married in August 1969 with an understanding that it would be a full partnership of equals, working together to build the best life possible for both of us. We quickly learned that Kay is the detail person who tightens down the bolts and I am the “big picture” person who imagines the possibilities. Over time we perfected these polar opposites in our personalities and learned how to work together as a well-oiled team. Nowhere was this more obvious than in how we built Friends of Garland’s Historic Magic 11th Street into a powerhouse within the Garland community.
We had formed the Friends organization before we went to Chicago for the groundbreaking National Trust for Historic Preservation Diversity Scholars Program. I was the president; Kay was the secretary. Other directors were selected from our closest group of friends and supporters in the community, each chosen because of their energy, wisdom, and commitment to the cause. We all had the single focus of making Garland a better community by adhering to historic-preservation principles. The 2017 meeting in Chicago widened our perspective to include preserving the history of all Garland citizens, not just those who looked just like us.
Our organization’s focus initially was on our historic Garland neighborhood, the Travis College National Register Historic District, the first area in Garland ever entered on the National Register of Historic Places, maintained by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service. The site is now a tourist attraction after the National Register designation. We worked diligently to add value to the designation—creating nationally certified Monarch Butterfly gardens, organizing historic home tours which soon evolved into annual Christmas historic home tours with the whole neighborhood lit up with Christmas lights and decorations, horse-drawn carriages, carolers, and hot-chocolate rest stations.
In a moment of pure blue-sky speculation, one day I suggested to Kay that she use her writing and music-composition talents to produce a musical drama about the history of the Travis College Hill Neighborhood. Within days she began writing “Becoming Garland Avenue”, a musical about our neighborhood’s founding in 1913. We then carefully chose local actors and musicians to partner with us and our board members to perform the musical. Within six months the first performance of the musical occurred on the stage of the Plaza Theater in downtown Garland to a sell-out audience who arrived unfazed despite flooding conditions in the city.
The sell-out and audience turnout in severely inclement weather caught the attention of city officials, who realized the dedication of our supporters. Growing respect and appreciation for our work followed afterward.
A year later our repeat performance got canceled by the COVID 19 pandemic, so we turned to live-streaming our efforts to use theatrical and musical performances to tell Garland’s full history to a growing audience that now included former Garland residents living as far away as Alaska and New York and even Italy.
Success breeds success, so in succeeding years our Friends organization expanded its reach to Garland’s Latino and Black communities and found welcoming supporters and audiences. Not only did new musicals—”The Cactus Chronicles” about Garland’s first Latino family in 1928 and “The Flats” about Garland’s full-throttle Black community which operated separately from the White community in the days of Segregation— make their mark on the community, but the Texas Historical Commission awarded Texas Historical Markers for each of the sites spotlighted in our musicals—The Travis College Hill Historic District, the homeplace of Garland’s first Latino family, the once-thriving Black community called The Flats in central downtown Garland, and the city’s first Black congregation (Sims Chapel) formed in 1915 on the banks of Duck Creek near the city’s western edge.
Our next target is telling the story of Garland’s Native American past, present and future. The city’s first Native American festival is titled “Other Feet, Another Time: Garland Native American Awareness Day” and planned for March 7, 2026 at the downtown Plaza Theatre and on the downtown Square. It will feature Native American films, speakers, cultural displays, tribal dancers, a dramatic dialogue, original music, Native foods, and Native crafts.
Later, we most likely will spotlight Garland’s large Asian community and other untold Garland stories.
We are most proud that the Friends organization has proved that using musical and dramatic arts as well as other skills to tell our city’s history resonates with citizens and provides new and creative ways to assure that future generations hear the accurate and true stories of our city’s history.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
As I approach my 80th birthday in 2026 and Kay moves on a few years later into her 80s, we recognize that the enthusiastic and creative work we have done must not stop with us but must continue on long after we are gone from the scene. Building a resilient long-lasting legacy and organization will become our central focus. Our dedicated and talented fellow board members are being mentored and prepared for the brighter future that lies ahead for Friends of Garland’s Historic Magic 11th Street, with new leadership and innovative ideas.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.friendsofgarlandshistoricmagic11thst.org/
- Instagram: magic_11th_street
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/magic11thstreet/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgeNWGExdPw
Image Credits
Photos by Deborah Downes of Take to Heart Images, Kay Wheeler Moore and Jan Nosko Alexander
