Manuel "Manny" Sustaita was a Vietnam veteran, civil activist, and the founder of Waco Citizens for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Though an insurance salesman by trade, he spent most of his life advocating for veterans and their families, Hispanic communities, and other underserved groups in Waco.

Sustaita was born in 1944 in Waco. As a boy he sold newspapers, shined shoes, and did other odd jobs to help support his family. In his free time, he played sports with the Waco Boy’s Club and especially enjoyed playing basketball. Though his parents did not speak English, they required their children to learn it, resulting in Sustaita and his siblings speaking what he called “neighborhood Spanish,” a mix of Spanish and English. Sustaita struggled with academics, and he dropped out of high school when he was fifteen.

Sustaita joined the National Guard at age sixteen, partially because of a desire to travel, and partially because of his love for movies like To Hell and Back and The D.I. Popular in the fifties and sixties, these movies depicted life in the military in a thrilling and heroic light, and Sustaita was moved by the example of the heroes in these films. For someone under the age of eighteen to join the military at that time, they had to have written parental consent. His father could not write, so Sustaita forged his signature. In 1963, Sustaita enlisted in the Marines. After training in San Diego, he went to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and then to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. After this first deployment, he served in Costa Rica and the Mediterranean before volunteering to join reconnaissance in Okinawa. With reconnaissance, he toured in the Philippines, Thailand, and finally went to Vietnam in 1965. Sustaita’s battalion operated out of an American air force base in Da Nang. Their primary objective was to scout for the division, and they chiefly had contact with Viet Cong guerilla units. Sustaita did one tour of duty in Vietnam before returning to the United States and serving at Camp Pendleton in California. He finally left the Marines in 1966.

When he returned to Waco, Sustaita became a life insurance salesman, drawing on his sales experience from his childhood jobs and love for interacting with people. After working for MetLife Insurance for a while, he started his own insurance company, called Multi Services Associates. He married Patricia Rivera Sustaita, and they had two daughters before getting divorced in 1981.

Sustaita made a name for himself in Waco as a civil activist. He was a founding member of the Cen-Tex Mexican American Chamber of Commerce, and he later served as its president. He served on the board of the Waco Boys’ Club and was involved with the Red Cross, but perhaps his most memorable contribution to the Waco community was his work on the Waco Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Sustaita was deeply moved the first time he visited the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Knowing that there were many people in Waco who had lost brothers and sons in Vietnam, as well as a significant number of other veterans, he resolved to build a memorial for the people of Waco. He, along with the Waco Citizens for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial, began the planning process in 1987, but due to a series of delays, the memorial was not dedicated until 2004.

After a lifetime spent serving his country and community, Manuel Sustaita died peacefully on May 20, 2020. He left behind a legacy of activism, having worked tirelessly to aid veterans, the Hispanic community, and all who needed help in the Waco area.

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The McDermott Motors building is a prime example of the way in which many of Waco’s notable architectural structures have been adapted throughout history in order to continually serve the city.

Wilford Dees McDermott opened a Buick dealership in Waco with the help of his father-in-law, Robert Buchanan, in 1926. Buchanan hoped running a business would help McDermott and his daughter settle down and become more responsible, and thus provided McDermott with the funds to construct a brand new building for the dealership on Washington Avenue which opened to the public on November 1, 1928.

The McDermott Motors building reflected the extravagant tastes of its owner and namesake. McDermott commissioned renowned Waco architect Milton Scott to design a Spanish Colonial Revival-style building, complete with a flat red tile roof, Mediterranean-influenced transom windows, and terra-cotta details. The showroom featured decorative spiral columns and scrolled metal balconies, as well as an embellished fireplace. McDermott filled the state-of-the-art facilities with the newest available technology and overbuilt the front portion of the store to accommodate future expansions.

Unfortunately, the McDermotts’s extravagant spending combined with a tough economy led to the business’ end at the onset of the Great Depression. After Robert Buchanan passed away in 1930, McDermott struggled to keep the Buick dealership afloat. The shop closed, but McDermott refused to sell the building, instead choosing to lease it to Waco’s National Guard unit.

Prior to the 1930s, the National Guard made use of the grounds of Waco’s famous Cotton Palace for their training and storage facility. Yet the demise of the cotton industry concurrent with the Depression led to the closure of the Cotton Palace. The vacant McDermott building—with its spacious, sturdy structure which lent itself to vehicle maintenance and storage—proved to be an ideal replacement. After the lease began in 1931, the National Guard temporarily renamed the structure Fort Fiske Wright, to honor a revered local officer who died heroically in World War I. In addition to its utilitarian purposes, Fort Fiske Wright served as a sort of civic center where veterans gathered to smoke and play dominoes and their sons brought dates to dances.

The advent of the Second World War led to the building transitioning from military use to wartime aviation production. Few National Guardsmen remained in Waco, and in 1941, Fort Fiske Wright closed. In 1943, McDermott leased the property to North American Aviation, one of the US military’s main suppliers of aircraft. The company painted over the windows and the army supervised the assembly site, but despite these efforts at secrecy, Wacoans discussed the airplane wings which were constructed there and shipped elsewhere for assembly. 

At the conclusion of World War II, the McDermott Motors building served once again as an automobile dealership for a short time when leased to D. T. Hicks, before entering a period of twenty years of disuse. Although McDermott received several offers from prospective buyers, he refused to sell the property until 1978. For a short time, a Christian bookstore resided in the historic building, and beginning in 1988, the charitable organization Caritas ran its operations there. Yet after a furnace fire resulted in enormously high repair costs, the building once again sat vacant.

The turn of the century brought about new uses for the McDermott Motors building. Texas physician Len Dippel purchased it in 2001, completing some renovations on the building as well as an application to list the building on the National Register of Historic Places. However, his plans to adapt the building into loft-style apartments were never realized, and in 2014, local entrepreneurs Joel and Josh Peel, owners of Hole in the Roof Marketing and Sticker Universe, respectively, bought the property. The brothers plan to complete renovations on the historic building and move their growing businesses into the unique and spacious structure.

This recent revival and repurposing of the McDermott Motors building ensures that the building will continue its legacy of adapting to meet the needs of the city.

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Ten weeks after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, Waco was chosen as the site for a military training camp. The United States initially lacked the military manpower needed to fight in the war and needed to rapidly increase the number enrolled in the armed forces. Cooperation between Waco businessmen and the federal government allowed construction to begin on a troop training complex on July 20, 1917. Spread out on 10,700 acres of cotton fields and blackland farms, the military camp cost five million dollars to construct.

The site was named for Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, a Medal of Honor recipient who served in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. Eighteen thousand troops arrived to begin their training in September of 1917. These National Guardsmen, primarily from Wisconsin and Michigan, boosted the Waco population, stimulating economic growth for the city. Though Camp MacArthur possessed the capacity to hold around forty-five thousand troops, no more than twenty-eight thousand resided at the Waco training compound.

The camp consisted of administration offices, a tent city, a base hospital, and a number of other military buildings. Loretta Johnston, a nurse at the hospital in 1918, described the base as “very pleasing to the eye” and the hospital as a “pleasant place for [the] sick and convalescent soldiers.” Johnston also wrote of a recreation hall in the hospital which housed parties and dances for the nurses and officers on weekends.

The troops from Wisconsin and Michigan formed the Thirty-Second Infantry Division of the National Guard. After receiving basic training in Waco, these troops joined the American Expeditionary Forces near Langres, France, on February 24, 1918, where they received more training and ultimately became a front line unit.

After the deployment of the Thirty-Second Infantry Division, Camp MacArthur became an infantry replacement and training camp, as well as an officer school. Recruits from Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and New Mexico arrived in Waco to receive their training until the camp became a demobilization center following the armistice of November 11, 1918.

The military center affected Waco in a number of ways. The population boost stimulated a period of economic prosperity which continued until the Great Depression. After the war’s conclusion, many soldiers returned to Waco. Even the annual fair held at the Texas Cotton Palace came to reflect the military presence in Waco. The Cotton Palace Exposition of 1917 catered heavily to soldiers, including exhibits such as a bullet-ridden German biplane. Additionally, the US Army’s insistence upon decreasing distractions for soldiers led to the closing of Waco’s red-light district known as “The Reservation.”

Camp MacArthur officially closed on March 7, 1919, and the land it formally encompassed was incorporated into the city of Waco. Portions of the materials from the camp were then used to construct a portion of the US-Mexican border; others were used to build houses in the Edgefield neighborhood in Waco.

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