There's a white building on La Salle Avenue with a stepped parapet, weeds at the porch posts, and six faded letters that outlasted everything else: BIG RED DIST.
Most people drive past it at exactly the speed those letters were painted for. But slow down — because that quiet little building connects to a soda empire, a golf caddie, Texas barbecue theology, and, as of this spring, an honest-to-goodness heist.
1937: two Waco men invent a color
Big Red was born right here in 1937, when a Waco chemist named Grover C. Thomsen and R.H. Roark created a cream soda unlike anything on the shelf — bright as a stop sign, sweet as a county fair, tasting mostly like red. They named it, with total 1937 confidence, Sun Tang Red Cream Soda.
Nobody called it that. For decades Texans just asked for the red one. The name finally caught up with the people in 1969, and the story of how is the best part: as the company itself tells it, a San Antonio bottling executive overheard a golf caddie call the stuff "Big Red" — and knew instantly that the caddie was a better brand man than anyone in the building. The name on the bottle finally matched the name in every Texan's mouth.
It went on to become the unofficial soda of Texas barbecue — Texas Highways has written whole essays on why nothing washes down brisket like it. The corporate offices eventually drifted to Austin, but here's the fact Waco should print on a T-shirt: Big Red is still made in Waco today. The soda never left. It just got famous.
The house the soda kept
Which brings us back to La Salle Avenue. This stepped-parapet building at 1516 La Salle wore the local distributor's name in proud soda-red letters through decades of Texas sun — the warehouse where cases of Waco's own invention were staged before fanning out to every icebox in the county. The business moved on years ago. The letters stayed, going chalky but never crooked, because old-school sign painters primed walls to outlast the companies that paid for them.
That's what a ghost sign is: paint that outlived its payroll. And Waco's La Salle corridor is quietly full of them — it's the old highway strip, the road Dallas-to-Austin traffic took before the interstate, and every block of it has something the decades forgot to erase.
May 2026: the heist
And then this spring, the story got a plot twist worthy of the soda's own legend. In May 2026, somebody made off with the property's beloved old Big Red sign — pried a piece of local history right off the place and drove away with it. Waco was sore enough about it that the police put detectives on the case of a soda sign, with an officer noting the sign was "one of those unique local landmarks that people enjoy seeing because it brings back memories."
Think about that. In a world with plenty of real crime, Waco PD assigned detectives to a soda sign — because around here, that sign was real. That's how much this town loves its red.
But here's what no thief can load into a truck: the wall. The painted letters on the parapet are the only Big Red left at Big Red's old house, and they don't come off. Paint beats burglars. It always has.
Make it a La Salle afternoon
The Big Red building is Stop 50 on our Waco's Walls trail — we call it Big Red's Old House — and it anchors what might be Waco's best two-block art crawl. One lot down is the Junky Monkey's crowned queen, and next door to her, a motorcycle shop painted its whole wall as a stack of 1970s magazine ads. Keep rolling and La Salle hands you a flower-covered florist, a Tex-Mex landmark, and the traffic circle itself.
All of it is free, all of it is mapped on The Whole Map, and every stop has a story worth reading out loud in the car. Bring your camera. And if you're the sort who stops for history, maybe bring a cold Big Red — it seems only right to drink Waco's invention while standing at its old front door.
If you know more about this building's working years — or you remember the sign that was taken — tell us on Facebook. This is the kind of history neighbors keep.