110Big Red's Old House
BIG RED DIST. ghost sign · hand-lettered business signage for Big Red Distributors, Inc. on the former Big Red distribution building, 1516 La Salle Ave · not a commissioned mural, and it cannot predate 1969, the year the soda took the Big Red name · sign painter not on record · know who lettered it? Tell us.SIGN
The soda was born in Waco in 1937. Its ghost still keeps a house on La Salle — and the house has a heist story.
In 1937, two Waco men — chemist Grover C. Thomsen and R.H. Roark — invented a cream soda the color of a stop sign and named it, with total 1937 confidence, Sun Tang Red Cream Soda. It took a golf caddie to fix that: a San Antonio bottling executive heard his caddie call the stuff Big Red, and by 1969 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 — ask any pitmaster what goes next to brisket.
The corporate offices drifted to Austin eventually, but Big Red is still made in Waco, and this stepped-parapet building wore the local distributor's name — BIG RED DIST. — in proud soda-red letters through decades of Texas sun. The building has sat empty a good while now, weeds at the porch posts. Then, in May 2026, it got a plot twist: somebody made off with the property's beloved old Big Red sign, and Waco was so sore about it the police put detectives on the case of a soda sign. Here's what no thief can load into a truck: the wall. The painted letters are the only Big Red left at Big Red's old house, and they don't come off.