51Papa Approves

Andrews Cycle Works has been keeping Waco's motorcycles alive since the late seventies — repair, customization, race prep, and the patient resurrection of vintage machines most shops won't touch. So when the wall needed paint, it didn't get a mural. It got a magazine. The whole flank of the building is painted as a spread of period ads in newsprint blue and cream: a dirt bike crests a gravel hill under the headline PAPA APPROVES; a Triumph rider hangs in the air over a pen-and-ink treeline beneath a single word, READY.; and the third ad is for the shop itself — a café racer wearing number 505, cover-dated Sept 1978, cover-priced 75 cents.

The margins are the best part: a column of black-and-white engine cutaways like a parts catalog nobody could bear to throw away, and the badges of the old marques — Honda's wing, Ducati, Kawasaki, Yamaha's tuning forks, Laverda, Velocette — names from the era when motorcycles were drawn, not photographed. It stands one lot down from the Junky Monkey's crowned queen, which makes this stretch of La Salle the best two-stop art crawl in south Waco: royalty, then horsepower.