West Bell County offers rich culture for residents, visitors
By JANNA ZEPP | Photos from TEX APPEAL archives
When I first moved to Central Texas nearly 20 years ago, I worked in Killeen. I was an instructor at Central Texas College working for Dr. John Henderson and teaching Introduction to Mass Communication, the first class most college and university students take if they plan on earning a journalism degree of any kind. I went on to work in III Corps Public Affairs on Fort Hood in addition to my adjunct faculty position at the college. I wrote for the Fort Hood Sentinel and I produced and anchored Fort Hood On Track for the Great Place. It took me about three weeks to figure out that an MOS (military occupational specialty) was a J-O-B (job). I got to know Killeen, Harker Heights and Fort Hood quite well in my first 10 years here. So much so, that I met and married a retired sergeant major back when he was still on active duty.
Killeen, Harker Heights and Fort Hood hold dear memories for me and my family. My twin daughters grew up visiting the military museums on post and occasionally eating in a DFAC, Army-speak for a dining facility. My girls learned the Army alphabet so well that I had to stop saying “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” in front of them. While working in PAO, I helped train soldiers on working confidently with the media without breaching OPSEC (operations security). The area and the Army still figure prominently in our family. My husband, Frank, still produces an OPORD (operation order) written in Armyese when we clean house.
Something else that the area holds dear to us: local businesses. Our West Bell County community is quite cosmopolitan when it comes to arts, entertainment, culture and dining. You can take a veritable international culinary tour there. Argentina, Venezuela, Germany, Cuba, Jamaica, Greece and most of Asia are represented well in locally owned restaurants. And, standing up for North America, there’s more than just fantastic Tex-Mex and pure Mexican food. Hawaii and Puerto Rico are here too. If I’ve missed a culture’s cuisine, let me know and I’ll write about it in Tex Appeal. I love exotic eats.
The area is great for shopping locally, especially during the holidays. There are more locally owned, new businesses here than anywhere else in the area. If you can’t find what you want in Killeen and Harker Heights, it might well not exist.
The Killeen Mall is still alive and bustling in an age when most malls are dead or dying. My daughters love sampling the throwback to ’80s mall culture that I lived and loved 40 years ago when I was their age. We had fun watching them there getting “scandalized” by the back wall at a chain novelty store that was a staple of my and Frank’s Generation X adolescence. Most of their hip, fashionable clothes come from over there.
Arts and entertainment abound if you know where to look. Downtown has begun to come back to life and there are murals from local artists on buildings as well as other art forms to be seen. The area is home to more than a few popular entertainers such as singer Rose Short, rapper Danny!, American actress, businesswoman, film producer, and philanthropist Denise DuBarry Hay, and Brother Nature, aka, Kelvin Peña, all of whom were either born in Killeen or grew up here.
For all the comings and goings of residents, military and civilian, the Killeen area has a small-town feel. The “lifers,” folks who’ve lived here all their lives, retired out of the services here, or ended up here purely by accident and stayed like I did all seem to know each other well. There’s a nice social life over there and y’all ought to go check it out.
We moved away from Killeen and down to our place in Salado when my girls started school. We then moved up to Temple about seven years ago to be closer to our jobs, and I confess that I am not as knowledgeable about the things to do and see around West Bell County as I once was. I don’t get over there as much as I’d like to, but I plan to remedy that soon. In fact, I’m now back living in Salado full time so I can get to both sides of the county a little easier for the magazine, not to mention that my girls have gone to school here since they were in kindergarten. I also miss experiencing every day the vigorous, youthful, international culture that the Army and other military branches bring to Killeen. I try to include stories from the western end of our county in every issue because the folks over there mean as much to me as the folks over on the eastern side.
For that reason, I’m asking y’all that live in West Bell County to write me an email at editor@texappealmag.com and let me know what you know. In fact, I invite all y’all — regardless of where you reside in Bell or surrounding counties — to write me any kind of email about Central Texas, even if it’s not about West Bell Co. and especially questions about things about the area you don’t understand and want to know more about. We’ll print them here in our Being Central Texan feature, and I’ll do my best to find the answers for you. You and I will learn together. Just keep it civil and keep your language clean, like I know you will because your mamas and grandmamas raised you right.
We want to include everybody. And I DO mean EVERYBODY, because Central Texas is wonderfully diverse and fascinating. With ALL y’all’s help, we can make it happen.
