San Antonio Storybook

This past month has been anything but normal. As the city of San Antonio continues to shelter in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we all find ourselves navigating situations we never have before. The stories of how we as a community are dealing with all this may not be heroic, but they’re worth sharing all the same.

On the south side of San Antonio sits Stinson Municipal Airport. You may have heard of it, but you probably haven’t heard the story of Katherine Stinson. Like Davy Crockett, Theodore Roosevelt and Manu Ginóbili, she is part of a long line of fascinating characters who have passed through San Antonio and helped make it the place that it is today.  This episode concludes the first season of the San Antonio Storybook. 

On September 13, 1987, Pope John Paul II visited San Antonio. While he was here, the supreme pontiff celebrated an open-air Mass with 350,000 people in an empty field on the west side of town. In this chapter of the San Antonio Storybook, we tell the epic tale of the architects tasked with preparing this site for the pope.

In a previous episode, we talked about the race that occurs at every San Antonio Missions home game between a kid and Henry the Puffy Taco. The implication was that the kid always wins this race, but that isn’t entirely true. One time the Taco won.

Barney Smith was both a preacher and a plumber, but he was best known as the creator of the Toilet Seat Art Museum. It wasn’t the legacy he set out to create, but it’s one he was proud to own. In this special episode of San Antonio Storybook, we pay a special tribute to Barney, who passed away last week at the age of 98.  

Attending a baseball game at Wolff Municipal Stadium is a memorable event. Each player on the Missions’ roster has a story, but in this chapter of the San Antonio Storybook we aren’t going to tell the story of the person who plays shortstop or first base. Instead, we’re going to tell the story of the person who plays the mascot.

Earlier this year a local children's amusement park announced it would be relocating to the San Antonio Zoo. The Kiddie Park has been the site of countless happy birthday parties and childhood memories. Many stories could be told about the Kiddie Park and we’re going to tell one of them in this chapter of the San Antonio Storybook.

This month the Rollercade celebrates its 60th birthday. The skating rink is a local institution and generations of San Antonians have skated across its smooth wood floor. In this chapter of the "San Antonio Storybook," we’ll tell the story of how the Rollercade came to be built and the family responsible for keeping the Alamo City rolling.

A large group of politicians recently descended on an empty lot in downtown San Antonio to break ground on a new federal courthouse. Of course, San Antonio already has a federal courthouse. In this chapter of the San Antonio Storybook we’ll find out the history of this building and the important part it played in the history of San Antonio.

San Antonio can be pretty quiet before it wakes up and before its streets fill with traffic. That’s what makes it so jarring when the silence of the morning is broken by the sound of a distant boom. In this chapter of the “San Antonio Storybook” we discover the story behind that boom as well as the people who are responsible for it.

Like chapters of a book, each episode of the “San Antonio Storybook” will tell a different tale about the city we call home. The stories likely are ones you haven’t heard before – narratives about the lives of the people behind the headlines, the sounds you hear, and the places you see as you drive around San Antonio.