Playing with numbers

No, I am not writing about how numbers are being used to propagate the lie that federal workers are overpaid. I am not even writing about how two of every three new Texans are Hispanic, new Census data show.

Instead, I was mesmerized by the interactive information contained on the USA Today Web site that accompanies the story about the new Census information. Way before there were computers, at least in my life, I would look thoroughly over each new year’s “World Almanac” reading all the great facts and figures it had to offer. I read it little bits at a time, learning all kinds of what some would say was “useless information.”

My reading  reference books didn’t get me on “Jeopardy” — I must admit I kick ass in “Trivial Pursuit” — but it has helped me in my work as a writer and as a journalist. That is why I absolutely love the Internet, no matter its downsides. Yes, it provides more than one.

Probably the biggest find reading today’s Census information about Texas was not unexpected as I had been watching it happen and reading about over the years in Dallas-Fort Worth area newspapers. I am talking about the explosive suburban and the “exurban” growth, the latter being increased populations beyond the suburban areas of a major city or metropolitan area such as the “Metroplex” of Dallas-Fort Worth.  Since I am a Southeast Texan by birth and residence, I don’t know why but a great number of my friends live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A few friends jokingly, I suppose, call it the “Metromess.” Although I live within slightly more than an hour’s drive from Houston, I spent a good deal of time in the Dallas area over the past 20 years or so. I lived for almost a year in the small, mostly rich enclave of University Park, which is surrounded by Dallas and is home to Southern Methodist University. Likewise, I spent a couple of extended periods in Allen, which one could call a Dallas suburb,  or years ago an exurb, or even today be identified as a suburb of greater Plano.

That’s right. I knew the population for the Dallas ‘burbs were getting huge. But it’s another thing to see it in print.

Allen, in Collin County, grew by 93.4 percent between 2000 and 2010 and now hosts 84,246 residents, according to the Census Bureau. Plano, next door, has grown to almost 260,000. One could still see a lot of farmland and empty lots ripe for the picking when I first started visiting the Dallas area around 1980. Several other Metromess-area examples and growth over the 10 Census years:

• Garland, 226,876, 5.1%
• Arlington, 365,438, 9.8%
• McKinney, 131,117. 141.2%
• Denton, 113,383, 40.8%
• Frisco, 116,989, 247%
• Irving, 216,290, 12.9%

These are just a few examples. The new Census figures also showed some surprises for places I live in or know fairly well. Beaumont, where I  live, actually grew 3.9%, to 118,296, despite continual naysaying that it would lose folks. Waco, where I lived for seven years in the last years of the 20th century and early 2000s, had a 9.7% growth rate, to 124,805 people. That was not unexpected, but that it actually happened and had that kind of growth leaves me scratching my head. Why? I guess there’s plenty of prairie land and many more Baptists than you can shake a stick at. Like the old joke that continually circulates around Waco in one form or another, Waco is a town with one tall building  surrounded by 100,000 Baptists. In case you don’t know about the Baptists and Waco, the city is home to Baylor University. The Alico Building, a 22-story structure completed in 1911, was once the tallest building in Texas and West of the Mississippi. I guess you have to be there to get the joke.

William Cowper Brann, a  journalist in the late 1800s, regaled the rest of the U.S. with his tales of many people he called “Psalm-singing sons of bitches” with whom he had to deal with daily as editor of the popular magazine “The Iconoclast” based in Waco. Brann was in an almost perpetual fight with Baylor and its supporters and referred to Waco as “Jerusalem on the Brazos.” His role as an iconoclast had its shortcomings, however, he died from wounds he received in a gunfight with a detractor.

Perhaps Brann had something to do with Waco’s population past and present. I don’t know. While I met some nice folks in the seven years I lived there, it was the place I lived that I most disliked. Oh well. Things could be worse. At least unlike my journalistic forebear, Brann, I wasn’t shot and mortally wounded when I lived there.