Waco volunteers as viewing site for 2024 solar eclipse

Waco, Texas, could be “smart money” as a premier location for viewing the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse. Waco is in the direct path and will experience a total blackout for 4 minutes, 13 seconds. 

Celestial spectators should find it comfortable to be outdoors in Waco in April. The normal temperature on April 8 ranges from 57 to 74 degrees, with a 53% chance of “clear to mostly clear” skies for the start of the eclipse at 1:37:55 p.m. (CDT). 

Plus, Waco has Nan Stevens in its corner. She is the friendly customer relations ambassador who welcomes visitors to Magnolia Market at the Silos in Waco, according to Jessica Leigh Mattern of Country Living magazine. 

Nan’s husband, Jerry Stevens, handles the “business side” of things for the Magnolia enterprises. They are the mighty proud parents of Joanna Stevens Gaines, who became an All-American celebrity by “playing herself on TV.”

 

Joanna and her chatty, goofball husband, Chip Carter Gaines, are “building a home-and-lifestyle brand empire on the back of ‘Fixer Upper,’ their wildly successful and popular HGTV series,” wrote Michael O’Connell of the Hollywood Reporter. The Gaines’ connection to Waco is a delightful phenomenon.

 

Jerry Stevens was an American soldier deployed to Seoul, South Korea, during the Vietnam War era. He met Nan at a party there in 1969…and she declared: “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” 

After his tour of duty, Jerry returned to the United States, but they kept in touch through letters. He sent Nan a marriage proposal and an airplane ticket. They were married by a justice of the peace in Las Vegas in 1972. 

Texas Monthly magazine wrote about how Chip and Joanna first met. 

Joanna graduated from Baylor University in Waco with a broadcast journalism degree and went to work for her father at his Firestone tire and auto repair business. Joanna did the local television commercials for the store.

 

Chip pulled in one day in 2001 to get the brakes on his truck fixed, saw Joanna and said: “Hey, you’re the girl in the commercial.” They talked for 30 minutes. They hit it off instantly and were married about two years later in 2003. 

Chip went to Baylor on a baseball scholarship and studied business and marketing. As a student, he ran lawn care businesses, owned fireworks stands and started a fluff-and-fold laundry service for Baylor students. 

Chip began buying and flipping houses…and was very good at it. He and Joanna became business partners, and they flipped, flipped and flipped Waco houses for about 10 years. He was the contractor; she was the decorator.

 

The “Magnolia” magnet may be strong enough to bring grown-ups galore to Waco for the 2024 eclipse, but kids can get excited about the pairing of “science overhead and science underground.” 

One day in 1978, two local fellows were out searching for fossils and arrowheads near the Bosque River in Waco.

 

By chance, they uncovered a really big bone. They carried it to Baylor’s science museum director. 

They had uncovered remains of a Columbian mammoth that died about 70,000 years ago. Columbian mammoths grew to be about 14 feet tall, resembling a giant elephant with long curvy tusks. 

University archaeologists went to work and found “one of the richest Ice Age fossil beds in the world, and the only known nursery herd of Columbian mammoths in the United States. These animals died in a single event – probably a flood.” 

So far, researchers have found skeletons of 23 mammoths.

 

In 2015, the Waco Mammoth National Monument became an official unit of the National Park Service.