Ashley Bean Thornton retired from Baylor University several years ago, but she is busier than ever working with Waco nonprofits and writing whimsical tales of her adopted city.
Thornton met her husband Craig while attending Baylor and spent many years after graduation in Houston. Anxious to return to a smaller town, she and Craig came back for Baylor Homecoming one year with resumes in hand; they moved back to Waco in 1998. Thornton spent the majority of her career working in several departments at Baylor.
“I worked at Baylor for 20 years and retired from there in 2018,” Thornton recalled. “I primarily worked in training and development for the staff as the director of Professional and Organizational Development. Toward the end of my career I worked in community outreach.”
Thornton’s husband was a long-time math teacher at Robinson High School, where he recently retired.
In 2016, Thornton made a New Year’s resolution to make walking her primary mode of transportation after reading Jeff Speck’s book “Walkable City: How Downton Can Save America, One Step at a Time.”
Thornton said, “When I started reading it, I posted on Facebook that I was reading the book and asked if anybody else wanted to read it and discuss. Twenty people responded with interest, so we gathered at the Dewey Community Center to discuss how Waco could be more walkable and also what we liked about walking. After several meetings, someone said, ‘You know, if we’re going to talk about making Waco more walkable, we should actually walk.’ And so we started walking, and have done so pretty much once a month for the last eight years.”
The majority of the group’s walks have been history based, and what started out as 15 or 20 walkers has swelled to as many as 150. One of her favorite walks was hosted by another Waco author, Jerry Powell, author of “The Sporting House Killings.” He led a walk discussing all the things that he learned while writing that book.
Thornton loves to think and dream while walking. One result was her recent release “Waco: A Fantastical History.”
During COVID, Trent Clifford from Wild Imaginings Theatre Group, and Sarah Moran hosted an online writing forum.
“I joined in with them and turned my ideas into stories, incorporating a lot of what I learned on the different Waco walks,” Thornton said. “Along with help from Geoff [Hunt] from the Texas Collection to add details to each story.”
“Waco: A Fantastical History” was self-published. Her friend, Vicki Northern, did the illustrations. Thornton smiled when she said she purposely published the book on April 1 of this year, saying the tales are “fantastical stories of dubious veracity.” She jokingly says the book is meant for childish adults.
Many of the stories in the book have a hint of truth to them — as any tall tale should — and readers will be delighted to learn of Jedidiah Speight’s pet elephants hauling the cables for the Suspension Bridge as well as the suitor-deterring cat of Major Isham Harrison Earle’s daughter Hallie Earle who became Waco’s first female physician.
Thornton hosted a launch party at the Waco Central Library with around 150 people in attendance and made it a fundraiser for Friends of the Library.
When she isn’t writing, Thornton works for the nonprofit Waco AfterSchool Academy, which provides tutoring and enrichment activities for about 50 children at the Hines Elementary Campus.
“I developed a program called Power Math,” she explained. “We use a little-known program for students who are eligible for federal work study as part of their financial aid for college. They can work tutoring math or reading and the federal work study program will pay their wages. We were able to partner with Baylor students to work with the kids one-on-one doing math in our after-school program.”
The program is under the umbrella of Transformation Waco, a hybrid nonprofit meant to help the Waco ISD schools with poor STAR test score rankings. Robin McDurham, the executive director of Transformation Waco, recruited the newly retired Thornton to be an advocate for that program.
“Before COVID, it was more of an enrichment-based after-school program. I had a lot of connections at Baylor to teach students art, gymnastics, drums, chess and more, but after COVID we needed to spend more time on academics. That is when I developed the materials for the Power Math program.”
“Waco: A Fantastical History” wasn’t Thornton’s first foray into writing books. As a volunteer at J.H. Hines Elementary before working for her nonprofit, she wrote a book called “Bad Friends & Monsters” which integrates some of the first-grade sight words. The students at Hines Elementary who were in the after-school art club illustrated it, and then Baylor Press helped publish it. The students sold them and made a little bit of money for their art program. Thornton also wrote a little book of nursery rhymes “Miss Bean’s New Fangled Nursery Rhymes” for a fundraiser for Act Locally Waco, which was illustrated by Sal Velasco.
Waco Walks is part of Act Locally Waco and can be found on their website or on Facebook and her book, “Waco: A Fantastical History” can be found Fabled Bookshop.
