April 4, 1990
By Daniel Perez
El Paso Times
Newman, Texas, is the town that never was.
The former stagecoach stop in the northeast corner of El Paso was designated as a townsite in 1922, but never attracted a population of its own.
It’s a place where people work and drink, but no one lives. The El Paso Electric Co.’s Newman power plant has about 45 employees, and the rest of Newman’s “residents” are the regulars of the town’s two bars: the Last Roundup Bar and Club 54.
“This is an out-of-the-way place where you can relax, play a game of pool. Police don’t bother you,” said Robert Kindrick, a Chaparral, N.M. resident who comes to Cub 54 several times a week.
However, civilization has begun to rear its municipal head in Newman, which is about 20 miles from Downtown El Paso. The state has paved a new road just north of Club 54 – and that angers some of the bar’s clients, including Doug Mills, a bar regular for almost 20 years.
Mills, 40, said people often use the discarded movie theater seats outside the north wall during the warm evenings to down a few beers and watch a few trains chug along.
“That was a time when ‘country’ meant something. Now it’s being threatened,” he said in reference to the paved Second Street, a frontage road that will connect U.S. 54 with Chaparral.
“I’ll throw up on the fist car (from the frontage road) I see drive up here,” Mills said.
The Texas Highway department completed the paving project recently, said Steve Coleman, an urban planner for the city of El Paso.
Club 54 co-owner Dick Selmon isn’t quite sure what effect the new road will have on his business or his property values, but he’s not upset about it.
“I have no idea what’s going to happen, so I’ll just sit back and see what comes,” he said.
When Newman was designated as a townsite, Coleman said, the initial intention was to keep it a separate town. The town wasn’t considered art of El Paso until it was annexed in October 1978.
Some of the last original buildings include the two bars, which were built in the 1940s when Newman was a railroad community. The town was named after rancher Henry L. Newman, who owned the area in the late 1800s.
One of the people who worked on the railroad track gangs in the 1940s was Northeast city Rep. Arves Jones Sr.
“There’s not as much there now as there was then. There used to be a post office there, but now they just have some rinky-dink bars,” he said.
Bartenders at both bars claim about 30 to 50 regular who visit the bars at least once a week.
One of the semi-regulars at the Last Roundup is Don Haskins, head basketball coach at the University of Texas at El Paso.
“He gets a low-neck Bud,” said Ruth Higgens, who said the bar has a family atmosphere.
Nobody bothers me here. Besides, (coming here) is better than sitting at home watching television,” she said.
Other than Haskins, the bar’s main claims to fame are brief appearances in “Bad News Bears” (1976) and a Clint Eastwood film.
“I don’t remember which one,” said Sue Waldroup, owner of the Last Roundup Bar.
The bars don’t get a lot of business from the employees of the Newman Power Plant because the plant is somewhat isolated from the community, said Carlos Samaniego, a plant shift supervisor.
“There are not a lot of close ties (between us),” he said.
Samaniego chuckled when he was asked if the two bars along U.S. 54 where the back of the community.
My Gosh. back in November 1974 i left Newman/The Last Round Up. and Sue was pulling bottles back then. The Round up was a every night place. Hey they even sold gas back then,
Posted by: Bennie Patrick | October 02, 2009 at 09:38 PM
Sue is still at the Round Up but now her daughter Linda is tending the bar.
Posted by: Trish Long | October 03, 2009 at 12:23 PM