|
|
Tuesday, February 9, 2010 |
Serving Seguin and Guadalupe County since 1888
|
|
|
Marketplace
Sections
Services
Service Center
|
|
 |
|
A building and a constable to be proud of
Published January 9, 2009
MCQUEENEY — Precinct 4 Justice of the Peace Larry Morawietz isn’t the first member of his family to serve in the position.
For decades beginning in the 1950s and ending in 1979, his father, Louis T. Morawietz and then his mother, Willie Mae Morawietz, held the post their son later inherited through Judge Walter Bargfrede and Precinct 4 voters. Neither of Larry Morawietz’s parents would be able to believe the relative extravagance of the court their son and Precinct 4 Commissioner Judy Cope got named for them on FM 725 just over the hill from ACME Brick.
Set into a hillside with its tin roof and broad porch held up by bright cedar posts shading a stately, brick-wainscoted facade, the justice court building has the look of a country estate.
And even Bargfrede, who like Larry Morawietz had a long career in law enforcement before stepping up to the bench, might be impressed by the masonry sign out front as elegant as the ones at Texas Lutheran University.
A while back, Morawietz invited a few of the folks who helped make the building the way it is — County Judge Mike Wiggins, ACME Brick Company’s Alan Schodowski and Morawietz’s brother Donald — out to his courthouse to say, “Thank you.”
How it came to be is one of those long stories everybody who knows the younger Morawietz — himself a retired investigator and no longer exactly a spring chicken — knows he can tell like almost nobody else.
For the first several years of his judicial career, Larry Morawietz and his staff — as had Bargfrede and his before them — worked out of a cramped, run-down and moldy former boat shop in McQueeney that everybody who remembers it knows was so ugly it could have lost a beauty contest to a bucket of old toads.
When the county built his new place, there wasn’t enough money in the coffers to do anything fancy, so they didn’t. They basically built a large tin shed around the floor plan Morawietz and his staff designed, and that was about it.
One day, Schodowski was by, and truth be told, he probably didn’t make Morawietz very happy when he asked why the building looked so ... plain.
“He said, ‘Your building looks a little blah,’” Larry Morawietz recalled.
But Schodowski wasn’t there to throw rocks. He was there to help.
“He said, ‘ACME Brick will donate whatever you need,” Larry Morawietz said. “Thanks to their help and generosity, we were able to get the brick for the building.”
Larry Morawietz also wanted a roofed porch on the side of the building that provides a pastoral view all the way to Interstate 10 and beyond, but money was a problem.
Eventually, he said, Wiggins found it, and county employees installed the porch and the roof, which, when court is in session, provides a comfortable and shady place to sit outside.
Some in the county, Larry Morawietz recalled, wanted to see the concrete porch topped off with columns made of the same material.
“They were just going to put concrete up, and then we got in a fight over the posts,” Morawietz recalled.
He wanted varnished, squared-off country cedar posts like he has out at his place, and he pushed until the county agreed he could have them.
“I wasn’t looking for a Taj Mahal,” Larry Morawietz recalled. “But I wanted it to look good, and I wanted it to look like it belonged here in the setting it’s in, and it really does. There isn’t a week goes by that someone doesn’t stop by and take a picture or ask about the awning, the brick or the posts because they’re building a house.”
The place needed one more touch, in Larry Morawietz’s opinion, and that was a masonry sign out front to replace the four-by-eight one the county was able to provide.
Larry Morawietz knew who he wanted to help him build the sign — it was the same contractor who’d built the signs at TLU’s entrances, and Larry Morawietz wanted one that was of similar quality — only more modestly sized.
Because the contractor was his brother, Donald Moraweitz, the county determined that Larry Moraweitz couldn’t bid on the job because it would appear to be an instance of favoratism — a problem Donald Moraweitz solved by volunteering to do the job for free, with his brother’s help.
The final touch was landscaping and trees donated by Efren Maldonado. The result looks like something out of a 1940s travel magazine, and Wiggins agreed it was a beautiful job.
“Since it’s been done, I’ve heard numerous compliments about how the building looks,” he said. “With Alan and ACME’s help and the work done by Donald Morawietz and Maldonado’s, we have an appealing office the citizens of Precinct 4 can be proud of.”
Schodowski said ACME Brick Company is very community oriented and looks for opportunities to give back to its neighbors wherever it does business.
“We love to support our community any way possible and we’re always looking to help out any way we can,” Schodowski said.
Share |
Save |
Mail |
Print |
Comment
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|