Not everyone spends their entire life in one place, but those who do get a special bird’s-eye view of their hometown’s history.
Over the last few decades, longtime Bedford resident Dane Martin has seen his country town transform into a robust small city. He spent his childhood exploring the area on foot and bike with friends, and he attended the Old Bedford School in the 1950s.
Martin later spent almost four decades as a local mail carrier.
He said, “I was dating a girl after I got out of high school, and something came up about how well I knew the city. She said, ‘Oh, you don't know it that well, it's a pretty big town.’”
“I said, I tell you what, you put a blindfold on [me] and we'll leave your house and drive around for 15 minutes, and you stop, and I'll tell you what street or what addition we're in,” Martin said.
In 1960, when Martin was 13, about 2,700 people lived in Bedford. The big cities on either side it, Dallas and Fort Worth, were growing fast. Now that those cities and the Metroplex are home to more than eight million people, Bedford looks a little different, too.
The city has around 50,000 residents today.
New projects, old landmarks
One of the city’s newest attractions is the Bedford Center YMCA (The Center), a sprawling fitness complex with a multi-level indoor track, basketball courts, and a water park with slides and a lazy river. It opened in 2023.
The Bedford Center YMCA sits on the historic site of Bedford Boys Ranch. That was a home for wards of the court, run by the Variety Club of Dallas from 1949 to 1957.
Martin remembers growing up with the young men who lived at Boys Ranch.
“At any one time there was probably 100, 120 guys here,” he said. “Most of them were really good guys. I spent the night over here on weekends sometimes in the dormitories playing pool because I spent my whole day, five days a week, in school with them.”
The conversion of the old Boys Ranch land to what’s now known as Generations Park at Boys Ranch is one of Bedford’s defining projects in recent years. Voters approved it narrowly in 2017.
Dan Cogan is Bedford’s mayor and a former city council member. What happened during the remaking of the Boys Ranch property is part of why he decided to run for office.
“[The City Council] basically went to the voters and said, ‘We need $70 million to redo this park. We'll figure out the rest later.' That was very controversial…That’s what got me to start paying attention to what was going on at City Hall as a resident.”
Martin described the Boys Ranch redevelopment as the city's most drastic change in recent years.
But despite the controversy over the project in its early phases, Martin said locals ultimately took to the change. "You build it and they'll come," he said, a reference to 1989's Field of Dreams.
"I think people were excited about it once they saw it," he said. "They didn't really change the land."
Looking ahead
There’s another big project on city officials’ minds these days, and they’ve been considering the specifics for a while.
Bedford Commons is a proposed development near City Hall that’s expected to have residential, retail and dining options. The city owns the roughly 30-acre property the Commons would sit on.
“People drive through Bedford all the time, but we want them to stop here, discover it and, of course, spend their money here and hopefully move here with their families,” Cogan said.
But Bedford Commons isn’t a done deal yet. After about 15 years of talks, a final decision on whether the project will move forward is slated to come down within the next few months.
As he comes up on 80 years in Bedford, Martin said he looks forward to the outcome.
“Hopefully they get it built before I'm gone, because I'd love to have a condo over there and be able just to walk outside to go to a restaurant,” he said. “But the way it’s moving, it may not happen.”
Got a tip? Email Andy Lusk at alusk@kera.org.
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