Gail “Big Boy” Hester is a Round Rock native who opened Hester’s Automotive in 1960, bringing longevity, baseball and community to the city for decades.

Hester has lived in Round Rock for 87 years—his entire life. He remembers when it used to have a population of 1,500 people, four grocery stores on Main Street and no central air.

He got the name “Big Boy” when he was a child because his twin brother, Dale Hester, was smaller in size. Growing up, he had an interest in baseball and cars—both of which helped him make a lasting impact on the Round Rock community.

“Round Rock’s been good to me,” Hester said. “[I] hope I've been good to Round Rock.”

The background: Hester’s entire career has been spent in the automotive industry. His first job was working at Chevrolet. After leaving Chevrolet, he opened Hester’s Automotive in 1960, which became one of Round Rock’s oldest businesses, Hester said.

The Williamson County Regional Animal Shelter recently began setting up stations outside of Round Rock businesses to help reunite lost pets with their owners.

The overview: The shelter announced Dec. 11 that it’s begun distributing reunion stations throughout the city, with the goal of installing a station in every Round Rock ZIP code.

The stations, which are small yellow boxes set up outside of local businesses, contain a microchip scanner and instructions for how to detect if a lost animal has a chip. The users can then find owner information registered to the microchip, contact the owner and help reunite the pet with its family.

City and airport leaders on Dec. 10 marked the completion of a new outbound baggage handling system at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, a key milestone in the multibillion-dollar expansion now underway, airport officials said. The upgraded system can process roughly 4,000 bags a day and roughly 37 million passengers a year, helping the airport keep pace with Central Texas’ rapid growth.

Some context: ABIA continues to break traffic records. October saw more than 2 million passengers, an increase of nearly 9% from last year, while the Monday after the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix set a new single-day record with more than 45,000 departing travelers screened by TSA.

Officials said the project supports hundreds of local jobs and is part of a broader effort to expand long-term capacity. The airport’s $4 billion program will add a new concourse by 2030, but staff anticipate further upgrades soon after. Current planning for Concourse B targets capacity for 32 million passengers annually as projections show Austin reaching 30 million yearly travelers sooner than previously expected.