Last Monday, Books-A-Million assistant manager Cindy Bucher could barely contain her glee while organizing the last few dozen of a reported 1,200-plus folks seeking to meet Laura Bush and get autographed copies of her memoir.

A year and a half has passed since President George W. Bush left office, and Central Texas just hasn’t had the same shine since the Western White House, west of Crawford, served as an occasional hub of international activity.

“We actually miss all the excitement of the DPS pulling us over (for presidential motorcades),” said Bucher, who lives three miles outside the town of Valley Mills and 12 miles outside Crawford, which practically makes her a neighbor of the president. “I even miss the helicopters flying overhead. I’d always wave and wonder if that was really Laura Bush inside.”

So what if local cynics told her she was probably just waving at some bemused Secret Service agent onboard?

Glowing sentiments for the Bush era were widespread among those buying copies of the former first lady’s book. Some folks stood for as long as two hours just to meet Laura Bush. Among them: Cheryl Mayfield, 65, who went to Robert E. Lee High School in Midland at the time Laura Welch attended the campus.

The two never met during those long-ago days in dusty West Texas, but Mayfield happily showed me her yearbook, complete with photos of the future first lady working in the yearbook office. Ironically, Mayfield has lived in Waco for 36 years, and, while she’s known friends and neighbors who met the president over the past decade, she never got the chance to meet Laura or the president.

Monday night, though, she was intent on her former classmate signing her yearbook.

Many in the crowd definitely miss the good old days, back when the Bushes made Central Texas living something special. Gone are the days when jet fighters circled high in the sky over the Bush ranch, presidential caravans halted traffic on country roads and security was thick throughout the county. Some folks tell me they miss that warm feeling of safety that they had whenever President Bush was at the ranch, especially amid a war on terrorism.

“He was close,” 66-year-old Diane Shelton said, “and I felt secure.”

When the president left office, two wars were raging, a recession was gathering steam, and history’s judgment remained in doubt. Bush has largely stayed out of the limelight since then, ignored by many in his party, vilified by tea party activists and routinely blamed for any number of things by Democrats.

Yet some here miss the passing parade that was the Bush era. They even miss the news media types from around the globe.

“We actually got a lot of good press in the national media,” 74-year-old retiree John Elliott said. “Now that he’s relocated to Dallas, we don’t see that anymore. But I always thought the advantages of the news media outweighed the disadvantages, just in terms of the economics.”

Although the Bush press office staff routinely datelined press statements from Crawford, not Waco, some Waco residents thought his frequent retreats to the ranch and occasional visits into Waco, including two summits at Baylor University, worked against the stigma of the Branch Davidian siege of 1993 that unfairly tarred Waco’s image.

“It brought a lot more attention to our city and our state,” 66-year-old retiree Elizabeth Dodd said of the Bush presence. “Sure, some of it was about protests or airplanes getting too close to the ranch and being forced down, but even that was more attention than usual for us.”

Monday, some of that old magic was back. Bucher and others told me how down-to-earth the former first lady is, how her eyes twinkle. I asked if she had any special demands before sitting down to sign copies of her book (and I understand she can sign up to 1,200 copies in two hours).

“She’s not like that,” Bucher assured me. “All she asked for was that some country-western music be put on. George Strait, Alan Jackson. She’s just a good country girl.”