Category Archives: Small Town USA

Road Eats ’14

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Serendipity is your friend on the road, but you have to be open to it. After spending some time at the Wichita Public Library’s main branch in downtown Wichita on July 14, we headed west on Douglas Ave., the way we’d come into downtown. We wanted lunch, and I thought I’d seen something interesting coming in. But I couldn’t remember exactly what. Then I saw Nu Way Crumbly Burgers.

Crumbly Burgers, yumClearly my kind of place. It’s a small Wichita chain. “The Nu Way tradition began on July 4th, 1930, at the same location we still call our ‘original’ home at 1416 West Douglas,” the Crumbly web site tells us. “It all started when Tom McEvoy… moved from Iowa to Wichita and built the first Nu Way. The dedication and absolute commitment to quality Tom began can still be tasted today as we carry on his reputation.

“We still make Nu Ways with the exact same recipe using our patented cookers and we still make our world famous Root Beer daily along with our homemade Onion Rings.”

Crumbly burgers are loose-meat sandwiches and root beer is, well, root beer, and we had both (Ann’s was a float), sitting at the counter. Considering that it was mid-afternoon on a Monday, the place was busy. For good reason. Those crumbly burgers might crumble, and you have to position your wrapping to catch those loose odds of meat, but they were satisfying. The frosty chilled root beer hit the spot exactly.

Nu Way harkens back to the ’30s. In Dallas, Keller’s evokes the 1950s, I think. But not the ’50s of televised nostalgia – we saw a lot of that in the ’70s – but just an ordinary burger-and-shakes joint that’s simply never been updated. Jay calls it Jake’s, since that used to be its name, but there was some kind of family ownership split or something. We went to the one on Garland Rd., but there are a few others, including one that’s supposed to be a drive-in. Anyway, the Garland location serves tasty burgers, fries and shakes, ordered and picked up at the front counter.

Bun ‘n’ Barrel is on the Austin Highway in San Antonio. Points for actually having two apostrophes. It’s been there since I can remember (it was founded in 1950, so that makes sense). The last time I went might have been in the late ’70s. It doesn’t seem to have changed too much with time, though there’s been a few recent renovations, such as the addition of a little nostalgia-oriented decor. They’re also happy that what’s-his-name on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives showed up to do a segment a few years ago.

Bun 'n' BarrelThere’s a barrel on the roof, but I had a hard time getting a good shot of it. Also, it was over 90 F that day, and I didn’t want to loll around outside. Instead, I snapped the painted concrete  barrel out in the back parking lot.

Bun n BarrelI got the wrong thing: a ham plate. It wasn’t bad, but it was exactly like ham I can get at a grocery store. Probably the barbecue or a burger would have been a better choice.

Threadgills in Austin isn’t a classic road-food diner or a greasy spoon, but it makes a mighty chicken fried steak. Be sure to have it with mashed potatoes and fired okra. Its nostalgia is late ’60s, early ’70s. For instance, I saw that the Jerry Garcia Fest will be at the restaurant’s beer garden this weekend. We went to the one in South Austin, one of two locations. The current restaurants are descended from a beer joint that opened as soon as Prohibition ended, with a musical heyday 40 or 50 years ago.

Finally, if you’re southbound on I-35 north of DFW and you take the very first exit after crossing into Texas, and then gas up at the gas station there, you will also see this.

Fried Pies!Among roadside eatery names, that’s high concept. Through much of southern Oklahoma, I’d seen fried pies advertised, like you can see pasties advertised in the UP. I decided it was time to investigate. It was arrayed like a doughnut shop, except replete with fried pies – bigger than the ones you buy in the grocery store, if you’re in the mood for high-calorie, barely mediocre treats. I bought a chocolate pie and a coconut one, and Ann and I split both. They were a lot better than any factory-make ones at a grocery store.

The Hide Vendor of Giddings

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One more item from Central Texas in late April. En route to San Antonio, Jay and I were at a stop light in Giddings, seat of Lee County, when we saw something neither of us had ever seen anywhere else.

It wasn’t the road sign marking the way to Dime Box, which I saw to the right, from the passenger’s seat. I’ve never been to Dime Box, but I remember the peculiar name — and the neighboring town Old Dime Box — from maps and because (I think) it was the capital, or at least the seat of power, in post-nuclear war Texas in the little-remembered SF novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999.

From the driver’s seat, Jay saw something entirely more remarkable. I handed him my camera and he was able to take a shot just before the light turned green.

Texas4.25.14 067 The van at the gas station is selling Quality Hides, and you can see some hides hanging on display. But that’s not the strange thing, even though I’d never seen van-based hide selling before. This is central Texas, after all. Lots of cattle around. A hide-seller’s no big deal.

Look a little closer, between the Texas flag and the Quality Hides banner.

We Take BitcoinBITCOIN Accepted Here.

Oh, really? What’s the story here? A dealer in hides so libertarian in his sympathies — so anarchist maybe — that he takes, or wants to take, the famed cryptocurrency? What are the odds that someone driving along in Giddings, Texas, on a fine spring day will be in the market for a hide and just happen to have a Bitcoin or two burning a hole in his virtual pocket?

Or is this just the vendor’s idea of a joke? Guess I’ll never know for sure.

Independence Hall & the Brazos

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The main attraction at Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site, as far as I’m concerned, is Independence Hall. Texas Independence Hall, that is, a much more modest and lesser-known structure than the one in Pennsylvania.

Independence Hall, Texas 2014Actually, it’s the second replica of the original building, dating from the 1950s, which replaced a 1910s replica put on the site. There’s something to be said for replicas or even hasty copies. After all, much of what survived the golden age of Greek civilization was through Roman copies.

The display inside is refreshingly informal. Go in through the open door and there you are. There are no roped off areas, probably because everything inside’s a recent copy. Not that there’s much inside. Just a few long wooden tables, some straight-back wooden chairs, and a couple of jugs, maybe to represent the hard cider on hand to steady the delegates’ nerves. The small obelisk just outside the door says On This Spot Was Made the Declaration of Texas Independence – March 2, 1836.

There isn’t much else, at least in the way of structures, near Independence Hall. Various paths lead off from it through the rest of the historic site, including one to the Brazos River. The scenery along the way looks like this, at least in late April in a non-drought year.

Texas4.25.14 064Before long you arrive at the banks of the Brazos. It seems like an under-appreciated river. For a moment I thought I’d never been to its banks before, but of course I have – and not that long ago, when I walked along the Brazos in Waco in 2009, and even crossed it on a footbridge. But it hardly seems like the same river, even though maps tell me that it is.

Texas4.25.14 065Something I didn’t know about the Brazos before today: it’s the 11th longest (source-to-mouth) river in the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and for that matter the longest within Texas. It used to be navigable as far north as Washington-on-the-Brazos, but its career as a river of commerce didn’t really take off. Finally, no less an authority than Hank Hill says that Alamo Beer is “from the lukewarm headwaters of the mighty Brazos River.”

Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site

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Not far south of College Station and Bryan is Washington, Texas, an unincorporated place with a small population. In some alternate universe, it’s a major city sprawling along the Brazos River in Washington County – and it’s the capital of Texas (the state, or an independent nation; maybe that’s two different alternatives), best known for a large public university, its tech industry, and a thriving music scene. Popularly called Brazos, to distinguish it from that other Washington on the Potomac, the city also has a countercultural streak: Keep Brazos Weird, the bumper stickers say.

For a while, little Washington on the Brazos River was the capital of the Republic of Texas – 1842 to the end of independence in 1845, but then a town further west permanently won the prize of state capital, where it remains. Along the way, the back-and-forth of the Texas capital location led to the odd incident known as the Archive War, which wasn’t really a war, and which I don’t remember being discussed in 7th grade Texas History class.

These days, Washington, Texas, is best known as the site Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836, a fact that was taught in Texas History class. That event is memorialized at the 293-acre Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site, owned and operated by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. More about it here.

Jay and I took a look at the site on the way from College Station to San Antonio on April 25. I’d never visited before. The site has three major components: Independence Hall, the Star of the Republic Museum, and the Barrington Living History Farm. We saw the first two, along with the visitors center, where we each bought a small Come and Take It flag in the gift shop because how many places can you do that? (Amazon doesn’t count.)

Near the visitors center is a bronze of this fellow: George Campbell Childress (1804-1841).

Childress, April 2014Another of the long line of Tennesseans who came to Texas early, and a brother-in-law of James K. Polk, Childress was honored with this bronze because he’s acknowledged to be author of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Note the quill and scroll. He was head of the committee tasked on March 1 to write a declaration, and it was ready the next day, so it seems likely that he’d already prepared the thing. The document clearly owes a rhetorical debt to Jefferson. The first paragraph says:

When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression.

Even so, the list of grievances is specific to the time and place, such as abrogation of the 1824 Constitution of Mexico and the annoying union of Texas with the state of Coahulia, but mainly boiling down to the assertion that no dictator in Mexico City’s going to tell us what to do.

Texas4.25.14 052The deco-like statue itself dates from 1936 – the centennial of Texas independence – and was done by Raoul Josset, a French sculptor who immigrated to the United States in the early 1930s, and left behind a number of works, including Childress but also “The Spirit of the Centennial,” now in Fair Park in Dallas, and the Fannin Monument in Goliad, Texas. More about Josset here.