Dairy Queen serves up comfort food, feeling for small towns
HENDERSON — The plan was to pay a visit to Mexia, mention how locals frequently have to explain how to pronounce the name — Muh-HAY-uh — and then share an old joke about Mexia’s Dairy Queen.
My plan went awry immediately. The Dairy Queen was closed. I mean CLOSED, shut down. These days, you have to drive over to Groesbeck or Waco for your Dilly Bar or your Triple Truffle Blizzard Treat.
Still, since there used to be a Dairy Queen in Mexia, I suppose the joke is still pertinent. As the story goes, a traveling salesman stopped off at Mexia’s DQ, and while he waited for his order, he asked the young woman behind the counter a question.
“How do you pronounce the name of this place?” he wanted to know.
She looked him in the eye and replied, slowly, as if talking to a child: “Day-ree Queen.”
I always imagine that the waitress answering the question is the late Anna Nicole Smith, who grew up in Mexia. I had heard that she worked at Mexia’s DQ, but that’s not true. Smith — then a gangly teenager named Vickie Lynn Hogan — worked in the mid-1980s at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken. Jim’s is still in business, and from what I hear, the chicken and rolls are really good.
I would have tried them, but I was on a DQ quest. I was looking, not for a medium chocolate malt, as is too often the case when I’m on the road, but for the key to Dairy Queen’s unique place in the culture of smalltown Texas. I headed to Henderson, the handsome Piney-Woods town that’s home to the oldest continuously operated DQ in the state.
Dairy Queens are so ubiquitous in small-town Texas, I assumed they were Texas-born and bred. Not so. Even though Texas is home to more DQs than any other state — 595 at the moment — the chain got its start with an ice cream store in Moorhead, Minn., owned by a man named Sheb Noble. When Noble’s friend John Fremont “Grandpa” McCullough and McCullough’s son Bradley persuaded him to start selling soft-serve ice cream in 1938, the trio realized they were on
to something after they sold more than 1,600 in a couple of hours. Two years later, they opened the first Dairy Queen in the Chicago suburb of Joliet.
Today, the Dairy Queen Corporation is owned by Berkshire Hathaway — Warren Buffett, in other words. The multi-billionaire investor is said to be a regular visitor to his hometown Omaha DQ.
A few years ago, Buffett gave me a wonderful anecdote for my biography of football Hall of Famer Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, his boyhood hero, so I contacted “my pal” to see what he had to say about Dairy Queen. His secretary said he didn’t have time to respond, because his plate was full — of business, I assume, not Blizzards.
Local lore thrives
Texas writer Larry McMurtry discovered Dairy Queens when he moved back to Archer City, the little northwest Texas town where he grew up. As he explains in his 1999 memoir, “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond,” it was the summer of 1980, and he was struck by a thought while sitting in a booth at the local DQ. Reading a book by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin and nursing a lime Dr Pepper — “a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road (Olney’s, 18 miles south)” — he came to realize that Benjamin’s observations about how we no longer share stories was relevant to Archer City and to Dairy Queens.
“What I remember clearly,” McMurtry writes, “is that before the Dairy Queens appeared the people of the small towns had no place to meet and talk; and so they didn’t meet or talk, which meant that much local lore or incident remained private and ceased to be exchanged, debated and stored, as local lore had been during the centuries that Benjamin describes.”
‘The wisdom table’
McMurtry, who used to enjoy rambling around Texas by car, no doubt knows that Dairy Queens aren’t the only places where small-town Texans get together to visit. In Fayetteville, guys of a certain age meet over coffee every morning at Orsak’s Café on the square, where, by agreement, they talk about anything and everything except politics. In Carthage, it’s the Main Street Café, where the head football coach and assorted locals gather at “the wisdom table.” In Marathon, now that the genial owner of Nancy’s Coffee Shop has passed on, it’s the covered garage at Ernesto Aguilar’s Alon gas station near the turnoff to Big Bend National Park.
Dairy Queens and other small-town gathering places “combined the functions of tavern, café and general store,” McMurtry writes.
‘I work next door’
I asked Dean Peters, DQ’s corporate spokesman, whether the company made conscious efforts to encourage DQ’s small-town social function. The only thing that came to mind, he said, is that DQ stores are locally owned; the managers and employees are part of the community. They make the locals feel comfortable.
So it is in Henderson, where Dairy Queen first opened a tiny walk-up store in 1950. Joe Rios, a former Rusk County deputy sheriff who’s lived in the area since 1976, has been store manager for 16 years. His sister, Norma Ramirez, has managed the DQ in nearby Tatum for 25.
Why Dairy Queen? I asked Bill Henry, a retiree who has worked for a nearby equipment rental place for the past 13 years and who gathers with a gang of DQ regulars at least weekly.
Henry laughed. “It’s good food. Joe’s a good friend. And I work next door,” he said.
At Dairy Queens and other small-town gathering places, something important is happening every day, without even the regulars realizing it. With their jokes and their jibes, their opinions outrageous and otherwise, their gossip and their bits of family news, they’re looking out for each other and for their community.
DQ to HQ
I thought about Tivoli, the tiny coastal town that Hurricane Harvey nearly blew off the map. The local Dairy Queen was the first business up and running after the storm, thanks to a generator its Corpus Christi owner brought in. Without power, locals brought food from their refrigerators that would otherwise spoil and cooked it at the DQ. The DQ became relief-worker HQ.
DQ regulars around the state don’t need a hurricane, of course. What they might tell you, though, is that a Dilly Bar may be more than just a guilty treat.