Golf tourney to fund veterans monument
The Travis County Sheriff’s Office is cosponsoring a charity golf tournament to fund a monument memorializing former Johnston High School students who died while serving in the military during the Vietnam War.
Of 75 Austin soldiers who died in the war, 23 percent of them were Tejanos who had attended Johnston High School, according to a news release.
The sheriff’s office, along with Tejanos in Action and the Johnston/Eastside Memorial High School Ex-Students Association, is hosting the tournament on Oct. 29 at 9 a.m. at Shadowglen Golf Club in Manor.
For more information on how to participate or to make a donation to the memorial, call 826-7569 or 658-2962.
Dan Balderas, 81, still remembers the smell of the first hamburger he ever ate in 1939 in West Texas.
“The aroma was of frying meat,” he said. “It smelled delicious.”
After a childhood spent picking cotton in Williamson County and many years of restaurant experience, he says he has now sold more than 1 million hamburgers at his own Round Rock business — Little Red Wagon Hamburgers.
Balderas said the figure came from Eric Goforth, who sells Balderas hamburger buns.
Goforth said he has sold Balderas 86,000 buns per year since 1993 — or 1.72 million hamburger buns.
Balderas charges $2.49 for a quarter pound hamburger and $5.69 for the hamburger special which includes double meat, double cheese, french fries and a drink.
“I keep lunch under $7,” he said. “I think people can afford that.”
Customers steadily flowed in and out of the restaurant at 1207 E. Palm Valley Blvd. on a recent August afternoon.
Lois McDaniel, a nurse at Trinity Care Center in Round Rock, said she has been coming to the place for 12 years.
“The hamburgers have the homemade taste like the hamburgers you grew up with,” said McDaniel.
“It’s a staple here in Round Rock,” said Jesse Mahan, a Round Rock contractor who was eating lunch with his
Dan Balderas, restaurateur wife Jenny.
Business wasn’t always so steady, Balderas said. He learned to cook at a San Antonio restaurant as a teenager and later cooked when he joined the Army, he said.
He first started selling tacos in 1977 in Round Rock for 55 cents apiece out of his truck after going broke selling cookware, he said. The first day he only sold one but the next day he sold out within a few hours, he said.
“I walked into businesses on Main Street and said ‘I’m Dan the taco man,’ ” he said.
One and a half years later he opened up six taco restaurants in Georgetown, Taylor and Round Rock, but he said he ran into trouble with low sales in Taylor and had to file for bankruptcy in the late 1970s.
In 1989 he opened up another restaurant in Round Rock — Tio Dan’s Puffy Tacos — which he still owns.
When he opened the Little Red Wagon in 1993, it was first called the Little Red Barn. He changed its name years later after seeing a pin his wife was wearing of a wagon, he said.
He still comes to the restaurant everyday to help his 16 employees learn the business so they can open their own places someday, he said.
“I tell them ‘I don’t want you to call me the boss — I’m your professor,’ ” he said.