Danny Roy Young (My unoffical Audtin chaperon)
busgal
Thursday, August 21, 2008
12:20 AM
Someone called Danny Young “the Mayor of South Austin” and it stuck
like an arrow because Young’s warm, gregarious personality and passion
for Texas music lit up the whole 78704 Zip Code. The big-hearted
neighborhood activist was the friendliest guy you could ever meet… and
he met everyone who ever walked into his Texicalli Grille.
Danny Roy Young, who also played rub board in Cornell Hurd’s band for
years, died of a heart attack Wednesday. He was 67. The stream of
shocked phone calls and sad emails from friends started circulating at
about 9 p.m.
“What a guy!” Susan Antone wrote in an email. “He was a class act
always and a great friend. He’ll be sorely missed.”
A native of Kingsville, where his parents ran a root beer stand turned
pizza parlor, Young and his wife Lu moved to Austin in 1975 and opened
the first location of Texicalli Grille (the signature Texicalli
sandwich was named after Gene Autry’s “Mexicalli Rose”) on South Lamar
Boulevard. He became the unofficial mayor of South Austin in the
mid-1980s, when the city planned to widen South Lamar and put in a
continuous median, to make it more of a thoroughfare. Fearing an
expansion would change the soul of the neighborhood, Young organized
other affected business owners, who gathered petitions, took their
concerns to City Hall, and eventually got the expansion project
dropped.
“It used to be, ‘All them Bubbas live over there with toilets in their
front yards.’ And there’s still some of that,” Young said of South
Austin in a 2002 American-Statesman profile. “But it’s the most
beautiful, supportive community. It doesn’t matter if you have long or
short hair, Skoal in your back pocket or a joint in your shirt pocket;
here people really care about people.”
Nobody spread the love like Danny Young, who tooled around town in Big
Lu-Lu, a 1954 Chevy station wagon, waving at friends and playing a mix
of music ranging from conjunto to blues to zydeco to western swing.
Young retired in 2006 at age 65 and sold the Texicalli, which brought
funky charm to an old Taco Bell on East Oltorf Street in 1989. The
restaurant, known for its Texan twist on the Philly cheesesteak,
closed in July 2007 because of rising rents.
A storyteller, rabble rouser and minor league baseball fanatic, Young
loved to hold court at a big, round table at the poster-covered
Texicalli, where musicians, artists and neighborhood eccentrics used
to gather to complain about government and “progress.”
“In South Austin, we do things the way we want, and we hope you like
it,” Young told former Statesman columnist Don McLeese in 1996. “But
if you don’t, we’ll do it anyway.”
On Wednesday, a mighty whiff of the Old Austin spirit disappeared.
There will never be another Danny Young; you can be sure of that. On
stage he kept the rhythm on a metal washboard he played wearing
leather gloves with Mercury dimes glued to the fingertips. But it was
the pulse of Danny Young’s personality, his love of life and music and
conversation, that helped give the ‘04 (78704) its beat.
busgal
1997. I've spent
many hours at the Texacalli or on road trtps meeting a lot of contacts
in the Texas mysic scene.