[AGL] [GH2] Fw: The Raw Deal

[Frances Morey]

Great article--I wish Fletcher and Smithum had survived to bask in its fond kudos. My favorite memory of TRD was one night I got into a discussion about Mexican truckers driving on highways this side of the border with some guy who started berating me for expressing opposition to it. 
I had driven in Mexico and the rules of the road there were startlingly different than here. When they pass on the highway at night, for example, the truck doing the passing turns off its lights--the road where I had observed this was a two lane!
None other than John Henry Faulk came to my defense. 
"She's entitled to her opinion," he told the guy in no uncertain terms that ended the guy's vehement tirade. So much the gentleman Faulk seemed somewhat out of place there.
The Whitliff Collection is a perfect place for the found photos. I wish the Maidens v. the Indians mural could have made it. I hope the sign declaring, "Beware of Single Women and Pickpockets" remains "lost". I do know where it is but I'm not telling. 
I took issue with the implication, being a newly single woman, and I resented the sexism of being categorized with pickpockets. I feel sure that drawing such offense was every intent of the proprietors.
Best,
Frances

--- On Mon, 10/27/08, Fontaine Maverick <fmaverick at austin.rr.com> wrote:

From: Fontaine Maverick <fmaverick at austin.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [AGL] [GH2] Fw: Raw Deal
To: ghetto2 at two.pairlist.net
Cc: "survivors' reminiscences about Austin Ghetto Daze in the 60s" <austin-ghetto-list at pairlist.net>
Date: Monday, October 27, 2008, 8:34 AM



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How great that the photos got into Dorothy's hands and into the Wittliff collections. There are actually quite a few of those old photos, framed and hanging on the wall of Waterloo ice house at sixth and lamar, including one of Billy Lee dozing at a table at the Raw Deal, and another of Lilly Boone and two other little girls sitting on the shoeshine bench. All of these, I believe, were taken by Stephen Clark, who has a gallery here in Austin, and who owned or owns Waterloo.  

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Connie Clark 
To: Ghetto List Latest ; Ghetto List 
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 7:31 AM
Subject: [GH2] Fw: Raw Deal




good early morning, I got a glimpse of my favorite moon phase in the dark morning sky on my way to work, the very slim crescent. austin360 article brings back some fond memories. full article and link below.
 
 
<snip>Over the next two decades, Dorothy Browne (once the wife of Billy Lee Brammer, and today married to the writer Jan Reid) frequently asked her close friend Fletcher Boone about the framed, black-and-white photographs of famous patrons that hung on the restaurant walls. She was worried about their survival, because she thought of these photos — pictures of Russell Lee, of John Henry Faulk, of Ann Richards and Bob Bullock — as invaluable snapshots of Austin social history. 
"I don't have them," Boone told her. "I think they're in storage somewhere." Sure enough: A few months after Boone's death in 2007, his daughter Lily found five boxes of framed photographs in a non-climate-controlled storage shed and brought them over to Browne's house. The grand plan is to pass them on to the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos. 
"A lot of people thought of the Raw Deal as a 'Third Place' — not your home, not your workplace, but a community place filled with the people you love to talk to," says Browne. "And you know what? A lot of people never found another 'Third Place' after the Raw Deal closed its doors." 




http://www.austin360.com/food_drink/content/food_drink/stories/2008/10/1026rawdeal.html 


  
FOOD/DRINK
Rediscovered photos evoke memories of the Raw Deal, a rough-hewed joint that attracted a sharp crowd
By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, October 25, 2008 
The Raw Deal was a steamy, scruffy joint at the eastern edge of downtown Austin — a bottled-beer and pork chop kind of place, fancy as a border cantina, with a jukebox that played nothing but vintage instrumental music. There were 10 tables, maybe. Six stools at the bar. Steaks cost a couple of bucks. The air conditioning worked sometimes. 
You're familiar with the gleaming new downtown shopping district, with its cafes and high fashion? The Raw Deal, circa 1976-1981, was the antithesis of that. There was no wall separating the grill and the dining room. Patrons ate in the kitchen, in the truest sense. 
The Raw Deal didn't greet you with open arms. Rather, it dared you to accept it on its own terms. Its motto: You've found the Raw Deal. The Raw Deal didn't come looking for you. Despite its location — just footsteps away from Sixth Street, at 605 Sabine St. — the place had an out-of-the-way feel to it. Among its neighbors: Dave Lofton's junk store and Austin Stove Repair. 
Yet in its moment, the Raw Deal was a quintessential Austin hangout, beloved by the left-leaning cadre of writers and politicians and students and thinkers that adopted it as their home. It was, first and foremost, a smart place — a hard-drinking watering hole, for sure, but also something of a kitchen-table salon. Writers Bud Shrake and Gary Cartwright and Billy Lee Brammer hung out there. The photographer Russell Lee went there. Civil rights attorney David Richards and his first wife, Ann Richards, were regulars. Politicos Bob Armstrong and Jim Hightower knew it well. So did journalist Kaye Northcott and writer/photographer Bill Wittliff. So did the freewheeling Jerry Jeff Walker, who became the object of the Raw Deal's "no guitars inside" house rule. (and Wayne Oaks as I recall - cc) 
"It was a hysterically funny place — and that's why I went," recalls Sandy Richards, who was known as Sandy Hauser before her marriage to David Richard 25 years ago. She was a University of Texas student, a dietetics intern at Brackenridge Hospital, when she discovered the Raw Deal in the late 1970s. "Whenever I wanted a good belly laugh, I trucked on down. It was a great place for a nightcap, and a great place to spend a summer afternoon. 
"There was always a little gang that clamored around that little shoeshine stand outside the front door, having serious discourse about politics, about things that mattered. Talk about a time of change! It was an exciting time (the late 1970s, during the Carter presidency), great music all around us, and that crowd was at the heart of the movement. The Raw Deal was one of several little Austin places — Mike and Charlie's, the Cedar Door, Scholz Garten — that attracted people with fertile minds." 
Eddie Wilson, the Austin dreamer who founded the Armadillo World Headquarters, opened the Raw Deal in late 1976. He liked the idea of operating something small and personal for a change, while taking with him the irreverence and political edge from the Armadillo. At the Raw Deal, Wilson fancied himself as a short-order cook who doubled as a producer of social-political theater. He hung a huge Adlai Stevenson banner in the front window, sold "Idi Amin for comptroller" T-shirts to mock then-State Comptroller Bob Bullock, and derided anyone (especially Texas Monthly) who designated the Raw Deal as a trendy place in print. He stocked Lone Star Draft, in cans, simply so he could list it by the initials "LSD" on the menu. 
In 1978, Wilson sold the Raw Deal to Fletcher Boone and Jim Smithum (aka Lopez), free spirits from Wichita Falls who'd been regulars at the joint from the beginning and had always wanted to run it as their own. "At a time when I was pretty defensive about leaving the Armadillo, the Raw Deal was my effort at having an offensive comedy club where I took no (bull) off anybody," says Wilson, who would open Threadgill's restaurant after leaving the Raw Deal. "But I got over that feeling pretty fast, and then Fletcher and Lopez took up my offer to take the stage. They were magnificent. They performed like champions." 
At the Raw Deal, Boone and Lopez assumed the roles of court jester and the curmudgeon. Boone had a feckless, artistic temperment; he'd been a promising sculptor as a young man. More beatnik than hippie, he was a debonair, devil-may-care guy who was comfortable wearing a beret in a town filled with cowboy hats. Lopez, in contrast, played the role of the grouch, often greeting customers with a wry, disconsolate, "Oh, it's you" as they entered into his domain. He was well-read. He loved writers. Lopez had befriended Brammer, Cartwright and Shrake in the 1960s, before he'd even moved to Ausitn, while working for an advertising agency in Dallas. 
Despite their joyful disregard for business acumen — what? food to go? numbered receipt tickets? — Boone and Lopez opened a second enterprise, Another Raw Deal, in the early 1980s. This second site (in the building we know today as Z Tejas) was a classy, well-mannered cousin compared with the raucous original, which the partners closed, reluctantly, in 1981. Even so, Another Raw Deal, with its more refined menu and spacious dining area, took over as a hangout of choice for the same crowd until it closed during the Austin real estate bust of the mid-1980s. 
Over the next two decades, Dorothy Browne (once the wife of Billy Lee Brammer, and today married to the writer Jan Reid) frequently asked her close friend Fletcher Boone about the framed, black-and-white photographs of famous patrons that hung on the restaurant walls. She was worried about their survival, because she thought of these photos — pictures of Russell Lee, of John Henry Faulk, of Ann Richards and Bob Bullock — as invaluable snapshots of Austin social history. 
"I don't have them," Boone told her. "I think they're in storage somewhere." Sure enough: A few months after Boone's death in 2007, his daughter Lily found five boxes of framed photographs in a non-climate-controlled storage shed and brought them over to Browne's house. The grand plan is to pass them on to the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos. 
"A lot of people thought of the Raw Deal as a 'Third Place' — not your home, not your workplace, but a community place filled with the people you love to talk to," says Browne. "And you know what? A lot of people never found another 'Third Place' after the Raw Deal closed its doors." 
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