Bobos Story

It all started with three college buddies, John Thorson, Mike Young & Tom Stewart, at Southwest Texas State University (Texas State University) in San Marcos, Texas. As my thoughts wander back to that time in our life, we were carefree, fun loving guys, interesting in the basics of college life; wine, women and song.  Studies were also an important factor but so was food. 

We spent our leisure time floating down the river in San Marcos, socializing at the local honkytonks within the surrounding area and on Cosmo Corner, an intersection right in the middle of campus that just so happened to be the best place to spot beautiful women walking to and from classes. We had a house in the country, about seven mile outside of town, just far out enough, so we could study hard in the quite surroundings and of course make as much noise as we liked without being disturbed!  

As I mentioned, food was always an important factor.  One of my special memories is that we always had a pot of pinto beans simmering on the stove which everyone helped themselves to.  We made our own flour tortillas with a tortilla hand press.  This must have been the beginning for the love for Mexican food.  Of course we practiced on making the perfect margarita during those days and trips to Mexico always inspired our imagination.

During those crazy, hazy days of college, we were always working on plans or promoting a project to make money and support our adventures.  On one of our first business adventures we pooled our money and bought a parking lot striping machine, filled it with yellow paint, placed in the back of Mike’s van or mine and drove around to local businesses offering to repaint the strips in their parking lot.  Our hands and arms were always covered with yellow paint because the machine clogged up a lot and it had to be cleaned out by reaching into the bottom of the tank.  We promoted an apartment cleanup business which cleaned out apartment complexes around campus at the end of each semester.  What a mess that was!

We eventually moved toward promoting bands to play in the area and had modest success at promoting bands like Marsha Ball, at the time called Frieda and the Firedogs. We found an old closed up honky-tonk  just down the road from our country house and across the road from Riley’s Tavern in Hunter, Texas.  The bash was a financial success and the music promotion business was underway.  Through all these and other misadventures we always carried that parking lot striping machine around.  Hey, you never knew when someone might need a quick striping job.

Just as we began to realize we could be promoters, Mike graduated and moved to Austin to get a real job.  John had a semester left at college and I had two years left due to an earlier interruption of the Viet Nam war draft.  John and I continued our studies and Mike hunted for work in Austin, the year was 1972.  The music scene in Austin was just beginning to take off, Sixth Steet was new and exciting, good restaurants were few and far between. (cont. p. 2)