Speaker 1: I'm Daniel Vaughn, Barbecue editor at Texas Monthly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Candice Bellamy as the irrepressible at a White.
Speaker 1: This is Fire and Smoke, the Texas Monthly Barbecue Podcast,
brought to you by Yedi.
Speaker 2: This is episode two Panhandle Pioneering.
Speaker 1: These are the kind of stories I like to dig up.
People who maybe were considered insignificant when they were cooking barbecue,
but looking back, really made an impression on the people
around them, made an impression on the on the barbecue
styles that came after them. So let's go meet at
a White in Borger Texas. Before there was Borger Texas,
the dusty patch of land and the Panhandle wasn't much
more than a raucous encampment of oil prospectors. That's when
Eda Randall, a twenty nine year old divorcee with an
eight year old daughter in tow, traveled four hundred in
fifty miles from Mineola to make a new life for
herself there. Forty five years later, she'd tell a reporter
from the Amarillo Daily News.
Speaker 2: When I first came in nineteen twenty six, there weren't
any buildings, any wooden houses everywhere you looked. All you
could see were tents, hundreds of them.
Speaker 1: Given her bleak description of the place, she likely arrived
around the same time that Ace Borger did Ace was
a Missouri born land speculator. He was there to capitalize
on the nascent Panhandle oil boom. He acquired two hundred
and forty acres of land and began to sell plots
for his namesake town in newspaper ads. The Border Townsite
Company made big promises like oil riches, and smaller ones
like actual buildings and houses. By the end of the year,
the population of what had come to be known as
Tent City had swelled from a few hardy souls to
an estimated forty five thousand, all lured by dreams of
hitting it big. It's not clear what possessed Etta to
move to board her. In a collected history of Hutchinson County,
her eldest daughter, Lila George, would say only times were
hard for black folks of Border, but not as hard
as they were at Miniola. Maybe it was poverty or
her failed marriage that motivated the move. More likely, it
was an escape. Minniola was a place where the second
q Klux Klan was on the rise. Racism was so
deeply entrenched that her Congressman, Morgan G. Sanders, campaigned against
an anti lynching law in nineteen twenty two. Sanders was
quoted in the Miniola Monitor saying that the law would
quote derive from the Republican Party thousands of white men
and more women who do not believe in social equality,
who know that the white race is the superior race,
and who knows that the white race will, now as
it has always done, dominate and control wherever it goes.
Perhaps the limitless possibility of starting from scratch appealed to Eda,
the idea that she could leave all that behind and
find her footing in a town that was doing the same,
to start at a ran a laundry service as she
had in Mineola. Later, she found a job at a
hotel and met her second husband, S. E. White. He
was a carpenter at the Rex Theater. It was on
Main Street, which was bustling at the time, so much
so that it became locally known as the White Way.
Together they worked and raised her daughters, Lila and Levada,
socking away money in the dirt.
Speaker 2: Literally, my husband and I would take our daily earnings
put them in a big tin can and bury them
in the ground inside the tent.
Speaker 1: By nineteen thirty four, they had saved up enough to
open their own business, a barbecue joint on North McGee Street,
just off Main Street. They called it white Way Barbecue,
but everyone who remembers it now called it Etta's. Indeed
at Kisements for Eda White's barbecue stand started to appear
in the Borger Daily Herald in nineteen thirty eight. She
and See ran the place with the help of Levada
and Lila, but there doesn't seem to be any doubt
who was in charge. Mother attended to the cooking and fire.
Lila recalled white Way Barbecue. Finally made it into Borger's
business directory in nineteen forty one. The listing had a
parenthesis CE next to the name to denote it a
quote colored business. That indignity disappeared with the nineteen forty
six version. Eda would add Southern style fried chicken to
her menu a few years later, but it was her
beef that proved most memorable.
Speaker 3: If you wounded barbecue, that's where you leave.
Speaker 1: That's Cleo Morrison. She moved with her family to Borger
in nineteen forty four, when she was twelve years old. Today,
she volunteers at the Hutchinson County Historical Museum. Morrison remembers
the old concrete pit outside behind a four table dining room.
She said, Edda kept it spotlessly clean.
Speaker 3: The place was my fancy and it was scrubbed. She
had almost scrubbed the design on the floor, it was
so clean. She served only beef and ribs, cold sauce, beans,
and she had their own special barbecue song.
Speaker 1: Morrison says the Pento beans were her favorite, noting.
Speaker 3: That I was there one day when she was fixing
to season them, and her beans were always good, but
she dipped out just a big spoon of crisco and
that's what she seasoned them with, and just salt, and
they were good.
Speaker 1: For most others. However, it was Edda's unusual style of
beef that everyone came for. Eda cooked hundreds of pounds
of shoulder cloud instead of the more traditional brisket, smoking
the whole thing for hours, but then she'd cut it
into bite sized cues covered in sauce and cook it
a little more. This made for tender, highly seasoned chunks
of meat reminiscent of our modern day burnt ends. It
was a far cry from the sliced and chopped brisket
common throughout the rest of the state. A style of
barbecue cookery uncommon then and now, But there's one restaurant
that continues to serve beef in the same way, Borger's
own Sutfin's Barbecue, which opened in nineteen fifty in nearby Phillips,
then moved to Borger in nineteen sixty four. It's doubtful
the similarity is a coincidence. Joey Sutfin, the son of
the founders, said he wasn't sure of the origin of
the family's recipes. He did acknowledge, however, that Eta was
in Borger quote for a long time. Her longevity was
indeed remarkable. She not only survived but thrived in a
lawless boomtown that burned to the ground twice in twelve
telve months, a place whose first sermon was delivered, according
to the Crosbyton Review quote from a beer keg in
a domino parlor. No doubt she watched Borger become a
haven for bootleggers, gamblers, and gangsters. The Fort Worth Star
Telegram labeled it the Sodom of the Panhandle. Eda was
there when the town's district attorney, John A. Holmes, was
murdered in nineteen twenty nine, he was appointed by the
governor to quote relentlessly prosecute criminals who infested oil fields.
During Borger's boom years, she witnessed the subsequent imposition of
martial law and the arrival of a contingent of Texas Rangers.
On day one, they arrested a dozen people on narcotics charges.
They found the town so in need of legitimate law
enforcement that they set up a temporary headquarters there. Ace
Borger himself was shot to death at the post office
in nineteen thirty four by the county treasurer. Needless to say,
Borger was a rough place, but Eda's strength and character
persevered a big, jolly person. In Morrison's words, Eda served
four generations of Panhandle residents. It was an eternity in
the fickle world of barbecue joints, and she clearly made
a good living doing so.
Speaker 2: Back in the early seventies, I went out to the
Cadillac dealer there and bored her. I was going to
buy a car. I was milling around and looking and
trying to get the salesman's attention. Well, he just ignored me.
So I left and went to Amarillo to buy my Cadillac.
When I went to the desk to pay for it,
I counted out one hundred dollars bills and body in cash.
The guy in Amarillo called over to the dealer in
Borger and said, you need to pay more attention to
your customers. This one paid cash.
Speaker 1: It took a heart attack to make Eda close her
restaurant in nineteen seventy two, one year after she had
told an Amarillo Daily News reporter that she had no
plans to retire. She died two year years later. Eda
White had survived divorce and the premature deaths of loved ones.
Levada had passed away at age forty, and Lilas's two
children both drowned soon after they'd arrived in Border. She
had turned her back on the unfortunate circumstances of the
town she grew up in and made it through the
early days of a lawless and dangerous oil town. The
distinct style of barbecue that Eda pioneered has survived as well,
and lives on to this day in the Texas Panhandle.
Texas barbecue is built from the ground up from the
wood to the smoke to the meat. You have to
have the right tools to create a masterpiece on butcher paper.
Yetti coolers have he covered, built to be indestructible, keep
ice for days, and keep a brisket hot for hours.
Yetti is built for Texas barbe and listening to Fire
and Smoke Texas Monthly Barbecue podcast. I'm Daniel Vaughan, and
I'll see you out there on the Barbecue Trail.