Frosty mugs, bow-ties and a family of burgers

Editor’s note: 2025 begins my 30th year of writing a weekly column for The Transcript. Longtime readers often ask what column drew the most reader responses. The following, published in 1996, has been a longtime favorite of readers.

With no camera shutter clicking, the A&W Root Beer stand on Robinson Street was taken down earlier this month. Another piece of my youth disassembled with a front-end loader. Another part of Americana pushed over, loaded into a dump truck and hauled to fill a nameless farmer’s pasture. My sleep was interrupted one night this week thinking that pieces of the landmark orange and white concrete block, the steel posts and the metal roof will be forever stranded in a ravine somewhere in western Oklahoma.

Demolition was inevitable. The widening of Robinson Street and the reconstruction of Flood Avenue, made the site much more valuable. The business had been closed for many months. Some of us held out hope it would miraculously reopen.

The reality of development makes sense but it sure doesn’t lessen the personal loss for those of us who have always called Norman home.

A&W was home of the tasty burger family — Papa, Mama, Teen and Baby. Floats came in frosty mugs. Take-home containers came full of the home brew mysteriously mixed with a boat’s oar in the drive-in’s small back room and pumped through a refrigerated line to the frosty room tap. Paper take-home containers doubled as megaphones when emptied.

Smiling car-hops were always dressed in wheat jeans, starched white shirts, clip-on bow ties and polished penny loafers. Mr. Jones ran a tight ship. He expected the best out of his youthful crews. My job interview outside the orange screen door was brief. “Son, you need to cut your hair,” he said. “No one will tip someone with that long of hair.” No thanks, I said.

There were free baby root beers for kids normally used as a reward for good grades in school, a yard well-mowed or a birthday surprise. It was a great way for kids to end a long summer day of swimming at the North Base pool. Over a frosty mug, you could tell your parents about what happened at the pool — Pinky Higginbotham’s high dive mishap, who else just got a driver’s license, or the girl down the street in her new, floral, two-piece swimsuit.

How many Norman kitchen cabinets hold a souvenir mug with that A&W logo? Some were purchased. Most were pilfered. My brother, and others who sacrificed their hair to work there, had to pay for the ones stolen from their aluminum trays.

Perhaps the drive-in’s remains will be placed next to pieces of other Robinson Street landmarks. Bury A&W with parts of Red’s Tavern, where boys could peek through an open back door and watch grown men play pool, drink Jax beer and listen to Conway Twitty’s twang.

Put it near the rubble from J.D. Vaught’s Texaco where the men wearing the star would never dream of making the customer pump their own gasoline. Or place the flecks of orange and white with what’s left of Court’s Grill where an after-church breakfast of waffles and sausage was a huge event.

Or bury it with the Norman Park Lodge where tourists stayed on their way to the OU football game or the rock walls of Hardy Field where Jim Baker coached Central’s football team and dragged hoses all summer getting ready for fall practices.

Progress and change are inevitable. But sometimes, it’s worthwhile to pause and recall those landmarks that meant so much to so many.