A Farewell to Dairy Queens
On a recent Thursday afternoon, the front lawns of Lockney, a South Plains farming town of fewer than two thousand, were still dusted with the windblown residue of the cotton harvest. Main Street was largely deserted, and most of the storefronts were empty. Though locals long ago became hardened to news of economic woes, the latest casualty was one that few could fathom: the local Dairy Queen, the iconic fast-food mainstay of small-town Texas, closed in late October. “They came in during the night and took everything,” said Buster Poling, Lockney’s city manager.
Now the store is a hollow shell sitting in the shadow of the town’s rusted water tower. Its red roof is marked with a teardrop-shaped scar where the DQ logo once perched. Inside, the menu boards have been stripped clean. On a side window, “Go Horns” is still written in white shoe polish, a tribute to the local high school football team, whose fans would gather at Dairy Queen after games.
The old saying that every Texas town has a Dairy Queen is no longer true for many communities, especially the agricultural hamlets of the Panhandle, which have been disproportionately affected by a spate of closures. On October 30, Vasari LLC, which operated about 70 Dairy Queens across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, filed for bankruptcy and announced it was closing 29 stores, 10 of them in the Panhandle.
In Haskell, about 150 miles southeast of Lockney, city manager Janet Moeller was so concerned when she heard about the closure in her town that she called her counterpart in Graham to see if the owners of its Dairy Queen would buy the Haskell site and reopen it. So far, nothing has come of the request. “It’s devastating for Haskell,” she said.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/farewell-to-dairy-queen/
= new reply since forum marked as read
