Memo's Restaurant

Memo's has been a Del Rio restaurant since 1936, opened by Guillermo Calderon, whom everyone called Memo, and moved in the 1940s onto land on the bank of San Felipe Creek near Brown Plaza, where it still is. Three generations of the family have run it, and dishes on the menu carry their names. What turned it from a good border restaurant into something more particular was one of those generations. Memo's son Moises Calderon, known all his life as Blondie, was asked to come home and take on the business in 1959, and agreed on the condition that he could put in a bandstand and a dance floor. He then started standing weekly jam sessions, which is how live music became part of what the restaurant does rather than something it occasionally hosts. He was also, from 1967 until his death, the bandleader and arranger for Ray Price. That is close to thirty four years running the Cherokee Cowboys, first on vibraphone and then on piano from the early 1970s, which makes him one of the longest serving musical directors in country music and almost unknown outside it. He kept the restaurant through all of it. Blondie died in October 2000, at sixty, on his way to a show. The walls still carry the photographs from that period, the Thursday sessions still happen, and his daughter and his sister run the place.