Memo's has been a Del Rio restaurant since 1936, opened by Guillermo Calderon, whom everyone called Memo. By the family's account it moved in 1945 onto land on the bank of San Felipe Creek near Brown Plaza, where it still is, and three generations of the family have run it. What turned it from a good border restaurant into something more particular was Memo's son Moises Calderon, known all his life as Blondie. He 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.
Blondie Calderon also spent almost thirty four years in Ray Price's band, the Cherokee Cowboys. He joined in 1967 on vibraphone, moved to piano, and led the band from the early 1970s, and he kept the restaurant through all of it. By the family's account he had a heart attack on the way to a show and died in surgery at Lubbock, in October 2000, at sixty. The walls still carry the photographs from that period, and the Calderon family still runs the place.
Getting there
29.3629, -100.8904
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