A coin flip brought Gene Dunston to Dallas. His mother had scraped together enough money working in a country café in rural Alabama to get the family out and into a city with better prospects. She put it to a coin: heads was Dallas, tails was Miami. Heads came up, the family packed everything they had, and a 15-year-old boy arrived in North Texas in 1946 with no particular plan.
He washed dishes at the Topper hamburger stand after school and valeted cars downtown on weekends. The valet job is where he met the man he still calls the Jukebox Man — a cash-heavy operator who rented jukeboxes to bars and restaurants across the city and had money to lend. Gene was a good enough kid that the man loaned him enough to open his first restaurant, a place called the Silver Castle on Oak Lawn Avenue. That led to the Wheel-in Drive-In on Harry Hines Boulevard in 1955. Ten years after that, Gene installed an open-flame mesquite pit in the middle of the dining room, renamed the place Dunston’s Steakhouse, and the rest is the kind of Dallas history that doesn’t get written up enough.
Continue reading
