Before there was a Sonny Bryan’s, there was a Thunderbird. A 1955 Ford with a continental kit on the back. There was also a house, and a collection of antique Colt firearms that had taken years to build. In 1957, William Jennings Bryan Jr. — everybody called him Sonny — sold all of it. He and his wife Joanne, who had won the Miss Dallas pageant a decade earlier, raised $6,500 and hired an old carpenter named Don Hoenstein to build a smokehouse at the corner of Inwood Road and Harry Hines Boulevard.
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