Jesse Roach had already lived about three careers before he ever sold a steak. He grew up in Mount Pleasant, studied pharmacy in Little Rock and ran a drugstore in Austin. Then he passed the bar, practiced law and went to the Texas House for two terms representing Hunt County. When he landed in Fort Worth in the 1940s, he was selling insurance to truckers.
In 1947 he and his wife, Mozelle, opened a restaurant in the same North Main Street building as the insurance office. They named it Cattlemen’s. Their early newspaper ads pushed “refrigerated air,” Sunday “Dollar Dinners” and calf and lamb fries, which tells you a fair amount about what Fort Worth wanted after the war.
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