McHuston Booksellers

Rare, Collectible, & Otherwise

Tag: Broken Arrow (Page 116 of 141)

The Enduring Taco.

October 10, 2012 /

Unfortunately, the sleek new Taco Bueno website offers no history of the company, except for such monumental achievements as “Muchaco is invented” and “Iconic Bueno Bubble makes its debut.”

The man behind the company – Señor Bueno, I think his name was – brought the recipes and drive-thru windows to Tulsa sometime in the early 1970s. The location near the Farm shopping center at 51st and Sheridan was one of the pioneer spots. It was within walking distance when the kids were young. It had a game room.

Games may be confined to iPads and cellphones these days, and the architecture has changed over the years as well. As reported in the Tulsa World, and already likely known to many Owasso Bueno aficionados, a second location has been opened in that city. Probably a great relief to the staff of the only other Taco Bueno in Owasso, reducing the taco load. The building design has been updated to feature a stone entryway.

Bueno has had a long-term relationship with the Tulsa area, and while it is true that they’ve added and taken away some menu items over the years, the primary offerings have not changed much. Taco. Soft taco. Chilada Platter. (Why they are chiladas at Taco Bueno and enchiladas everywhere else, I don’t know.) There’s that fry-bread-like muchaco. Mexidips and chips.

And we’ve not grown bored of them after forty years…

Other chains have come and gone. There used to be Steak and Ale, which was a special occasion dining stop for a lot of people. A big salad bar lure for others. That group is gone, having Chapter 7nd into history back in 2008 after a 42-year run. Some of you may remember Shotgun Sam’s, a pizza place that dusted the pans with corn meal before spreading the dough and baking. That chain is no longer.

Part of it is the food and part is presentation, when it comes to diner loyalty. Those Steak and Ale filets were pretty tasty but the management never updated the stodgy old stores, which were reminiscent of a medieval alehouse. When they finally saw the edge of the precipice, remodeling just wasn’t enough to save them. Red Lobster has just announced a big menu shakeup, adding non-fishy items to attract the non-seafood lover in you. The change was spurred by a downturn in sales.

As for the Bueno-heads in line at Owasso – it is clear that the tacos are still a favorite with us here in Oklahoma… even after 40 years, Taco Bueno is still writing the book on Tex-Mex.

Good Book! Good Gosh!

October 4, 2012 /

Salvation is a lot more expensive than it used to be!

One of the online book sales consortiums releases its priciest sales once a month, and for September, the Good Book brought a heavenly price for the seller. The hand-tooled bible is old enough that Christopher Columbus could have taken it along on his voyage to the new world.

Printed in 1491, the so-called “Poor Man’s Bible” sold through American Book Exchange for $26,200. Obviously, it isn’t a poor man’s bible any longer, but at the time of its printing, this volume was among the first published in a much smaller and less ornate binding – more affordable for the common man.

Several Bibles made the top 10 of ABE’s most expensive books sold, but the top fiction honors went to a first edition copy of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” The 19th century volume brought $25,000 in a private sale.

Nowhere near that price, but an interesting book just the same is an 1883 German language bible we have in the shop currently with a binding that looks like it was carved from the trunk of an oak tree. The heavy volume is filled with beautiful engravings as seen in the accompanying image.

Some of the earliest Bibles printed in America were done in Western Pennsylvania, where German immigrants settled at the invitation of William Penn. Publishers in the region continued to print in the German language to accommodate the large settlements in Chester and Lancaster counties that still relied on their native tongue. Obviously, the use of German was prevalent enough to require the publishing of German language books well after the Civil War.

Somehow, one of the Good Books from that area found its way to Indian Territory, and eventually Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where it proudly sits anticipating its 130th birthday.

Rolling your eyes: is there a button for that?

September 17, 2012 /

My eleven-year-old did something this morning he’d never done before: he rolled down the car window. The morning fog had settled all over the glass and I couldn’t see the passenger-side mirror.

“Do I just move it this way?” he asked, pointing to the hand crank. After I nodded, he flew to the task and worked the glass down and back up, clearing off the collected condensation that was blocking my vision.

When I bought the car, I searched for one that had manual door locks and windows, having had multiple bad experiences with electric motors and switches. As a kid growing up, I’d missed most of the fancy Johnny-come-lately options installed in the more expensive cars. On the other hand, he’d never been in a car that DIDN’T have a button to push for just about everything. The first time he’d seen me crank down the driver’s window, he laughed and asked me what I was doing – that flurry of arm and elbow activity threw him for a loop.

The task must have been undertaken in some other manner in the really “old days,” or else I suppose I would have asked him to “crank” the window. As a society, I don’t think we do a lot of cranking anymore. I have no idea how it came to be called “rolling the window down” in our family. There isn’t a lot of rolling involved. These days, it’s mostly the rolling of eyes at the idea of manually moving a car window up or down.

Car windows aren’t the only thing, I suppose. Teachers still explain how to tell time on an analog clock, but I wonder – for how long? The skills needed to type on a manual typewriter are unknown to a significant percentage of Americans, who will never in their lives need to know what the carriage-return bell signifies or how to set the tab-stops. How many younger folks have ever been confronted by a telephone that had a rotary dial instead of buttons?

Some of the old skills still apply, at least to some degree. I’ve had cashiers count back change the old-fashioned way, beginning with the total due and adding the coinage and dollars until they reached the amount of the bill presented. The majority simply let the cash register display the change due, and hand the pile over while announcing the amount.

Progress renders one set of skills important and others obsolete.

Concerning books, the lessons about how to turn pages are so simple as to be understood. Downloading an eBook onto a Kindle or Nook – now that’s another thing.

And I’d never be so foolish as to challenge an eleven year old to a videogame competition.

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