Kelso: Manchaca native in a pickle, and that’s a good thing

By John Kelso   –   Austin American-Statesman

Kenneth Hoosier took his granddad’s advice. When he told his grandfather he wanted to own a bar just like he did, the old man set him straight.

“He said, ‘Boy, you don’t want to own one of those juke joints,’” Kenneth recalled.

So instead, Kenneth has gone into the pickle business. Kenneth has produced a line of pickles he calls “Bad As Gourmet Pickles.” He left off the second “s” in the name so no one would be offended.

“Kids like ’em, too,” he said.

Kenneth lives in Manchaca, a small community about a dozen miles south of downtown Austin. Manchaca, now covered up in middle-class cookie cutter neighborhoods, was once rural and inhabited by African-American farmers.

Kenneth traces his lineage to those folks. His grandfather, Samuel H. Dodson, had a farm where he grew vegetables and slaughtered hogs to turn them into bacon.

Kenneth remembers the farm from his childhood, hanging out with granddad.

“It was my first time seeing a pig hung from a tree,” he recalled. His grandfather butchered the hogs and cooked them over a barrel.

“The ribs from one of the hogs, he barbecued ‘em and they fell off the bone. And they were really good,” Kenneth said.

Samuel H. Dodson had a bar in Manchaca. Kenneth doesn’t remember the name, but his grandfather ran it out of the building on Manchaca Road now occupied by Giddy-Ups Saloon. Dodson put up the building in the 1950s. Kenneth says his grandfather owned another bar, the Aristocrat, on East 11th Street.

“He was a pretty good guy,” Kenneth said. “My mom told me he didn’t believe in keeping his money in banks. He was a very generous guy.”

Dodson was known for the barbecues he threw at the Aristocrat. His best friend, a guy known as Mailman, did the cooking. “And he would have people come into the bar and eat,” Kenneth said.

Dodson owned quite a chunk of property in Manchaca. Kenneth is living an ancient house owned by his grandfather that has seen better days. When you see the place, you might well wonder if somebody is living inside. The house sits at the end of a bumpy dirt path. Kenneth wants to sell the house and the property to raise “seed money” for his Bad As Pickles venture.

Meanwhile, he’s keeping his day job, working security at a private complex.

The pickle business is off to a slow start, but Kenneth is working on it. He dropped off some Bad As Gourmet Pickles at Rudy’s Barbecue to see if the place would carry them. Before that can happen, Kenneth has to put a bar code and the nutritional facts on the bottles. Although the motto is already on the label: “Just can’t eat one.”

I suspect they’re fiery, though. The liquid inside the pickle jar is a ferocious red.

Kenneth has tried a little bit of everything to make a living. He dabbles in music. He wrote a song called “Cowboy Christmas.” But his true love is football. His dream was to play in the National Football League. He was a running back at what was Johnston High School in East Austin and was apparently a good one.

“They compared me to Eric Metcalf, I think, at that time,” he said. He played football for a couple of junior colleges. He says the University of Houston was interested, but he was interested in the University of Texas, and too stubborn to change his mind.

“I did have a chance to play over in Europe, but this was how my head was back then: I didn’t want to play in Europe. I wanted to play in the NFL,” he said.

Kenneth says he went to a couple of NFL tryouts. “Of course, I didn’t get picked ’cause I’m sitting here now,” he said, as we chatted at a table inside Manchaca’s Macho Taco, talking pickles.

So if the pickles don’t take off, how about that beer joint? Is that out of the question?

“I haven’t given up. It’s on my list of things to get done,” Kenneth said. “And if my grandfather were alive today, I would have it.”