Sometime this month, sooner rather than later, I’ll get in the car and drive up Abrams Road to Northwest Highway. I’ll make a right and then a quick left, and that will put me in the Keller’s parking lot.
Keller’s is an institution. It is probably even more than that, as important a piece of Dallas history as we have that is still standing. It opened on Northwest Highway in 1965, serving hamburgers and beer. It’s still there, 43 years later, having outlasted the Dr Pepper plant, almost all of the important locally owned banks, and just about any other Dallas landmark you can think of. The Cowboys? Gone to Irving and then to Arlington. But Keller’s? Still there.
I will pull under the shed, roll down my window, and order a double cheeseburger with chili, fries and a Miller Lite. And only then I will know that spring has arrived.
At this point, many of you reading this are probably wondering why I am about to wax poetic about a drive-in that serves hamburgers and beer, and a dumpy drive-in at that. I can only assume that you do not know what Keller’s is and what it means to the community.
This is not an unwarranted assumption, because this area has changed so much over the past couple of decades. When I moved here almost 25 years ago, it was rare to find someone who didn’t know what Keller’s was, let alone talk to someone who had not eaten there. Today, however, I find both increasingly common. “Ooo, you eat there?” “I didn’t know that place was still open.” “I don’t go to places like that.” (Said with an upturned lip, of course.)
Well, it’s your loss, and not just because the hamburgers are pretty darned good. (The No. 5 special is worth a taste, too.) It’s about the role Keller’s plays in our collective memory, and that’s much bigger than some greeting card nostalgia or the occasional media reference to “Happy Days.”
In 1965, when Keller’s opened, NorthPark was brand new, and people still went downtown to shop. Sears had just opened a store in a cotton field in what would become Valley View (which took almost a decade), and people said the company was crazy. DFW didn’t exist, and Love Field didn’t offer jet service to Europe. Most of Dallas north of Northwest Highway was the country, and it wasn’t unusual to see riders on horseback in the area.
Dallas was not always the sleek, cosmopolitan, high-energy city it likes to think it is today. Back then, before the Tollway was built, Dallas had about 700,000 people, and was not all that much more important than St. Louis or Baltimore, and equally as blue collar. Keller’s, to paraphrase the songwriter Steve Goodman, remembers that for us.
Go to Keller’s if you want to see what Dallas used to be. Every time a pickup truck pulls up in front and goes off with a couple of cases of beer, it’s a reminder that this town is mostly dry, and that buying alcohol, until fairly recently, was never especially easy. There’s a reason, after all, that Keller’s sits on Northwest Highway, near the wet/dry divide. When the carhop comes out to take your order — and some of them have been there for all 43 years — it’s a reminder that eating dinner with the family or going on a date was not always a high society occasion that cost hundreds of dollars at a high-profile restaurant. Sometimes, it was enough to get a hamburger.
I’ll probably mull all this over after I get my double cheeseburger, and I’ll look at various the cars and the people driving them, and I’ll smile at the carhops. I might even have a second beer. But what I won’t do is take Keller’s for granted.
