Stephen Austin sits in the kitchen at his home. Photography by Emil Lippe.
“It was back last October, I believe it was. We was going to hold a tent service off at this college town, and we got there about dinner time on Saturday. Different ones of us thought that we ought to get us a mouthful to eat before we set up the tent.”
So go the opening lines of Andy Griffith’s monologue “What it Was, Was Football.”
Some might have heard the actor deliver it on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1954, or maybe they bought the record in 1953. Some might have never heard it at all. But others might have heard it from Woodrow Wilson alumnus Steve Austin.
Back in his high school days, Austin was a record pantomime, which is the old-school version of lip syncing. He competed in talent shows, including one at the State Fair of Texas, where he won second place for his performance on the Pepsi Stage. “What it Was, Was Football” was one of the pieces Austin used to cover, along with “It’s in the Book” by Johnny Standley and “I Went to Your Wedding” by Spike Jones & His City Slickers.
“I think I wanted to be an entertainer, but I didn’t really know what that meant,” Austin says. “As a young kid, I wanted to be a trapeze artist. I always thought that was interesting, to be able to get up there and fly around. My grandfather was an entertainer, and I think that’s where I got the bug.”
Before Austin was in the chorus, drama club, ice skating club and JROTC at Woodrow, he went to junior high at Alex W. Spence. He was bused to the school, not because of integration, he says, but because campuses were too crowded.
After he graduated from Woodrow in 1957, he joined his best friend in New York City. But by the time Austin arrived, his friend was living with a girl, leaving Austin to sleep on the floor. That only lasted a few weeks because he took a job with Summer Stock, a summer theater circuit prevalent in the 1960s, and moved upstate. And when he came back to the city at the end of the season, he found an apartment and a roommate.
“I lived in New York in the wild ’60s, very young and naïve. And this kid from Texas, experiencing life,” he says.
After 10 years there, he returned to Texas, bought a house in Old Lake Highlands and started working for his father as a dental technician. When his father retired, Austin took over the lab, managing it until his own retirement.
But he still wanted to do something. He got a job at Dallas Summer Musicals, selling tickets in the box office and planning events for almost 20 years.
“That was like my element, I guess,” Austin says.
In the ’90s, he started making YouTube videos. For one of his first, he put on a wig and some funny glasses. He thought he looked scary.
He’s pretty tech-savvy and taught himself or Googled how to use a swath of apps, like Vine — until it “went kaput” — and most recently, TikTok.
“I didn’t really know what I was going to do because it’s a young person’s media,” Austin says. “And people on there, they danced and sang and did lip sync and stuff like that and I was kind of out of my element.”
Creating the videos — around four daily across TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Facebook and Instagram Reels — has provided Austin an escape and a way to express himself creatively. For a while he wanted to be an actor, but he was afraid he wasn’t good enough to make it. This way, he can entertain while retaining a certain level of anonymity, because he doesn’t see his audience.
Videos like “Cooking with Old Man Steve,” where Austin records himself making a bowl of cereal or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, receive a lot of attention. This was especially true while stay-at-home orders were in place. Years ago, one video of Austin eating a peanut butter sandwich went viral on Vine and got over 9 million views.
Now with 1.7 million TikTok followers, Old Man Steve has been featured in Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal and was a guest on CNN, Rachael Ray Show, The Kelly Clarkson Show and even an Australian morning TV show. On Rachael Ray’s show, Austin was asked to make a dish, so he took saltine crackers and spread cream cheese and peach preserves on top.
“When your gal pals come over and you all have a glass of wine, you can bring these out and you can sit around and munch on them,” he told her. “Well, she thought that was the funniest thing she ever saw.”
From the very beginning, he wore colorful hats in his videos because he thought it made him look better. He collected a few, and then people began sending hats to him. Now, he has more than 100 in different shapes and sizes.
Some other things he gets in the mail are peach preserves and once, a note from a girl saying she wanted him to be her grandpa. Austin has received some financial rewards for his success. In one TikTok video, he talked about his back pain and said he needed a new mattress. Weeks later, he received an email from a company offering to send him a new mattress if he did an unboxing video. He also did an advertisement for Thomas’ Original English Muffins.
He invested in lighting equipment to improve his videos, which he records at his apartment in Richland Hills, but he does all the work himself. He needs an entourage, he says: a driver, someone to do his makeup, a bodyguard, the works.
That’s not to say Austin hasn’t tried including others. He invited his cat, Buttons, to join the videos, to no avail.
“I told him if he would be more clever, we could do videos together, but he doesn’t like the camera,” he says. “It’s hard for me to get him on camera. I said, ‘We can make lots of money.’”
Austin’s content is “wholesome,” according to parents whose kids have introduced them to his work, and he never discusses politics or religion. He did one series on YouTube called “Old People Hotline,” where he took phone calls from seniors and gave them advice. He says he thinks he did “pretty good” on those.
“I still can’t believe all of it has happened and why did it wait to happen when I was over 80 years old,” he says. “I’m 83. Why couldn’t it have happened when I was younger so I could really maybe done so much more?”
