Remembering Sidekicks | by Linda Brendle
Published in the Rains County Leader on January 12, 2023:
For anyone who is not a football fan, you may not know that the College Football Playoff game was Monday, January 9. I don’t know who won, because I’m writing this on Sunday, but there is a lot of excitement about this Superbowl of college football. As if that weren’t enough, the professional football playoffs, the ones that lead to the actual Superbowl, begin Saturday, January 14.
While I was watching the Cowboy game on Sunday, I was searching for inspiration for my column. The game itself was anything but inspirational, so I was scanning through older writings looking for memories. I wrote a chapter about my parents’ devotion to the Cowboys in my first memoir, but before I located that, I came across a column I wrote in 2015 about Sidekicks.
David’s and my first experience with the restaurant was in 2009 when we were looking for property where we could move the mobile home where David lived before we married in 2000. After the wedding, he moved into my house in Carrollton and allowed his roommate to stay in the mobile home in Grand Prairie. In 2005 David’s job took us to Florida where we continued to received rent check from his friend from time to time. One day in late 2008, David got a call from a friend who lived in the subdivision in Grand Prairie telling him that his tenant had abandoned the mobile home and was in arrears on the utilities and lot rentals. With the house being in danger of being pulled of the lot, we did some quick phone calling and overnighting of checks to buy a little time.
We had planned a motor home trip toward the end of the year to meet our granddaughter who made her debut on January 2, 2009. We extended our trip, waved goodbye to one-week-old Zoe, and traveled to Texas to find a suitable homestead. We checked several areas and ended up staying for several weeks at the Thousand Trails Park on CR 1470 while we checked out East Texas. We cooked and ate in the motor home most of the time, but one place we did visit a few times was Chubby’s, a 50s-style diner. It was particularly memorable because it was decorated with photos of musicians, vinyl records, and other memorabilia from the 50s and 60s, the golden age of music for many of us early baby boomers.
Once we found THE lot, we rented out the mobile home until we left Florida permanently in 2011 and moved to Emory. By then Chubby’s had morphed into Sidekicks. We still cook and eat at home a majority of the time – except for lunch at the Senior Center – but Sidekicks was always a good place to take out-of-town visitors or have lunch with friends after church. Their breakfast burritos were a favorite of mine, and David favored the chicken fried steak and fried fish. Following is that column from 2015, a simple experience that I saved in words.
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