How Childhood Memories Shape Our Perception Of Family

Do remember things from when you were a kid that you swear were true, but family members dispute?

Maybe you distinctly recall a certain color car your family owned ("I swear we had a purple Falcon!"). Or perhaps you remember a strange place you visited ("I'll never forget when we got to eat part of the world's biggest pumpkin pie"). Maybe it was an offbeat houseguest ("I can't believe Kenny Rogers came and stayed with us that one weekend").

Whatever the case, some of those memories are treasured, if not entirely accurate.

I have fond recollections of visiting Luby's Cafeteria as a youngster in Texas.

Luby's was, well, food Utopia for a 10-year old.

You walk into the restaurant and they have food set out on little plates in a buffet style setup. But instead an overall buffet price that pays for everything you see, at Luby's you just pick a few of the things you want and put them on a tray (like a school cafeteria), then pay for just the items that you chose.

To me, it was like school lunch, only with much, much better food.

For example, a tray may hold a dinner roll, gelatin, an entrée like meatloaf, mashed potatoes and a piece of pie. The roll was a quarter, the jello 69 cents, the entrée two bucks, the taters 50 cents and the dessert $1.50. The whole tray's worth of food was less than five bucks and I got to choose what it I wanted (a huge plus for a 10-year old).

Obviously prices have changed a lot in the last 40 years or so, plus my memories of the incredible tasty food may not be super accurate (it was a loooooooooong time ago).

But Luby's, which has 42 locations in the state of Texas, has been doing something right for a long time now.

So what are the odds of a Luby's setting up shop in Washington County?

Well Luby's, whose credo is "Tastes like Texas, feels like home," doesn't have a single location outside the Lone Star State.

Yet.

Bob Luby opened his first restaurant in 1947 in San Antonio. His goal was to serve good, fresh food in a setting people would want to come back to time and time again.

We could definitely use some of that here.