An Elegy for Ten Late Great Texas Brands

In Christine, Stephen King’s 1983 novel about a demonically possessed car, he drops a surprisingly poignant statement about the human experience. “If being a kid is about learning how to live,” he writes, “then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.” I have no idea what the quote has to do with the car, because I found the sentence by googling “famous death quotes,” but I do think King’s on to something. The longer you live, the more accustomed you become to the act of saying goodbye to friends, pets, relatives, and, for the sake of this article, brands. 

Go ahead and press play on that one Sarah McLachlan song because we’re ’bout to get to mourning. We couldn’t celebrate Texas’s iconic pickup truck models, restaurant chains, and sundry other businesses without acknowledging those that are no longer with us. Here are just some of the Texas brands to which we wish we could still be fiercely loyal. Oh, Blockbuster, we hardly knew ye. 

Read the complete article from Texas Monthly here.