THE STORY CONTINUES

This is not a new story, but an old one that has been under construction for my whole life, after my birth in 1953 in Fort Worth, Texas. The food part of the story probably began when I ate sourdough bread in San Francisco on a trip there with my parents around 1964.

The journey began in earnest when I traveled around the eastern United States in 1976 after graduating from Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas with a degree in business management. I remodeled a 1971 VW SuperBeetle with a bed on the passenger side and toured for six months. I read WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau 14 times on a hillside while backpacking in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I later read his journals in the Library of Congress that fall. You could say I am a fan of simplicity.

That trip was so successful, I took a beautiful young lady I met in Lubbock (she pulled me into her bedroom the first time I went to her house and rocked my world!) after I returned, on a month long trip the following summer of 1977. We spent a couple of weeks hiking in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, visiting one of her aunts in Atlanta, Georgia, and recovering from a bad case of tonsillitis at her other aunt's house.

In the fall of 1977 I found myself a Tom's Toasted Peanut route truck driver. I also baked whole wheat bread in a small rent house I shared with my girlfriend in Lubbock, Texas, and delivered it to a collection of 45 friends and regular customers each Monday night. I wanted to feed the world better food, so I started looking for a place to open up a natural food bakery. The first location I called thought I would cause too many parking issues at lunch, and the second call I made eventually led me to a partnership with an Italian restaurant owner, Mike Cea, June 6, 1978. My girlfriend designed the logo around an Italian plate, and I was a restaurateur. She later moved to New York to pursue her dreams as a design artist (after I cheated on her--my one and only indiscretion in a serious relationship). She runs her own respected design firm today.

I tried making the whole wheat bread at Orlando's, but the market was not yet ready for natural foods, especially inside an Italian restaurant, and I ran out of world-changing steam. Before I quit as a baker though, I met my wife Karen when she came into Orlando's to get a menu for her employer, Bob Skibell, the owner of Gardski's Loft. What kept her at the bar taking to me as a luscious loaf of freshly baked banana nut bread. To give you an idea of the quality of the bread it was made with Arrowhead Mills expeller-pressed corn oil, raw local honey, stone ground whole wheat flour, eggs, real bananas, pure vanilla, and raw walnuts. It was dense, moist, and evidently good enough to secure me a wife.

I did open and run a health food store called The Alternative Food Company from 1981 to 1984, funded with $7,000 from my new wife Karen's car accident settlement, which she loaned me after I signed the note payable to her. I sold the health food store in 1984 to help fund the construction of a second Orlando's location. The AFC still stands and is now operated by its fourth owner. I still get a founder's discount there!

In 1997 we opened the Caprock Cafe, a fun little neighborhood burger bar.

Now, as our board discusses what to do next, I am beginning to want to do something new, something healthy, something that will help people find a better way in life. I want to feed people something that is good for them even if they ate it every day.

The Simple Cafe is such a place. The world's first open-source restaurant with all its recipes available to anyone on the cafe's website. You read it here first. The first example of my Internet Copyright Theory.