Even though I grew up in and around West Texas, I don't recall having ever heard the phrase "a one-Dairy Queen town". And some digging in Google reveals a very few occurrences of the phrase. (While the saying is not exclusive to Texas, it is often used by Texans in reference to small Texas towns.)
This phrase intrigues me because the idea behind it is that one can use the number of Dairy Queen restaurants as a gauge of population size. And it is distinct from the idea of a single stoplight. A town can have a number of stoplights but still have only one Dairy Queen. For instance, I grew up in a four-Dairy Queen town. One of my grandmothers still lives in a one-Dairy Queen town.
Lots of folks who have driven up Highway 84 to Lubbock would stop in Post, a true one-DQ town, to have a quick bite at the Dairy Queen before heading up the Caprock Escarpment. That Dairy Queen was the last place I saw my good friend John before his death in 1999. That DQ has since closed, making those stops in Post just a memory for many of us.
So, let's see what instances we can find of this phrase:
There is also a Texas Monthly article about Dairy Queen with an interesting quote:
The chain is a small-town fixture, like a porch swing or a courthouse square; folklore has it that any town with two water towers will boast a Dairy Queen.and this quote:
In a celebrated Texas Observer article about questionable drug busts in Tulia, writer Nate Blakeslee referred to the Panhandle hamlet as "so small it doesn't even have a Dairy Queen." And country singer Lee Ann Womack once called Jacksonville, whose population was about 12,000 when she grew up there in the eighties, "a two-Dairy Queen town."Sure enough, one can easily find profiles of Lee Ann Womack with that phrase:
Finally, here the numbers of Dairy Queen restaurants in some of the Texas towns I grew up around:
Copyright 2003-2004 by Karl Reinsch, karl at rockin-r.net
Last modified: 06 January 2004