![]() ![]() “(Some people) weren’t taught like you and I were taught and thought they could do anything they wanted to,” Helen says, pointing to a thick wooden table shoved into a corner of the dance hall, its top caved in by a former customer who took his fist to it one night. Over the years they turned the Backbone into a quintessential Texas bar and dance hall. They instituted open mic nights at the tavern and worked hard to weed out rowdy customers and build a family-friendly environment. They had to invite the fire marshal, Rick says, because they had stuffed 185 people into a building approved to hold only 100.Įarly on, the Fergusons lived in a small apartment on the property. Helen boiled potatoes for the potato salad during a jam session, and Rick smoked 11 briskets, 100 pounds of sausage and “a whole herd of chickens” in the shed out back. Rick and Helen met in the 1990s and got hitched at an Old West-style wedding at the tavern, complete with a horse-drawn carriage, period actors and a barbecue they catered themselves. I remember him saying, ‘Son, we’re going down the Devil’s Backbone.’ I don’t know if he was drunk, but I know it was a fun ride.” ![]() “I distinctly remember having a Nehi chocolate soda water,” Rick says. His father pulled their big black Ford into the dusty parking lot of the Backbone for a break. He rode in his daddy’s lap when he was about 6 as the family drove to Marble Falls after a relative’s college graduation in San Marcos. They wound up at the tavern, where her brother played guitar with Evelyn’s husband, who played fiddle. She and her sister had driven up from San Antonio to meet their brother, the foreman of a nearby ranch. Helen remembers the first time she ever walked in. RELATED: Fifty years later the Broken Spoke still stands ![]() “It’s kind of like a redneck Cheers,” Rick Ferguson, 70, says of the tavern on a sultry August afternoon. Several others leased the tavern from Kubena’s descendants before Helen Ferguson, who had met Evelyn in the 1980s, landed it in 1990. ![]() Evelyn Kubena bought the property in the 1940s, enclosed the dance hall and ran the business until 1974. Perched at a natural resting point on FM 32 above a 2-mile hill, just on the Comal County side of the Comal-Hays county border, the bar opened in 1937. RELATED: Billy Bob’s gets a new dance floor Musician Todd Snider immortalized the bar in a song, and the low-slung stone structure has appeared in several low-budget films. Locals and tourists have long flocked to the Backbone, as regulars call it, for cheap beer, acoustic jams and shuffleboard tournaments - and to see the bank vault’s worth of dollar bills tacked to the ceiling and the stone some say is shaped like the devil’s head, which is lodged above the fireplace mantel. 20, after the family who owns the building sold it to a trio of buyers who say they plan to pump new energy into the tavern’s old bones. Helen and Rick Ferguson, who leased the building for nearly three decades, handed over the reins on Aug. For weeks, customers have dropped by the Devil’s Backbone Tavern near Fischer, toasting the longtime barkeeps and fretting a little about what’s to become of the joint, which has served up good times and cold brew for more than 80 years. ![]()
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