Billy Bob's Texas
Billy Bob's Texas
is located in the historic Stockyards district of Fort Worth, Texas.
It is advertised as the
"World's Largest Honky Tonk" with an
indoor area of over 100,000 square feet. Inside you will find 40
bar
stations from which you can order up
a beer in a long neck bottle, several Texas sized dance floors for two
steppin', live entertainment from top
country music stars, a general store, an indoor rodeo with live bull riding
on the weekends, a video arcade, a
pool hall, a shooting gallery, a shoe shine with gals dressed like Dallas
Cowboys
cheerleaders, and much more.
Even the telephones are different. A row of sit down, enclosed and
sound-proofed
telephone booths offer optional background
music. My favorite was "office sounds" which is the clattering
of typewriters and phones ringing ...
"Honey, I'm still at the office working on this deal. I'll be home
real soon."
In the early 1980's I was in Dallas
regularly on business. A local friend drove us over to Fort Worth
one night for
some barbecue and Billy Bob's.
The barbecue was great, wish I could remember the name of the place, but
Billy
Billy Bob's was unbelievable.
It's a bar as big as a city. For anyone from Texas or the Southwest,
I'm sure Billy Bob's
is well known. But for someone
from New York, who knew? I came to visit Billy Bob's often on my
trips to Dallas and
took delight in introducing it to other
Easterners. On one of these visits, they had a Casino Fun Night with
blackjack
and craps and perhaps some other table
games. I bought in and played for a while. For some reason,
a decided to
keep one of each color chip they used
that night, a red, white and blue. This is long before I began collecting
chips
or maybe this was my start.
The chips lay unseen for many years
until I recently starting collecting in earnest. The chips are H&C
and all have
the same center inset - white background
with a map of the state of Texas imposed on top of the Texas state
flag.
In very small letters "Billy
Bob's" is written in the panhandle area of the map and "Texas" is written
in much larger
letters across the entire map.
I have never seen these chips anyplace else or on any for sale or trade
list. A call to
Billy Bob's provided this additional
information: Billy Bob's closed for a short time in January, 1988
and reopened
in November under new management.
The chips went back to the original owners. They still hold Casino
Fun Nights
there for groups, but now they bring
in an outside company to run it and they use there own (generic?) chips.
If you
have any additional information about
these chips, please email: ckaplan@attglobal.net.
This article was originally published in the Casino Chip & Token News, Volume 13, #1, Jan, 2000.