In 1932, a twenty-eight-year-old confectionery manager named Charles Elmer Doolin ordered a sandwich and a nickel bag of corn chips at a small San Antonio café. He liked the chips enough to track down the man who made them, a vendor named Gustavo Olguín who was getting ready to move back to Mexico and wanted to sell off the business. Doolin bought the recipe, a hand-cranked potato ricer, and nineteen retail accounts for one hundred dollars, borrowed from his mother, who reportedly pawned her wedding ring to help raise it.
That hundred dollars is where Fritos start, and it’s also where Dallas comes in, even though almost nobody associates the chip with this city anymore.
Doolin began making the chips in his mother Daisy’s San Antonio kitchen, with his father and brother Earl helping out, turning out about ten pounds a day and clearing roughly two dollars in profit after expenses. Production moved into the garage behind the family’s house on Roosevelt Avenue, then into the house next door once that filled up too. By 1933, a hammer press had pushed daily output up tenfold, and Doolin was ready to expand beyond San Antonio. That same year, he licensed a plant at 1405 N. Haskell Avenue in Dallas. The first attempt at running it failed within five months, so the Doolin family bought it outright and turned it into their second company-owned plant. A Tulsa location followed in 1934. Dallas, not San Antonio, became the company’s real center of gravity from there forward.
Doolin kept building. He developed his own hybrid corn variety and contracted Texas farmers to grow it exclusively for Frito production, treating the corn itself as a trade secret. He opened Tango Dairy Mart, an experimental fast food stand serving canned Mexican food, chili, tamales, and enchiladas, which is now considered one of the first Tex-Mex fast food concepts in the country and reportedly the first place in Dallas with a microwave…