Living the Dream
For 35 years, the Big Burger and Coca Cola Museum was that nebulous wonder of Monahans—and that’s just the way its founders, Elaine and Dan Wetzig, wanted it.
Dan Wetzig and his daughter Jenesse Oyerbides
Jenesse Wetzig Oyerbides says: On October 19th, Dan Wetzig lost his battle and went to be with the Lord. I am so proud to say that he was my Father. He touched so many lives with his Heart of Gold. His Coca-Cola Collection has been donated to the Million Barrel Museum in Monahans, TX, where it rightfully belongs, since most of the citizens of Monahans had donated items. It is so touching to know that his memory will live on though this collection. (November 4th, 2009 at 7:35am)
Small towns have their legends, and this one belongs to Monahans: At a local church, a youth group leader wanted to teach the kids what it was like to be homeless for a day. He sent them out into Monahans with no money and told them that if they wanted to eat, they’d have to beg for food. Some children probably stood locked still, contemplating their eight-year-old mortality to the rhythm of their stomachs’ cavernous growls. Inevitably others—considering the church setting—prayed.
But one group of kids walked into the Big Burger on Stockton Avenue and promptly met Dan Wetzig. The children said they were hungry; he sat them down and fed them. Granted, Dan knew they weren’t really homeless, because he knew them, just as he knew everyone in Monahans. But he fed them all the same, and the kids returned to church to tell the rest of the youth group just how wonderful being homeless truly was.
For 35 years, the Big Burger and Coca Cola Museum was that nebulous wonder of the local world—for its collection of Coke products, it was a landmark; but it was also where you went to get sodas after a Little League game. People would travel from Odessa to sample the catfish, while tourists from all over the country would climb over the red booths, videotaping and snapping photos of Coca Cola antiques. And everyone wanted to bring their grandkids there.
Walking into the white building, capped with a red roof, people were first hit by the shelves, dozens and dozens stuffed with every Coke product you’ve never imagined. But as soon as your eyes were freed from red tin and the signature snow-white polar bear, Dan Wetzig’s bottom-toothed smile was there to greet you. He and his wife, Elaine, opened the Big Burger together in 1964 because Dan loved to cook and Elaine loved Dan. And they both loved the people of Monahans.
“They genuinely cared about everybody,” said Brett Heflin, a family friend who worked for the Wetzigs in the early eighties. “They always made it a point, even if they were way back in the kitchen, to yell out ‘hello’ to you when you walked in, and they’d come see you in the dining room.”
But in March, Dan wasn’t moving with his usual steadiness. He and Elaine started bumping into each other in the kitchen where they both cooked for up to fourteen hours a day—Dan the king of catfish, Elaine the maiden of Mexican food. He’d ignored the pain in his neck and shoulders, but something curious, less typical of old age had happened: His right eye shut on its own whim, and stayed shut. Then his head just dropped. “The only way I could keep my head up was to hold it up with my hand. And I was still working like that, walking around holding my head up with my hand,” Dan said.
On March 23, just weeks after his seventieth birthday, Dan stopped breathing. At Medlin Hospital, he passed out and woke up in the critical care unit. During his five weeks of hospitalization, he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a rare form of muscular dystrophy. And the Big Burger closed for good.
Dan Wetzig was born in 1939 to a Fabens cotton farmer and a mother who, after bearing four sons and zero daughters, decided she was going to teach somebody how to cook. She educated the four boys on the ways of the stovetop, and they all took to it. Originally, Dan set out to become a veterinarian, but he’d been born hard of hearing, and had trouble making the grades at college. After dropping out, he studied computers at the Durham Business College in Austin. This was back when computers were bigger then the rooms they were put in. Dan found work as an inventory controller at the Coca Cola Bottling Company in Monahans in 1961.
“I was very proud to be able to work for this company, because of the Dunagan family,” Dan said. John Dunagan had founded the plant in 1927, and he and his boys, Conrad and Buddy, were good to Wetzig; Mr. Dunagan treated Dan like a son. “He gave me my own office, and daily he would come in and visit and talk about my family. He wanted to make sure that every family working for him was taken care of and was happy.” There were yearly picnics, baseball teams, bowling leagues, Christmas bonuses—“they saw that each family had a good Christmas.”
Six years after Dan started at Coca Cola, he acquired his own family: a widowed Elaine and her four young children. They were set up at a New Year’s Eve party, and either that night or the next day—the couple disagrees, and after 40 years, the argument’s pretty negligible—Dan met her children. They liked him immediately. Little Dedra even looked like Dan. “She had blue eyes and hardly any hair,” Elaine laughs. Dan was soft-spoken and thoughtful. He didn’t offer to take her shopping in Odessa and tell her to leave the kids at home, like another man had. They were married on Valentine’s Day, barely two months after they met.
So in 1974, Dan Wetzig had the job, the girl, and a fifth child, two-year-old Douglas. Now what he wanted was Bob’s Burger. The drive-through restaurant had just shut down, and Dan, well, his mother had really made him love cooking. He loved the people at Coca Cola, but the work wasn’t for him. Burgers, catfish, chicken, and flautas—now that was appealing. Dan and Elaine christened the restaurant the Big Burger and opened for business.
Jalapeño burgers. Frito cheeseburgers. Green chili cheese burgers. Catfish, tacos, guacamole salad. Smothered chicken burritos. French fries. “We had customers from Odessa and Fort Stockton who would come to eat our catfish,” Dan said, near nostalgia. He was on his feet fourteen hours a day. “I was so fortunate that for 35 years I was in good health. And my wife. Without her I couldn’t do anything, and without me, she couldn’t do anything.” Any time one of them got sick, they shut the Big Burger down. That happened for two days out of 35 years.
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