Who remembers Junior?
He made Austin weirder. Then he disappeared. Who was he?
Update — 6/27/2024:
When I posted this in 2021, I was optimistic. Junior was the kind of guy people don’t forget, especially in 1985 Austin. The city was half the population and people like him shone brighter.
He was a central figure in the earliest days of Austin’s now-famous craft beer scene. Locals went to Junior’s the store for its imports and kegs, but also to see Junior the man. And they would just, like, hang out and drink beer and shoot the shit.
At the end of the article I asked people to get in touch if they knew him. I figured I’d hear from a handful of Austin old-timers.
That didn’t happen. But this week, a man named Thomas came through.
Subject: Junior’s Beer
I remember his brother and him, I was an original customer and purchased longnecks by the case.
I was reflecting on my years in Austin (1981–1989) and thinking about the people I knew and some of the things we did. Your article came up as a search result for Junior’s murder. I lived up the West hill at MoPac and rode my bicycle everywhere and enjoyed the selection of beers at Junior’s, that is where I tried Duvel for the first time.
I remember Mike’s disappearance and have always wondered about it. His brother was about the same height as I recall, maybe older and I remember the red hair. Mike was two years older than me. I have been to way too many funerals in the last few years.
Thanks for the article.
Blue Skies,
— Thomas
Thank you, Thomas. Blue skies to you too, brother.
Think of a place from your past. One you haven’t thought about in years. Summon your senses. What do you remember?
Usually when I remember things from college it seems like I’m replaying scenes from someone else’s life. I guess that’s just getting older. It must have been a decade since Junior’s Beer and Wine crossed my mind. But I guess the weird little red shack imprinted on some remote part of my brain because, let me tell you, one day in 2018 a friend sent me an article and I was right back there again. It’s vivid and familiar. I was young and naive and far too confident. I was a little less sad. Unlike most of my memories from that period, it’s a me I recognize.
I grin and roll my eyes at the faded beer babe posters. Feel the weight of the keg as we heave it into a pickup bed. Hear the thud when it lands. Wince at the rawness in my hands. Slip into a daydream about my crush, then silently curse her boyfriend’s name. Tonight we’ll flirt and dance and, years from now, we’ll get married and make two beautiful babies. But I don’t know that yet. The keg clangs on every concrete step up to the apartment; it’s a group effort. Finally we drop it into the grey plastic trashcan and cover it with ice and I plunge my aching hands right in. Some knucklehead sprays the foamy first sputters of Ziegen Bock directly into my mouth like a kid drinking from a hose (“Brewed and Available Only in Texas” — as if state pride helps you choke it down). I’m free as I’ll ever be.
…you can drive up to their dilapitated (sic) shack in west campus and get carside service from a true “slacker”. It’s like a living diarama (sic) in Austin’s natural history museum. All points for style.
— a 2007 Yelp review
Jack Ken wrote “West Campus beer store Junior’s has mysterious history” in 2013 for UT Austin’s college paper, The Daily Texan. The piece asks — but doesn’t answer — two questions about the original owner’s past: Who was “the man simply known as Junior?” And what happened to him?
Back in college, I never wondered for a second who Junior was, but now it was all I could think about. Nothing more has been written on the subject since the article ran in 2013. Hadn’t someone read it and contacted The Daily Texan or the store with a name? How could a string of people own a store called Junior’s, there in West Campus for decades, but not know who Junior really was?
What really shook me wasn’t the mystery, but the sad truth that a person’s identity could be so totally forgotten. Some part of me couldn’t handle that. Still can’t.
Eventually, I rediscovered Junior’s name, a few pictures, and some details about his life. I also strung together the official story of his disappearance and death. This is the first time I’ve published any of it.
The current owner, Tiffany Bollum, knew nothing more than she did in 2013, and the store’s homepage still mentions the mystery of its namesake. So I looked through property records, zoning board minutes, microfiche cassettes, web archives, everything I could think of. I found a few possible identities, ruled them out one by one, and hit dead ends with the names I had left. After weeks of this, some new, grim combination of keywords led me to a newspaper clipping from 1985 in a paywalled archive. That discovery let to a few more articles and an obituary.
They contained a familiar name from my list: Michael Joseph Gordon.
I heard Elon Green on the Longform podcast the other day. People love his new book because it focuses on the victims and their lives and the places they inhabited (I will read the hell out of it very soon).
Point is, it doesn’t engage in the typical true crime shit — elevating the perpetrator to antihero, eagerly covering every last gruesome detail, etc. No. Green tells host Max Linsky:
The murders and the murderer should not be the driver. It should simply be the catalyst for the other story. And the other story is the victims.
A lot of crime writing doesn’t bring closure. It doesn’t heal. It doesn’t illuminate. It exploits to entertain. We’re in the early stages of a movement away from ~that~ and into something…much better. More humane. More complicated, too, but also richer. And hey, that’s life.
Yeah. Life. I want so badly to write more about Junior’s life. Right now I have impressions and shadows, really. Enough to start with. If I was an actual reporter maybe I’d have a lot more. I reached out to several of them (also editors) to help tell Junior’s story but no luck so far. No luck contacting any family yet, either. No one owes me anything. Maybe someone who knew him will read this and reminisce with me. To me, really.
That said: This is not a crime story. Still, I find Green’s view useful because I’m writing about a human life that ended in tragedy. And so I will try to avoid many of the the same temptations and traps one finds when telling stories about the dead.
So here’s what I could piece together from the materials I found.
A friend described Michael Joseph Gordon as “the nicest guy in the whole world.” Some knew him as “Mike,” others called him “Junior.”
He was born on September 15th, 1962 to Ann and Robert Gordon, which makes the “Junior” nickname all the more curious. He had a brother named Bobby and two sisters, Debora and Cynthia (or Cythia or Cindy).
Junior had a nice smile but didn’t show it to high school yearbook photographers. He graduated from Round Rock High School in 1979 with long hair that curled like crazy from his eyes down to his shoulders. The hair, the softball tee, it’s all very Dazed and Confused and he looks damn cool if you ask me.
In 1985 he was 22, 5 foot 8, 140 pounds with dark brown hair and “greenish-brown” eyes. When he disappeared that year he was wearing “blue jeans and a beige Moosehead beer T-shirt with the words, ‘The moose is loose in Austin.’” He drove a light blue 1976 Chevy Luv pickup and was a good amateur mechanic.
Junior must have been handy, too. He and a friend built the iconic red shack themselves. It opened in 1982, he was 20, and the store still operates out of the original structure. It’s an odd little relic amid the new-construction luxury private dorms, poke shops and fast casual chains that dot the neighborhood these days. In my early twenties I was blacking out at music festivals and working in a boiler room collecting debt from unlucky people. I contributed absolutely nothing to society. This guy created something that has made Austin just a little richer, a little weirder, for 39 years. That’s a legacy. Could he have imagined?
Junior’s friends cared about him. One was named Angela Hicks. Another was named John Zamora. Zamora delivered beer to Junior’s shop and somehow later “became the proprietor” without knowing Junior’s actual name. Someone please explain to me how this is possible? Maybe he knew it then but since forgot. In any case, he told The Daily Texan in 2013:
He was one of the most likeable guys I’ve ever met. He was an all around awesome guy. Everybody who’d met him had nothing but good things to say about him.
Junior had a girlfriend. His dad said he wasn’t depressed (according to a 1985 Statesman article), but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. We all hide things and some of us are pretty good at it.
You can visit Michael Joseph Gordon’s grave in Bastrop, TX at Fairview Cemetery, which has been around since the Texas was a republic. It’s peaceful there. I found his stone near a white gazebo on the gentle slope of a hill. It was partially overgrown with weeds, so I cleared them away. It felt like the right thing to do, but I don’t know. Now fully visible, his epitaph reads, “You will always live in our hearts.”
There was a time when Austin was a craft beer desert. Homebrewing was banned until 1983, and brewpubs were illegal until 10 years after that. But “Junior’s Beer & Wine shop was a hub of craft beer influence,” according to Brad Farbstein, who these days owns Real Ale Brewing Company out in Blanco. Junior’s was also one of the first in Austin to let shoppers mix-and-match six packs, a feature of most bottle shops today. Each trip would push your horizons a little further, open your eyes a little wider.
Many things about Austin in the 1980s would be familiar to today’s Austinites. The Drag was dirty. The Armadillo was already an office building. The blue bonnets showed up every Spring. The grackles moved like tiny dinosaurs and peered down from the power lines. Hippie chicks sunbathed topless at Barton Springs. The city grew fast — 6% from 1984 to 1985, double today’s rate. In 1985 The New York Times profiled the city’s social tolerance, liberal politics, mega-university, and — did you doubt for a second? — Willie. Damn if this doesn’t read like it was written today:
Yet much to the dismay of many old-timers, a new Austin is emerging, a boom town based on computers and high technology. And, despite efforts to ‘’manage’’ growth, that boom has brought traffic jams, pollution and high prices.
A true Austin old-timer told me: everyone thinks Austin’s heyday was the day they moved here and they start talking about “when Austin was cool” the next morning. I’ve been dicking around in Austin since 2003 and I don’t always rise above this kind of selective memory. I’ve half-joked that Austin will die when Martinez Brothers Taxidermy closes. It’s still kicking, next to a Black women-owned headwrap boutique and an artisanal leather shop that also sells espresso. Kindly boil that block down and shoot it directly into my veins. This is still a place where we have La Perla, the raucous last cantina on East 6th, and Perla’s, a place where beautiful young people get daydrunk and order $37 gulf snapper. I wish there was much more of the former and much (much) less of the latter, but I still see a lot of what makes Austin the gorgeous, green, artistic, hard-drinking, psychedelic city that feels like a small town on the best days. The weird’s still here if you care to look. Accept no imitations.
Here’s where I want to tread carefully. I don’t want to dwell on Junior’s death. But it’s part of his story. Around 6pm on March 4th, 1985, Junior told coworkers he was off to run a 10-minute errand and left the store in his Chevy Luv pickup. On March 6th, a friend found the truck on Spicewood Springs Road. Exactly one year later, a woman searching for a lost calf discovered his skeletal remains on a wooded hillside nearby.
I obtained the Medical Examiner’s report. “Found with the remains was a shotgun,” notes Dr. Roberto Bayardo. He details a “shotgun wound of the abdomen” (a March 7th, 1986 Statesman article indicates the shotgun was registered to Junior). Dr. Bayardo concludes: “Suicide.”
I still have questions. The big one is, how much of Dr. Bayardo’s work can we trust given what we now know about him? The Austin Police Department told me they did not retain any files because the case was “closed administratively” once it was determined to be a suicide.
Honestly? I’ve made my peace with that. Because soon after I uncovered Junior’s identity, the balance of my curiosity shifted. I found myself wanting to know more about his life than his death.
I was chasing his mystery. Now I’m after his memory.
Michael “Junior” Gordon would be 58 today. There must be people who remember “the nicest guy in the world.” I want to learn who he was — the dreams he had, the people he loved, the music he listened to, the beers he drank — goddamn all of it. I hope to write a follow-up post filled with memories.
Next time you’re near campus, swing by the little red shack, buy a Mix 6 and pour one out for Junior.
Gone but no longer forgotten.
Did you know Michael / Mike / “Junior” Gordon, or someone who did? Please reach out: rememberjunioratx@gmail.com
If you are in crisis, call the toll-free National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1– 800–273-TALK (8255), available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The service is available to anyone. All calls are confidential. http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
