In tribute: Restaurant owner always ready to dish out advice, barbecue

Benny Barrow was always a man to dish it out, whether it be a joke, advice, political leanings or a plate of the barbecue that always kept Clovis coming back for more.

The owner of the former Ben’s Barbecue died Oct. 13 following a battle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Born Aug. 1, 1941, in Clovis, Barrow had the typical Clovis upbringing, meeting his future wife while dragging Main Street. He was there to meet a girl, and Vicki Moss was there to meet a guy. They clearly found what they were looking for, and were married six months later.

“He seemed to be a forward man,” Vicki Barrow said last week.

He was never one to shy away from a hard day of work, as he and Vicki raised both of their children on a farm outside of town.

“We grew up out in the country, 25 miles away in Ranchvale, raising cows and pigs, driving tractors,” son Lance Barrow said. “It was quite the experience. When we got caught up farming, we also grew up at Ute Lake, water skiing and fishing.”

After the family left the farming business, Ben worked odd jobs around Clovis until he found his calling at the Mabry Barbecue. He learned everything he could about the process, and soon he was winning informal barbecue competitions.

“He had always cooked barbecue around here,” Vicki Barrow said. “He was very good at it, knew how to handle it. It wasn’t the meat, it was the sauce. Ben came up with one that he thought was good. From that point on, that’s what stayed and a lot of people seemed to like it.”

With the Mabry Barbecue gone, the Barrows decided to fill the void, and opened their own restaurant. People from miles around flocked to the restaurant for a quarter-century, and the food gained acclaim at both New Mexico State University and the University of Texas.

“He would freeze it for me, ship it on a bus,” said Lance, who went to college in Las Cruces. “All of my roommates gained 50 pounds. He kept our fraternity up in barbecue.”

The frozen packages made their way to his daughter, Tracy Nuckols, as well.

“There’s a bunch of barbecue in Austin,” Nuckols said, “but it wasn’t the same. We needed that barbecue.”

Barrow taught his children the value of work, but also to leave leisure time as well. He taught the kids how to water ski, played poker every Tuesday night and formed a competitive 42 domino team with Maurice Smith. About the only skill he didn’t have was catching fish, Lance joked, but it wasn’t for a lack of effort.

“Before the disease took it away from him, he was playing 18 holes of golf and walking 18 holes of golf,” Nuckols said. “It was three or four days a week, to the point where it would annoy my mother.”

But Vicki made sure to give the ribbing back. Every Sunday during football season, one could find Ben in front of the television rooting for the Dallas Cowboys — right next to Vicki, rooting against the Cowboys just enough to irritate Ben.

People always knew where Barrow stood on things, whether he gave his opinion personally or in a steady stream of conservative letters to the editor of the newspaper.

“He always dispensed a lot of his advice, whether you needed it or not,” Nuckols said. “Everybody at his funeral had gotten advice from him at one point or another.”

More often than not, the children ran with it.

“As the years had passed, I was a mama’s boy,” Lance said. “After college, I became more of a daddy’s boy, listening to his words, listening to his wisdom. I took his advice when he’d give it.”

The business shut down in 2009, and was vacant for years on the corner of Fairmont Court and Prince Street. But it was never forgotten.

“We had a lot of good food and people who believed in us,” Vicki Barrow said. “I still run into people who say, ‘Aren’t you the lady from the barbecue? We miss that so much.’ It makes me go through the roof.”