Howard Brunson

BY FORREST PREECE

Every town has a Howard Brunson, a successful businessperson who persists, acting as a mentor and making positive things happen for other people.

Now that he is 93, Howard walks and talks a little slower than he did in his younger days. But his mind is going full speed ahead about his business operations; and his personal philosophy is still geared towards helping others.

Not long ago, I sat down for lunch with him in the Arpeggio Grill, one of his tenants in Yellow Brick Road Shopping Center on Airport Boulevard just north of Highland Mall, and heard some of his stories.

Howard is a legend in West Austin as a successful businessperson, a civic leader, and a Rotarian. A lot of people would be surprised to know that during his days at the University of Texas, he was the managing editor of the Texas Ranger, the campus humor magazine, and that he majored in physical anthropology. He was also in ROTC and after serving as a company commander and troop movement officer in the 101st Airborne Division, he returned to Austin, where he started his career in the moving and storage business.

“In that business, I was using skills I had learned about transportation in the military,” Howard says. He was also chair of Austin’s sister city committee which interfaced with Saltillo, Mexico and while working on that project, he had a hand in starting what became Austin Smiles. For his health services work in

Mexico, he was awarded the DIF Medal for Humanitarian Service by that country’s government.

In the early 1970s, Howard was on the zoning committee of Austin’s Planning Commission, and Highland Mall was being opened. The moving business was stressful, to say the least, and he got the idea that being a developer would “be more fun” than what he was doing.

At the height of his career, Howard had 15 centers in Austin and the surrounding area. He also built the Southwest Tower downtown at East 8th and Brazos and some other office buildings. Around 1971, George Brown was subdividing the land where Highland Mall is, and the area north of there towards Lamar. Howard approached him about buying the land where his Yellow Brick Road Center is now located. “George sold me this land for the best price imaginable,” Howard says. Now he has sold most of his properties except for Yellow Brick Road and two similar centers in Pflugerville and Georgetown. All three are occupied by small businesses run by entrepreneurial people. After lunch, we walked around the center and from the greetings we received from all his tenants, it is obvious that they hold him in high regard. Howard could have sold his remaining centers off or razed them and built larger structures on them, but in his heart, he is committed to helping first generation Americans grasp their foothold on the free enterprise dream. After talking to some of the store/restaurant owners in the center, I realized that Howard has created a miniUnited Nations here. To that point, I’ve included a list of the stores in Yellow Brick Road and the nationalities of the people who own them. I also talked with Fida Shah, the owner of Arpeggio Grill, about his story of running a business in Howard’s center.

FIDA SHAH

Fida is proud of his restaurant, and I can attest that it offers scrumptious food at reasonable prices. His journey to Austin was convoluted. He went from his native Afghanistan to Iran and then, when the shah was thrown out, he came to America in 1979. He attended hotel school at the University of Houston and found a job at Meridien Hotel, the first French hotel built in the USA, where he worked for four years. “Almost everyone else there actually was French,” he says. He became the director of purchasing, which was a key post in the hotel, since the French wines and ingredients for the restaurant dishes could not be found in the US at that time.

In 1987, he moved to San Francisco and started a restaurant which was destroyed in the 1989 earthquake. He came to Austin in 1991 and got a job as a salesman with

Apple Toyota – “I made the first sale of a car at the dealership,” he says.

Then, after owning and running grocery stores in Bartlett and on Cesar Chavez in Austin, Fida transitioned into the restaurant business in 2008. Fida adds that Howard gave him the best lease imaginable and has made him feel wanted and comfortable being here. Howard even came in and helped Fida with advice and contacts on a daily basis to get the business going. Fida says that this level of support works both ways – he is committed to staying here and making his restaurant work on a long-term basis. His children also work there, adding to the family atmosphere. “I want my customers to feel like they are at home here, just like I do.”