Bill Page: The building where Carney’s Pub is now located used to be Youngblood’s. They were known for their “tastes like home cooking” fried food. The fried chicken was good. And the fried fish they had, even Aggies would fill up on that.

Henry Mayo: It was known as the “really good” seafood place in Bryan/College Station.

Bill Page: We didn’t have a lot of seafood options back in those days.

Henry Mayo: And everything on their menu was deep-fried, that’s for sure. Ben Youngblood owned it. I’m not sure whether he started it or might have been the son of the owner.

Bill Page: His mother was Bonnie Youngblood. She was an agronomist with the college.

Henry Mayo: Ben had this distinctive International Harvester Scout, sort of the precursor to today’s SUVs. It was bright red and he had like ten railroad-sized air horns on the roof of the cab. I saw it all over town. It looked a lot like a firetruck from a distance.

Bill Page: When it was Youngblood’s, there was no parking across the street, as is the case now for Carney’s. You just had the parking around the building. And speaking of that building: the facade is petrified wood!

Henry Mayo: The Putz family owns that building. Youngblood actually owned a house behind that building, and I didn’t know that he didn’t own the building until a few years ago when we were surveying for the new sidewalks they’ve put in along South College. We had a meeting with the local home and business owners, and Mr. Putz’s son came. He told me they’ve always owned that building, dating back to when it was Youngblood’s. I guess they just didn’t want to sell the building, so the proprietors have had to rent it all these years. I once had a chance to ask Mr. Putz about the petrified wood, and he said it was local. Apparently it came from the White’s Creek area.

Bill Page: The man who did the stone work on the Girl Scout lodge near Country Club Lake, his brother owned the house I now live in back in the ‘40s. Charles Eicholz was his name, and I believe he worked at A&M and was a stonemason in his spare time. I’m pretty sure he had something to do with the construction of Youngblood’s. I knew a guy who was writing a book on Texas houses built out of petrified wood. As I recall, it took him so long to write it that somebody else beat him to the punch and got their book on the same subject published first. He said you have to have special skills to work with petrified wood because it is more brittle and much harder to shape than regular stone. What he discovered in doing his research for the book was that a lot of those who worked with petrified wood were itinerant Czech artisans. They’d travel from place to place, and so where you found one building built with petrified wood, you were likely to find several others.

Henry Mayo: I’m of the assumption that one reason they used petrified wood was that it was a free material. In this area, there was a lot of petrified wood.

Bill Page: And it makes for a very unique and noticeable exterior design. Those buildings, like the Girl Scout lodge and Carney’s, really stand out from everything else. In fact, there was a petrified-wood bungalow where Calloway-Jones is now, right there by the creek across from the Country Club Lake.