Joe Michael Lung

Joe Lung, a proud, lifelong Austinite and possessor of one of the brightest smiles and readiest laughs that this city ever produced, died peacefully on June 27, 2018, after suffering a series of strokes the week before. He was 77 years old.

He was born Joe Michael Lung at Seton Hospital on August 23, 1940, the son of Sam and Lorene Dismuke Lung. He took his name from his paternal granddad, Lung Zhou, who’d had his family name Anglicized to “Joe” and switched to his first name at a California immigration office when he arrived from Hoi Ping, China, in 1876. The first Joe Lung built railroads out West and then around Austin after moving here in the 1880s. In 1897, he opened an American-style café on 6th St., which Sam Lung took over in 1926. Sam later opened one of Austin’s first Chinese restaurants, Lung’s Chinese Kitchen, on 12th St. and Red River in 1945, which the younger Joe Lung eventually ran and finally closed down, in 1974. He liked to say it was where Austin learned to eat with chopsticks.

Joe’s parents raised him and his sisters, Sandra and Meiling, on the East Side, in a two-story house on Canterbury St. The kids grew up chasing chickens in their back yard and working in their dad’s restaurant, their free time devoted to two of Joe’s lifelong passions, watching horror movies and UT football. Their neighborhood was largely Hispanic, and as one of the few Chinese families in town, the Lungs were a minority within a minority. Joe thrived in that life, developing an affinity for other people and cultures, for greasy enchilada plates and Little Joe y la Familia records, and for the friendships that lasted his entire life. He graduated from Austin High School in 1958, studied two years at Southwest Texas State College, then joined the Army and learned German at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

In the summer of 1959, Joe’s best friend Wayne set him up with a pretty St. Mary’s Academy student named Diane Freytag. That first, blind date was at Green Acres Miniature Golf on Burnet Rd., and Diane was immediately taken by his sharp dress and, of course, that smile. She soon learned how smooth he moved on a dance floor, and by year’s end, they were serious and exclusive. Then, in June, 1961, Wayne died when a crop duster he was piloting crashed in Elgin. Joe was supposed to fly with him that day, and he and Diane realized that life was too uncertain to put off the important stuff. They married that September.

Through the tumult of the 60s, he worked to help Austin live up to its ideal of itself. He served on the city council’s Human Relations Committee, advising on things like how to better desegregate restaurants, and going on Friday night patrols with Austin police through the East Side, mediating racial conflict. He took that mindset to the Texas Restaurant Association, where he served as president of its Austin chapter. In the 70’s, he opened a string of sandwich shops, all called Joe’s, including one that was three doors down from the original Antone’s on 6th St. It was a favorite of the city’s late 70’s blues scene.

Joe and Diane’s first son, Mike, came in 1966; the second, Mark, followed in 1973. Joe liked to tell his sons that since his lineage was Chinese and their mom’s was Czechoslovakian, that made the two of them Chinese Checkers. He raised them in the Lung tradition, putting them to work in his sandwich shops early. By the fifth grade, Mike was manning a cash register on his own; at the same age, Mark would accompany a driver to San Antonio to pick out the best-looking produce. Joe taught them that the way to run a business—and your life, really—was to treat people with respect and to take pride in what you do.

He moved the family to Westlake in the early 70’s, back when it was still “the sticks,” when the quickest route out there was Low Water Bridge and the rest of the residents were largely UT professors and cedar choppers. He continued to run the sandwich shops after closing Lung’s Chinese Kitchen, then finally got out of the restaurant game for good in 1990. He had a number of other pursuits through those years and beyond. He owned and operated an office cleaning service. He sold ads for the Thrifty Nickel. For the last ten years he worked at the gift shop at the State Capitol, welcoming tourists and telling them how much he loves Texas.

The constant through all of that was his smile. To say he never met a stranger is a cliché that applies because if you met Joe Lung—at the counter at Joe’s, on a sales call for the Nickel, in a deer blind on the hunting lease, over a burger at Mike’s Pub, on the rotunda floor at the Capitol—he wanted to get to know you. He wanted to make you feel like you mattered. He had a habit of creating inside jokes with nearly everyone he met. He’d pull those lines out whenever he saw you, reminding you that his relationship with you was unique, something special.

In recent years he spent a lot of time talking about Old Austin. He’d tell everybody—new friends and old; his sweet, beloved grandbabies; a reporter who profiled him for the Statesman and another who did the same for KLRU—about the Austin he grew up in. About the old haunts and events and people that made this town a place that the wider world has finally awoken to, about the essential, irreplaceable things that made Austin special.

Joe Lung was one of those things.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Sam and Lorene Lung, and his parents-in-law, Alice and Anton Freytag. He is survived by his wife, Diane Freytag Lung; his sons Joe Michael Lung, Jr. (Joanna Cook) and Jonathan Mark Lung; grandchildren Opal and Charles Lung, and Evan and Tate Lung; his sisters Sandra Atkinson (Herschell) and Meiling Horton (Wendell); and numerous sisters- and brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews.

The family would like to express its profound gratitude to the staff of Seton Hospital and Christopher House for their compassionate, supportive and loving care.

Services will be held on Monday, July 2, at 10:00 a.m. at Triumphant Love Lutheran Church, 9508 Great Hills Trail, Austin, TX 78759. There will be visitation the afternoon before, Sunday, July 1, at 3:00-5:00 p.m. at Cook-Walden Funeral Home, 6100 N Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78752.

For those wishing to make a charitable contribution in Joe’s memory, please consider Christopher House, the Triumphant Love Lutheran Endowment Fund, the Moody Adams Evangelistic Association, and Crossroads Ministries International.