09/02/2026
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If you have ever stood in a barbecue line before the sun was all the way up, you have some idea of what a Saturday morning looks like in Lexington, Texas. What you might not know is that the woman who fired those pits was out there at two in the morning to do it, and she is in her nineties.
Her name is Norma Frances Tomanetz, though almost nobody has called her that in a long time. Everybody calls her Tootsie. She was born on a farm outside Lexington in 1935, and she came to barbecue sideways, in 1966, when the City Meat Market over in Giddings was short handed and needed somebody who could work. She was thirty one years old. A man named Orange Holloway taught her the pits, and she never really stopped.
She and her husband later bought the meat market in Lexington and ran it themselves. They sold it after he had a stroke in 1996, and she took a job in the maintenance department of the local school district. Here is the part people have trouble believing. She kept that job. She started working Saturdays at Snow's BBQ in 2003 and has been its pitmaster ever since, on top of everything else.
Snow's carries the childhood nickname of co-owner Kerry Bexley, who was called Snowman from the day he was born because his brother had told a neighbor he wanted a little snowman. The doors open at eight on Saturday morning and close when the meat runs out, usually somewhere around noon, and those hours trace back to a livestock auction down the road that used to start at half past twelve.
In May 2008, Texas Monthly named Snow's the number one barbecue in Texas. It slipped to number two in 2013 and came back to number one in 2017. Calvin Trillin wrote it up in The New Yorker that same year of 2008. In 2018 she was a James Beard semifinalist and went into the Barbecue Hall of Fame, and in 2020 she was the subject of the premiere episode of Netflix's Chef's Table: BBQ. None of it changed the alarm clock. A woman in her nineties is still out in the dark ahead of everybody else, moving coals by hand, because that is how it has always been done.
