Published: September 11, 2008 10:56 pm      

‘We don’t cook cats ... but if that’s what you want, we’ll try’

You may recall our column a few weeks ago that mentioned the once-popular Chatterbox restaurant located on U.S. 52 near Welch.

The canteen-size eatery was popular from the mid-1960s through early 1980s.

We got a nice letter the other day from Martha Rector of Oakview Lane in Beckley. Martha is a native of McDowell County.

The missive reads in part:

I enjoyed your column on the Chatterbox restaurant at Big Four. This one brought back wonderful memories that I have growing up in McDowell County.

As a young gal, my Dad would invite me to lunch at the Chatterbox during those summer days that I worked at his auto dealership.

That was a big deal for me, to be with Dad and to get to see all his cronies’ wheeling and dealing over Louie’s famous hamburgers or Lucille’s brown beans.

This carried over past college, marriage, and daughter Laura in grade school to become a habit for us most Friday nights for supper.

There are hundreds of stories about the Chatterbox, and I think you recounted about the most famous one of all, a true story it is!

One of my personal favorites is about a Friday evening that we dined there. It was packed, as usual, but we finally got a table, cleared all the dishes off, and set them on the counter.

Well, Louie comes over and takes our orders. I always marveled at this process because you would go into detail what food you wanted and how you wanted it.

Louie would listen, and then make some kind of mark on his order pad in a split second, and somehow every order would be exactly right.

This time, Don gets Louie’s famous hamburger, piled high with lettuce and onions that spill out the sides, all covered with paprika dashed on top.

Laura orders her usual hot dog, and I get brown beans and slaw.

We sit, enjoy all the noise, and talk to all the folks. Laura pumps her money in the Juke Box, and as I fiddle with my big bean soup spoon, I find a clump of something right in the middle of it.

About that time, Louie brings our food, first the burger, the hot dog, and then my brown beans.

As he sets the beans down in front of me, I say, “Louie, there’s a glob of something on my spoon; could I have a clean one?”

He takes the spoon, looks at it, “Yep, there’s a glob.” He takes his huge thumb, scoops the glob off, wipes the spoon with his apron, hands it back to me and bellows out, “Little lady, now it’s clean.”

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Then there was the time that a stranger came in to eat. We knew he was a stranger, because everyone looked up, and he greeted no one.

He finally found a place at the counter, just next to us. He ordered a burger, and watched as Lucille in the kitchen cooked all that good stuff on her big, hot coal stove.

He watched and watched, and then yelled out to no one in particular, “Cats, cats, cats in the kitchen!”

Everyone heard this, including Louie.

Louie saunters over, leans on his side of the counter. “Mister,” he says, “we don’t cook cats in this place, never have, but if that’s what you want, we’ll try.”

Then he yells back to Lucille in the kitchen. “Lucille, fry up old Mama.”

The man looks at Louie, gazes around at everyone in the restaurant, stands up, shakes his head and slams the screen door on his way out.

Of course, the place shook with all that laughing, yelling and knee-slapping.

Poor Laura! It took a while to get her to go back to Louie’s Chatterbox, though, since she said she would never eat cat.

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Top o’ the morning!

— Blankenship is a columnist for The Register-Herald.

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