The charge for the man's meal in Trout Creek's new outdoor café came to $8.
The fellow handed Lynn Eaton a folded bill, told her to keep the change and started walking away.
“You've made a big mistake!” Eaton hollered at the man, who waved her off, saying, “I know you are just starting up and I know how hard it is to start a new business. Good luck.”
Eaton told reporter Jay Simons of the Sanders County Ledger that she's wanted to run a restaurant since she was 5 years old.
“When God closed one door, he opened a window,” she said, “so instead of running an indoor restaurant, I am serving food to people in an outdoor café.”
Eaton and her business partner, Cindy Bertsch, bought a mobile cooking unit and set up shop next to the Trout Creek building that formerly housed the restaurant where Eaton had worked, Katie Jack's.
The building was remodeled and converted into office space, but owners John and Elaine Taylor offered Eaton and Bertsch space beside it for the outdoor café.
The mobile cooking unit, previously used to sell espressos and pizza, now pumps out a full breakfast, lunch and dinner menu, from biscuits and gravy to nachos supreme, as well as milkshakes that Simons reports are “delicious.”
When the weather turns cold, the Ledger says, Eaton and Bertsch will add stews, spaghetti and chili, and they'll keep serving customers “until the water freezes.”
Smaller Dixon crowd enjoys Melon Days fun and food
Attendance was down but enthusiasm was up for Dixon Melon Days, which picked up four new volunteer organizers for next year's end-of-summer affair and announced its Little Buckaroo Rodeo would return in 2009.
Outside of the absent rodeo, which lacked a volunteer organizer until it was too late, Melon Days offered folks a street dance, live music, pancake breakfast, roast beef dinner, parade, sack races, cribbage, horseshoe and 3-on-3 basketball tournament, a farmers' Olympics and - of course - a melon-eating contest.
The Valley Journal reports that brothers Aaron, Dennis and Billy Fisher of Arlee all won prizes in their age divisions in the melon-eating contest, which 11-year-old Dennis attributed to practice.
“My auntie gives us lots of watermelons,” he told reporter Melea Burke of the Journal.
Jim Barnes of the Melon Days committee said attendance was down about
25 percent from past years, “but as I understand it, it's like that everywhere.”
This year's event was organized by a committee of nine Dixon senior citizens.
Weeklies Reader is compiled by reporters Vince Devlin and Kim Briggeman.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)