Oh No!  There goes my Lemon Custard.  I need to make a quick run out Chapman Highway and stock up the bunker before that one closes too.

Another piece of my long-ago childhood is dust.

So... Kay's closes and Dubb's (on 129 by Home Depot) gets a facelift.

Is Dubb's any good... for breakfast? Lunch? Avoid it?

I've been going to that Kay's since I was small enough to ride the horse. We went there every month or two with our girls. We started this trip by going to Kay's. I'll miss that place.

Hey, Les, why don't we just call each other assholes and get it over with. - Somebody on the old Southknoxbubba.net (if that was you, claim your quote and win net.fame!)

I grew up a mile or so west of Kay's. My most memorable moment of that building does not involve Kay's itself. In the summer of 1964 I was delivering morning newspapers along Old Niles Ferry and the Buena Vista subdivision. The paper was the Knoxville Journal (when it was the AM paper and the News Sentinel was published in the afternoon). I would ride my bicycle down to what is now the Kay's building and clip open the bundle or two of papers that had been left for me.

On Friday July 10 1964 I opened the bundle and was shocked by the headline (at least I don't believe I knew about the news story the night before; TV was only 10 years or so old in Knoxville and cable news operations were two decades away). Also, I was only 12 years old at the time.

The story was about a United Airline crash on Thursday evening in Parottsville (Cocke County) that killed all 39 people aboard. What I remember to be true (hard to confirm now) was that my Mother and I had been on the very same flight exactly 4 weeks earlier. My father was manager of a local family-owned retail store and rarely was able to take off for a vacation. My mother and I had saved our money and for two years in a row took a vaction (in 1964 to Washington, DC and in 1965 to New York City [2nd year of NY World's Fair]).

I often have trouble remembering the years but I know we went to Washington on the first trip and to NY the next year. When in DC we visited Arlington Cemetery where we saw JFK's grave, so I always remember it had to be at least 1964 and since the World's Fair was from 64 to 65, I can pin it down that way. With the Internet I could locate the date of the air crash which I remembered to be a Thursday.

Back to Kay's itself -- I don't recall when it first located in that building. In earlier years there was a TV repair shop in the front and a gas station at the back. Eventually Kay's occupied the front half of the building and later expanded to take over the entire building. I enjoyed many hamburgers and ice cream cones there over the years.

There is a Kay's on Chapman I've been to a few times in the last eight years. I decided to take my girls, 3 and 6, there one day after picking them up. 5:30 and the place was empty except for the staff. I stopped by the ice cream to explain how it worked and told them "after dinner." I went to the counter to order, and noticed something missing. "Do you take Visa?" "No. No cards." "Oh... okay then." I don't know if the Maryville Kay's was different, but in 2006 you are not gonna last if you don't take credit and debit cards.

Here's some info about other long-gone West Broadway restaurants from the same era - the Zesto, Dwarf, and Noah's Ark. Only the Zesto building (the current site of the Horn of Plenty) still remains.

Hey, Les, why don't we just call each other assholes and get it over with. - Somebody on the old Southknoxbubba.net (if that was you, claim your quote and win net.fame!)

I have a Kay's Ice Cream story, but it's not about the Kay's in Maryville. Although they did make a great burger. We went there a few times after we moved back from FL and lived over that way. Growing up we went to the one on Chapman Highway.

Anyway, one summer I drove an ice cream truck. It was an, uh, interesting job. Actually, it wasn't a job so much as a contract gig. You had to buy your uniform, and buy your ice cream wholesale, and I think there may have been a truck "maintenance/lease" fee or something.

So you'd go down there to the Kay's headquarters on Magnolia in the morning, pick out a truck, and go in the big freezer warehouse and pull your order for the day. The boss man would supervise and tally up what you owed. You didn't have to pay right then. You payed for your stock minus returns to inventory at the end of the day. Whatever was left over (minus misc. deductions) you kept and that's what you made for the day. I had many days of negative earnings owing to a variety of reasons, some not even my fault.

Anyway, one morning the owner (Mr. Kay? I don't remember his name, but he was a really old guy and the Big Bomb Pop at the time) came out to survey his kingdom and watch his fleet of ice cream trucks deploy. I had a particularly crappy truck with a sloppy clutch and I was having to rev the motor to even keep it running much less get up the steep hill from around the side of the building up on to Magnolia.

Mr. Big Bomb Pop hollered out from his perch overlooking the loading dock "Quit gunnin' that motor boy! That's my truck!"

I felt like hollering back "Well, clean out your carbeurator and adjust the points and maybe it'll keep running long enough for me to get it out of this loadin' dock without me havin' to keep gunnin' it!"

Instead, I replied sheepishly, "Yes sir."