A Roadside Diners in the Fifties

Story by Brant Short and Jess Stennett

Photos courtesy of the authors

Rupert Police Chief Henry Willis was a regular patron and became good friends with our grandmother Dollie and our mother Barbara, which on several occasions really paid off. For more than a decade in the 1950s and 1960s, Dollie (Rice) Dowell ran a small café on the southwestern edge of town.

One night when the wind was blowing and it was very cold outside, there were few customers. Our mother Barbara (Nussbaum) Stennett, who had started working at the café as a waitress when she was fifteen years old and became Dollie’s unofficial assistant manager, was mopping the floor and talking to the night cook, Marion Browne.

Barbara noticed a nervous customer with a briefcase who kept glancing at the cash register. She began to worry and decided to call the chief. Not wanting to alert the customer, she said, “Hello Willis, it’s Barbara. Just wanted to let you I’ll be home soon.”

Willis understood something was up. Our mother told us, “Willis swaggered in like nothing was wrong. He ordered coffee, sat next to the guy, and found out he was a hitchhiker.” Willis asked what was in the briefcase, and the man said it was a gun.

The chief told him he would trade the gun for a warm bed that night at the jail, to which the hitchhiker agreed. When they were leaving, Willis asked what he was planning to do with the gun. “What do you think I was going to do?” the man responded.

On another occasion, one of the employees at a grain elevator near the cafe struck Barbara as strange. She told Willis she found him a little scary but nothing came of it until about a year later, when Willis reported the man had been arrested for a minor offense. His fingerprints revealed he was an escaped inmate from Missouri, convicted of murder.

When we brothers think about Dollie’s Café, it takes us back to a time some people like to idealize. Over the years we’ve heard many stories about the place from our mother, learned some of Dollie’s mainstay recipes, and got a glimpse into the culture of the American roadside diner of the 1950s.

Before the interstate system emerged across the nation in the 1960s, highway travelers going to Boise, Portland, and Seattle drove by Dollie’s Café, open twenty-four hours a day every day of the year. It was located at the intersection of Idaho 25 and what was then US 30, now Idaho 24.