As someone who has spent a career trying out locally owned restaurants across Arkansas, it's hard to comprehend that it has been 14 months since I ate a meal in one. We've been careful in our family during the pandemic due to some health concerns.
Two weeks after the final member of my immediate family has had the second shot, the time will have come to again sit down inside a restaurant.
It's fitting that the last meal before the state shut down was at the iconic Keeney's Grocery in Malvern. I was assisting KATV, Channel 7, with a series of stories on famous Arkansas restaurants. I joined the KATV crew for a trip to Keeney's on March 12, 2020. I was then the speaker that evening at the annual banquet of the England Chamber of Commerce. It was my final public event of the year.
The piece on Keeney's never aired as pandemic news began dominating coverage. Maybe the folks at the station can pull out the raw video and edit it since Keeney's was among the small Arkansas businesses that somehow managed to survive the pandemic.
Charles and Maureen Keeney opened a grocery store 65 years ago at the same location where the business still operates, hidden from traffic in a residential area. In 2000, with competition from Walmart and other big retailers hurting his business, Charles Keeney thought about retiring. With only $45,000 in the bank, though, he decided to keep working.
The man employees refer to simply as CK says: "I just pushed the groceries back and put in a kitchen and some tables. I did it because I had to make a living. We stumbled through the menu for a while, but I was raised country so we fix things in the old home-style way."
He sometimes sells so much sausage at breakfast that he doesn't have time to make it for the grocery section. On Thursdays, he sells dozens of rib-eye steaks. Many people eat them in the restaurant for lunch while others come in during the afternoon to buy steaks to take home. Charles arrives at the store at 4:30 a.m. and begins serving breakfast at 6 a.m.
Charles was 20 and Maureen was 17 when they bought the store in 1956.
Here's how Wayne Bryan told the story in a 2011 feature for the Tri-Lakes edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "Rather than just carry on business as usual in a grocery store that seems to fit more in the 1950s than the new millennium, Charles decided to latch onto what's still the fastest-growing segment of the supermarket industry, cooking for customers (or, as it is called in the grocery business, home meal replacement).
"Starting in the late 1990s, supermarket operators discovered that preparing and serving food in their stores was a good way to bring in new customers, gain greater loyalty from existing customers and increase checkout sales and profits. Today, in-store restaurants aren't unusual. Charles had the same idea for his store on Mill Street. The couple, along with several employees, prepare and serve breakfast and lunch six days a week at the back of their store."
Malvern is almost like home. I grew up about 25 miles down the road at Arkadelphia. My sister is married to a Malvern native, and my college roommate for three years was from Malvern. As a boy, I bought soft drinks at Woody's Newsstand in downtown Arkadelphia from Clem Bottling Works, which began at Malvern in 1907 and continued to be produced there until 1972.
Like Keeney's, Clem's was a Malvern icon.
"Clem Bottling Works was started by J.M. Clem and his son Dock," Darrell Brown writes for the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "The Clem family produced and bottled soft drinks in a small building behind their home. In May 1914, the Clem family built a bottling plant and warehouse at 937 S. Main St. The first bottles the company used were embossed with 'J.M. Clem Bottling Works' and were sealed with a wire and inner seal. In the early 1920s, the company converted to bottles sealed with metal caps. Bottles were covered with paper labels.
"J.M. Clem died on Sept. 22, 1931. Dock Clem's son Harold joined the business in 1933. After Dock Clem's death on May 21, 1942, his widow Jewell Clem and her son continued to operate the business until 1972, when the family sold the company to Dr Pepper. The purchase included the rights to the soft drink formulas and trademarks but not the bottling equipment. Harold Clem joined Dr Pepper and worked there until he died on April 23, 2004."
Clem Bottling Works produced about a dozen kinds of soft drinks. They were distributed in Arkansas, north Louisiana, east Texas and west Mississippi.
"For years after Clem Bottling Works closed, the bottling machinery remained in the building," Brown writes. "The machinery was purchased in the early 1990s by the Mountain Valley Spring Water bottler in Hot Springs. Cases of glass bottles used by Clem were purchased in May 2011 by Excel Bottling Co. of Illinois, which also trademarked the name R-Pep and began producing the original beverage formula for the first time since Clem closed."
Malvern has a rich history. It was established in 1873 as a stop on the Cairo & Fulton Railroad. The Hot Spring County seat moved there in 1878 from nearby Rockport. When fires in 1896-97 destroyed most of downtown, the city used it as an opportunity to rebuild the business district with brick structures. A number of those structures still stand. Malvern saw its population double from 5,290 in the 1940 census to 10,318 in the 2010 census.
It's almost time for a road trip to Malvern and an order of CK's sausage.
Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.