The recent passing of Jeannette Cathy this summer and Truett Cathy last fall, brought back an awful lot of memories of dining with them.
I arrived in Georgia in April, 1959, from Ohio and moved into a house my husband had purchased in Forest Park. He was here about 4 months before me. The house was a small 3 bedroom house on a tiny lot. It was newly built and we paid all of $11,000 for it.
A few weeks before my husband left Ohio for work at the Atlanta airport, coffee began to taste strange to me. I scrubbed the coffee pot quite thoroughly. I threw out the bag of coffee I had recently bought and purchased another one. It didn’t taste any better. After a couple of months, the reason for my no longer being able to drink coffee comfortably became obvious – yep – I was pregnant. I have never once in the intervening 56 years ever met anyone with that same problem.
Can you imagine having to call your husband long distance and telling him he’s going to be father? We had been married at that point for 6 years so we were really excited.
At my fourth month I had packed up everything we owned and it was all in a moving van heading due south.
I got off the airplane at the Atlanta airport and my husband took me to this neat little restaurant in Hapeville, housed in what looked like a box car. My first meal as a Georgian was at the Dwarf House.
The owner was perfecting a boneless chicken sandwich which everyone immediately loved and the meal was not complete without their lemon pie.
Truett Cathy opened another Dwarf House in Forest Park, and a young artist that had grown up in Hapeville created a large painted scene of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to be put into this restaurant. The artist then lived in Paris and shipped this scenery ahead of flying home to visit his mother. The scenery arrived, the artist did not. He was killed along with 200 other Georgians in the Paris plane crash of 1962. The sister of the artist and I worked at banks together for many years and remain friends even today.
When my children were quite young it pleased me to take them through the little door at the Dwarf House in Hapeville. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to do this when one was built in Fayetteville and I got to take my grandchildren through the little door.
While these memories are sweet, I’m sorry for the reason they were all brought back.
