‘UnStuck’ Review: Stuckey’s, Back on the Road Again

‘unstuck’ review: stuckey’s, back on the road again

One sure way to bring a tear to a baby boomer’s eye is to remind one of those bygone summer vacations in the family car. Trips to visit distant relatives or tours of the national parks were fine, but the lasting memories of the 1950s and 1960s were made at motels with swimming pools and Magic Fingers vibrating beds, at putt-putt golf courses and stops at any of the hundreds of Stuckey’s stores along the highway. As Stephanie Stuckey reminds us in “UnStuck,” her account of the company’s rise and fall and current attempts at resurrection, Stuckey’s was for decades an oasis of fun—and profit.

Billboards placed every few miles promised travelers the rich experience that awaited if only Dad got off at the next exit. “Relax, Refresh, Refuel.” Stuckey’s offered cheap gas and clean windshields. Inside were “Sparkling Rest Rooms,” as well as “Picturesque Souvenirs,” a kingdom of kitsch that set kids’ hearts racing: snow globes, Davy Crockett hats, bins of floppy rubber alligators. Ashtrays, too, some in the shape of states, others in the shape of toilet seats bearing the words “put your butts here.”

Stuckey’s rode the good times for the better part of 30 years. At its height the chain owned 368 stores in 40 states, most of them clustered in the South. “For a while in the 1960s, Stuckey’s was opening an average of one store per week, and franchises were making $50,000 to $150,000 per year,” Ms. Stuckey writes. The coming years would see a slow decline, however, largely due to the influx of cheaper competition and rising gas prices. The company’s falling-off mirrored that of another once-great hospitality chain, Howard Johnson’s.

In the 1960s, the family sold its stake in Stuckey’s to corporate owners who eventually broke up much of the chain, treating the stores as “nothing more than assets on a balance sheet,” the author writes. In 1985 a Stuckey’s family partnership that included Ms. Stuckey’s father, a five-term U.S. congressman from Georgia, convened to buy back the company trademark along with a few dozen independently run stores, all that remained of the enterprise that its founder, the author’s grandfather, had created. Five years ago, in a spirit of mad adventure mixed with optimism and sentimentality, Ms. Stuckey bought those assets and became owner of the brand.

She was an unlikely chief executive. At 53, Ms. Stuckey was a divorced mother of two, a former Georgia state representative and trial lawyer. She paid nearly every penny she had and knew nothing about running a business. Still, she was determined to make Stuckey’s, if not great again, at least returned to respectability.

The author devotes some part of her story to a road trip she undertakes to visit the 68 properties she now owned. The passages are nicely evocative of Southern back roads as she rolls through towns like Meridian, Miss., Summerton, S.C., and Bagdad, Fla. She finds only a few former stores run well. Others appear dirty and rundown. One has become a cannabis shop, another a homeless encampment.

Back home, Ms. Stuckey turns to a boxed collection of papers, mementos and photographs of the company’s history left to her by her grandfather Williamson S. Stuckey Sr.—known to all as “Bigdaddy”—hoping to find insight and inspiration in her quest to revive the company. Bigdaddy grew up so broke during the Depression his family barely had enough to feed the family mule. A local merchant one day suggested he buy pecans from local farmers and bring them to his store for sale. The idea proved profitable for the merchant so Bigdaddy decided maybe he should cut out the middle man and to go into business for himself. With a $35 loan from he mother, he began selling nuts with names like Pawnee, Cape Fear and Desirable out of a roadside stand the size of a chicken coop. The budding businessman’s wife, known as “Bigmama,” began experimenting with ways to make the nuts more appealing. Thus was born the pecan log roll, a confection of nougat and maraschino cherries dipped in caramel and rolled in roasted pecans. One Southern newspaper praised the recipe as being “as sweet as a Sunday morning hymn.” The Stuckey’s pecan log roll remains the company’s signature item.

By the 1950s, Bigdaddy had 29 stores. “Every Traveler Is a Friend” was his slogan, and he meant it: Stuckey’s stores in the South were never segregated. With the coming of the Interstate Highway System in the mid-1950s, Bigdaddy eased right out into the traffic by building stores topped with gable roofs painted in bright teal, spacing them apart based on how long he estimated travelers could drive before needing to find a bathroom.

Bigdaddy preferred elevated properties that could be seen by motorists for miles, just in case they hadn’t noticed any of the more than 4,000 billboards placed from coast to coast beckoning travelers in for hot dogs and pimento cheese sandwiches—topped off with a Stuckey’s log roll, of course—not to mention corncob pipes, wiener-dog bookends, fez hats, jumping beans and rubber tomahawks.

Bigdaddy, the author writes, transformed himself “from a blue jean-clad product of the Depression to a savvy entrepreneur in pressed pants and linen shirts.” “UnStuck” is the story of what Ms. Stuckey has accomplished so far (much of it by trial and error) to honor his memory. She knows success will require her being as savvy about modern marketing tools—online sales and licensing candies and snacks to convenience stores and supermarkets—as Bigdaddy was about billboards and clean windshields. But a pecan log roll is still a pecan log roll. The company remains a work in progress, Ms. Stuckey concedes, but it will never lose its rich, nougaty center.

Mr. Cooke is a writer in Washington.

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