The Rock Cafe, Stroud, Oklahoma
When Dawn Welch was 14, she told off Garth Brooks.
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| Restored neon sign at the Rock Cafe. |
Welch and Brooks worked together at Ken's Pizza in Yukon, Okla., where Brooks and several other employees thought it was hilarious to play pranks on Welch.
They'd pick up the motor scooter she drove to work and hide it from her. They'd lock her into the cabinet under the salad bar when she crawled inside to let the water out of it.
One day, Welch got fed up with Brooks' antics.
“I told Garth Brooks—I said, 'You're such a big loser, I'm gonna come (to town) one day, and you're gonna be the carnie that lets me onto the carnival ride,'” she laughed.
OK, so she's not clairvoyant.
Nearly 20 years later, Brooks has taken his country music act all over the world.
Welch, meanwhile, is still in Oklahoma, letting the world come to her.
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| Part of the Rock Cafe decor |
“All summer long, you never know what's gonna pull up,” said Welch, who owns the historic Rock Café on Route 66 in Stroud.
A Japanese singing group once serenaded Welch and her customers with American rock 'n' roll tunes.
Sitting in a booth at the café, the three-man group launched into an impromptu rendition of Bobby Troup's “Get Your Kicks.”
“We started clapping when they got done, and that just let 'em loose,” Welch said. “They said they were big rockabilly stars in Japan. They could spell 'rockabilly.'”
Unfortunately, that was just about the only English they knew, aside from the song lyrics.
“People started shouting out songs for them to sing, and they would sing something, but it wouldn't be what you wanted. They had no clue,” Welch said.
Foreign tourists aren't the only source of entertainment at the Rock Café.
“You have all your American weirdos doing all their American weirdo stuff,” Welch said.
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| Rock Cafe owner Dawn Welch with daughter Alexis |
She recalled the chain smoker who was riding down Route 66 on his bicycle (“He rode 100 miles a day on that bike, and he looked like the most fit person in the world, but he never, ever stopped smoking those cigarettes”) and the guy who was saving the whales by bicycling down 66 with his kid riding next to him in a sidecar shaped like a whale.
Welch bought the Rock Café in 1993. Her plan was to stay in Stroud for a year, build up the business, then sell the restaurant at a profit and move to Costa Rica. At the time, the Costa Rican government was offering incentives to entrepreneurs to set up restaurants and other businesses that would serve tourists and employ locals.
The Rock Café turned out to be so much fun that one year turned into ten.
During those ten years, the business has seen some changes.
In 1998, Welch began the process of nominating the property to the National Register of Historic Places. Four years later, the Rock Café was placed on the register.
“It was very time-consuming,” Welch said of the application process. “It costs about $2,500 to have somebody do it for you, and I just decided to do it on my own. Basically, if you pester the government long enough, they'll do it.”
Pestering the government has paid off for Welch, who got a grant through the National Park Service's Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program to cover half of the $55,000 cost of remodeling the Rock Café.
Renovating the building—which was constructed in 1936—wasn't easy.
In addition to filing paperwork and coming up with her half of the remodeling costs, Welch had to deal with a few unexpected hassles.
For instance, the construction crew had just put the finishing touches on the kitchen when Welch went in to clean up the dust.
“I was . . . all alone in the kitchen, sweeping up the floor, and all of a sudden, the whole entire ceiling fell down on me,” she said. “That was pretty scary. As soon as it was done, you couldn't even see me” because of the dust and debris.
Welch took the situation in stride.
“I have this saying. I always say, 'Oh, monkeys' about everything, and I said, 'Oh, monkeys,' and one of the construction guys said, 'Oh, no, that's more like oh, gorillas,'” she said.
Fortunately, the damage took just a day to repair, and today, the Rock Café is in good shape. The restaurant's bar and booths—which were removed in the 1980s—have been replaced, and the original entrances on the east and west sides of the building, which had been covered with rocks, have been restored. A pass-through window also was installed between the kitchen and dining room, and the neon sign out front glows brightly.
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| The restored bar area |
The improvements have been popular with customers, Welch said.
“We just had our best January ever, and I've been here 10 years,” she said. “We had a big 53-store mall here until '99, and a tornado blew it away, and our numbers sank to 50 percent of what they were . . . Now we're having the best time we've ever had.”
The Rock Café, located at 114 W. Main St. (Route 66) in Stroud, is open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week. For more information, call the café at (918) 968-3990.
