Peggy Brown, who with husband George owned the long-popular downtown Anchorage restaurant Lucky Wishbone, died Sunday. She had Parkinson's disease. The Browns opened the restaurant in 1955 and kept working there into their 80s. Click here to see a Daily News audio slide show from November marking the restaurant's 55th anniversary. Below is a Daily News profile of the Browns from 2005, when they celebrated the Lucky Wishbone's 50th anniversary. Click here to see Peggy Brown's full obituary.
The 'Bone turns 50
Dec. 4, 2005
By DEBRA McKINNEY, Anchorage Daily News
At the Lucky Wishbone the other day, a couple going and a couple coming crossed paths in the parking lot. "Pretty wild in there today, " the outbound warned the incoming.
"Oh, is that right?"
That was definitely right. The Wishbone was celebrating its 50th anniversary, and this town wasn't about to let that go unnoticed. With all the hugging and picture snapping going on, you'd have thought this was a family reunion. Which isn't far from the truth.
George and Peggy Brown opened for business on Nov. 30, 1955. Among those who came to celebrate a half-century later was Millie Tapscott who had been there on opening day. Andrea Monsen too. But even a relative newcomer like Dan Booyer, who's only been coming in practically every day for the past 30 years, feels right at home here.
"I know everybody; they know me. It's like family, " he said.
By 11 in the morning, the place was getting zooy. Balloons were everywhere. The first of 18 bouquets of flowers started to arrive. Cake and ice cream circulated around the room. By 11:30, all the booths, tables and counter seats were filled, and the line of people waiting had grown 20 feet long.
"Hey, happy birthday!" Rick Boots said as he maneuvered through the crowd, holding the reins of an enormous balloon bouquet before handing it over to Peggy.
He's been coming to the Wishbone since he was "this high, " he said, his hand at knee-cap level. That was something like 40 years ago, when his father, who had an office nearby, would bring him here for lunch.
Boot thinks of this place as an oasis.
"It's old Anchorage, " he said. And here at the 'Bone, old is good.
So much about this city has changed in the past 50 years, since the days when deals were sealed with a handshake and doors didn't need to be locked. In that respect, the Lucky Wishbone is a monument to an era. Other than a couple of expansions, the last in '69, it hasn't changed all that much. Not the owners, not the food.
Here, change is what you get after paying your bill.
"Comfort zone" is how Sidney Johnson thinks of the place he's been coming to for all of its 50 years, and his son, Erik, longer than he can remember -- since diapers.
That's because the Wishbone serves up the kind of fare that fills the tank -- a workingman can order himself a jumbo cheeseburger without fear of it landing in front of him befouled by a pile of alfalfa spouts.
And that Georgia-fried chicken -- it's the same today as it was 50 years ago: flown up whole and fresh from Seattle, worked over with a cleaver, dunked in homemade buttermilk batter, pan-fried, towel-dried like a baby fresh from a bath.
If that's not chicken enough for you, you can even order up a batch of gizzards, livers and giblets.
"It's the closest chicken to what my mother used to make when I was a kid, " said Rich Guthrie, a 25-year Wishbone veteran.
"That sums it up, " said Red Wagner, who has put in 40 years here, enough to figure he should own a piece of the place.
But it's not just the food that keeps customers so loyal. Everybody says the same thing: They've been coming here since donkeys could fly because the employees are so friendly, the place is so homey and George and Peggy are the finest people in the world.
A WISHBONE IS BORN
George and Peggy met over Formica during World War II. He was a lieutenant at the time, a pilot doing training in Denver; she was a waitress. They married the day after Valentine's Day in 1944. And then he went overseas.
After the war, George worked for Ford a few months, ran a restaurant with his younger brother in Wisconsin, then leased a gas station.
In 1951, encouraged by friends who lived here, he and Peggy drove up the Alaska Highway. They had two of their four children by then, plus a dog. George went to work in construction, and Peggy worked at a root beer stand.
After a few years of that, they moved to Arizona and went back into the restaurant business, opening a little place in Tucson called Brown's Drive Up.
"It didn't go, " George said.
So in 1955, back up they came.
They bought property on the edge of town -- "the boondocks, " as George puts it, at Fifth Avenue and Karluk Street -- built the Wishbone and gave the restaurant business one more shot.
"Of course, we had the usual worries of anybody starting a business, " he said.
Turns out there was no need for that.
"The first day we took in $80. The second day, $125. Then we went to $300 -- on Saturday, I believe it was. We were totally swamped. And on Sunday it was $460.
"At that time, why of course, coffee was 10 cents, a jumbo hamburger was 65 cents, a regular hamburger 40 cents, a milk shake 35 cents -- that kind of thing."
Things were looking pretty good after that first week. From then on, the business "grew and grew and grew."
So here they are 50 years later, serving up over 1,000 chickens a week, somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 a year. George is 83, Peggy soon to be 82. Where did the time go?
"I tell everybody I'm going to write a book, " George said. "I have the title; it's called 'Suddenly 83.' All I've got to do is fill out the rest of the book."
EXTENDED FAMILY OPERATION
All four of George and Peggy's children -- Pat, John, Lorelei and Corky -- did time at the Wishbone. As the oldest, Pat Heller blazed the trail, peeling 200 pounds of potatoes a day with a peeling gadget, finishing them with a hand peeler and running them through a slicer. That was before the Wishbone made the switch to frozen fries.
Heller works for Gov. Frank Murkowski now. Corky lives in Utah and Lorelei in Oregon. So John is the only one still around, having worked at the Wishbone "forever and a day." His business card reads, "#1 Son."
Not only did the Brown kids get their first work experience here, so did a lot of their friends. So did a lot of customers' kids and their kids' friends.
That's another thing you hear over and over about this place. In a business known for high turnover, Wishbone employees tend to move in for good. Like Carolina Stacey, a daytime manager, who's been working here 11 years -- since she was 16. She can't imagine working anywhere else.
"I LOVE this place, " she said. You can tell she means it.
Relatively speaking, she's not even one of the old-timers. Because there are a whole slew of others in the 20-plus-years club: Alan Boita, Laura Sands, Dave Martinchick, Carolyn Malcolm, Heidi Heinrich, for starters.
Jean Morris, now retired, worked at the Wishbone for 33 years, mostly as a cook. And Agnes Wallace for 40 years. And that's just so far.
She started as a day waitress a few months after the place opened, back when George ran the grill, Peggy make the milk shakes and the Wishbone had only four tables and 11 stools at the counter. After coming and going a bit, she finally retired. So she thought. Four years ago, when her husband died, she decided to come back.
"It got me out of the house, " she said. "It was more for entertainment than anything."
At 75, she was doing just fine until she fell and broke her hip in early November. But that's still not the end of it.
"I'm looking forward to going back as soon as I can, " she said.
Employees stay this long because George and Peggy are so good to them, they say. They keep them happy, which keeps their customers happy, which keeps the books happy.
And George and Peggy share the profits.
"We give them 40 percent after everything's been paid up, " George said.
A little perspective from his son Corky: "At this company I worked for in Utah, my Christmas bonus was a $5 gift card. They (his folks) would give away $30,000 to $40,000 in Christmas bonuses."
"We are literally treated like family, " said Heinrich, daytime manager. "And they're right next to us, cleaning tables and doing everything. They never ask their employees to do something they wouldn't do themselves.
"There's nobody aside from my parents who have influenced me more in my life than George and Peggy, " she said. "And Carolina (Stacey) can say the same thing."
It's only by a stroke of luck that Heinrich ended up at the Wishbone in the first place. She was about to turn 16 and was out searching for her first job when she walked into a downtown dress shop to ask about applying. The woman running the place basically told her to get lost.
Heinrich walked out and plunked down on a big rock that used to sit outside the J.C. Penney parking garage. And that's where Peggy found her.
"She just happened to be in that dress shop, " Heinrich said. "I guess I must have looked so dejected. She ran outside and offered me a job because she felt so bad about how that woman had treated me.
"I've been there ever since."
That was 26 years ago.
STIRRING THINGS UP
As nice as it sounds, to say the Lucky Wishbone hasn't changed a lick in 50 years isn't quite right. In 1990, George decided to ban smoking in his restaurant.
You would have thought he'd decided to switch from chicken to tofu. This was way before other businesses and workplaces did this.
"We were right behind Northwest Airlines, " he said. "I said, by god, if they can do it for four hours in an airplane, they can sure do it for a half an hour in here."
In all their years of marriage, it was the worst disagreement George and Peggy had ever had. Peggy was scared they'd lose customers. But George had too many friends die of lung cancer. So he laid down the law.
"Also, I just didn't want to empty any more damn ashtrays, " he said.
He posted warnings of the new policy well in advance and set the date for April 19, which would have been his mother's 88th birthday, only she died the month before.
"Then Peggy and I got out of town. We went to Puerto Rico for about a month so we wouldn't have to listen to all the smokers giving us heck about it."
They did lose customers. "Oh yeah, they were mad." But they gained a bunch too, people who heard about it and came in to show support. The day after the ban went into effect was the biggest day they'd had in two years.
"Father knows best, " George said with a grin.