Starting the day in Dairy

Cafe, feed store central to life for local residents

By LEE JUILLERAT
H&N Regional Editor

April 23, 2008

It’s 6:55 a.m. and the lineup has begun.

Two, then three, pickup trucks angle off Highway 140 and park outside O’Connor’s Irish Pub and Diner, where the drivers wait patiently for Shelly Knight to flick the “open” light on at the Dairy eatery.

“They know the rule,” Knight explains two hours later, after the morning rush for cups of coffee has died down. “We open the door at 7.”

“That’s what time they open the door, so that’s what time we get here,” quips O’Connor’s regular Willie Rajnus, a potato farmer who lives just down the road.

Rajnus, 69, wasn’t the first one in the door. Don Russell, who lives in Klamath Falls and commutes to Bonanza, where he manages the Bonanza Irrigation District, walked in, sat at his usual stool at the counter and gulped down a steaming cup of java.

“I’ve been coming through Dairy since 1960,” the 66-year-old Russell says in between cups. “It’s actually a very nice part of the world out here.”

Eighteen miles east of Klamath Falls , Dairy is a place most people drive past while on their way somewhere else. But because it’s spring, and farmers are preparing fields for plantings of hay, alfalfa and potatoes or ferrying loads of hay to buyers in the Willamette Valley , the diner is humming.

“Rural restaurants do real well,” says Randy O’Connor, the diner’s owner and cook. “You give people good food and they won’t drive to town.”

ABOVE: Waitress Shelly Knight pours a cup of coffee for O’Connor’s regular Don Russell.

The Dairy eatery, which O’Connor has owned for five years, is the eighth restaurant of his career. He started in Southern California and moved north a decade ago to Bonanza. He also makes and sells fresh pizza at the Bonanza General Store, but the Dairy diner is his meal ticket.

“I’ll definitely retire with this one,” the 56-year-old O’Connor said.

At the feed store

Getting ready for the day, too, is Robert Rice, Dairy’s unofficial mayor and the owner of Rice Feed and Supply Store.

This morning, before his cup of O’Connor’s coffee, he stuffed bags of fertilizer in a car trunk, weighed several tractor-trailer rigs and rang up sales from locals buying starter fluid and other necessities. The shop’s shelves are lined with fan belts, work gloves, hoses, mice bait, tools, motor oil, pipe fittings, soft drinks and batteries.

“Our main business is in the spring of the year when they’re planting grain seed,” Rice explains. “We’re also the information center. People call up and say, ‘What’s so and so’s cell phone number? Or they tell me somebody’s got a horse or a cow out, or ask, ‘Where’s the ambulance going?’ ”

Rice, 63, grew up in Dairy and at the store, which his father, Don, bought in 1949. As the story goes, “He saw the building, stopped to get a pack of cigarettes and left owning it.”

Rice, like others in the small community, lived and worked elsewhere before returning. He took over the business when his father died in 1992 and has no plans to leave.

Gary Urbach fires up his tractor in Dairy after a trip to Rice Feed and Supply.

He and his wife, Cindy, have a house nearby, but it might be argued that Rice lives in his store, which is open Mondays through Saturdays from 7 a.m. to “at least 6 because there’s people coming home from town and they don’t want to stop in Klamath Falls. Sunday, that’s the day I catch up on my paperwork.”

Last April, Rice sold 100,000 pounds of grain seed, but this year, because on lingering winter weather, he has yet to sell a sack. In January he ordered 280,000 pounds of different types of seed that will arrive in the coming weeks.

“Hopefully, it’ll all go out the door,” he said.

Between customers, Rice grabs his coffee cup and strolls to the diner, his golden lab, Jack, sauntering close behind. Rice pours himself a cup of coffee while Jack winds around the counter, where O’Connor is waiting with this morning’s treat: Scraps of ham.

The usuals

When he sees Sherry Walker’s SUV pulls up, O’Connor slaps a sausage patty on the grill. “Everybody has things they order,” says the 38-year-old Knight, who during her six months at the diner has learned that Walker ’s routine is a sausage patty and egg. But she and O’Connor each raise an eyebrow when Walker instead orders two scrambled eggs.

Walker and her husband, Dick, who was among the first batch of coffee drinkers and has been known to call his wife the “Dairy Queen,” used to farm hay and grain, “but we’re pretty-well retired now.”

Fully retired is Al Jones, who bought 55 acres in 1980 and farmed on the weekends while working at Kingsley Field. “I was looking for a piece of land to move my family to,” he explains

Jones, 65, quit farming in 1998, the year he retired from Kingsley Field, and now leases his land.

Heading to work

Because Rajnus — his friends explain the name backwards is Sun Jar — is still farming, he finishes his breakfast and heads to work. Born in Klamath Falls and raised in Malin, at one time he planted 500 acres of potatoes, but now has 100 acres.

“It’s been a pretty good year. Nothing like the other commodities,” Rajnus says, “but it’s been all right.”

Bob and Mary Tofell stop by. Because it’s crowded, Mary comfortably plops herself on Bob’s lap. Bob, who was born in Merrill, remembers a time when Dairy had several small 50-cow dairies. His family dairy had up to 150 cows in the late 1940s and early ’50s.

“Most of that milk went to town,” Bob says. “When we started, we milked cows by hand and separated the cream.”

Unsuccessful retirement

Bob, 69, tried to retire last year, but ended up planting 300 acres of grain for himself. He’s been busy repairing equipment and preparing for this year’s planting, which he plans to have done by mid-May.

He and Mary, who after much deliberation decided she’s 66, estimate 400 to 500 people live within a five-mile radius of the diner.

“And there’s more coming,” Mary says. “People who want to get out of town.”

Back at the feed store, Rice is scrambling in and out, weighing trucks and helping customers like Richard Dahl of Sprague River, who’s buying a couple of quarts of anti-freeze.

Dahl, 53, has lived in the area since the 1960s. When Rice hustles out to operate the weigh scales, Dahl reveals that Rice keeps whiskey and other alcohol behind the counter — “and it’s purely medicinal.”

A time for socializing

It’s bitterly cold, but because it’s morning, truckers and customers use the store’s wood stove to cure what’s ailing them. Among them are brothers Alan and Craig Urbach. Together they farm alfalfa and grain, this year on 450 acres of their own land and another 200 acres of lease land.

Their father, John, moved to the Klamath Basin in the 1930s to pick potatoes, and he ended up staying. After serving in World War II, the Urbachs homesteaded near Yuma , Ariz. , before returning in 1953.

Coming home

“I’ve been back almost 30 years,” says Alan, 60, who has lived and worked elsewhere. “My dad was about the age I am now and wanted to get someone younger in farming. I just really enjoy the lifestyle. You’re your own boss. Independent.”

Gary , 57, worked other jobs before returning. He and his wife, Betty, and their family, live at the farm while Alan and his wife, Carol, and their families, live nearby. Their father died in March 2007. One of Alan’s son-in-laws has shown an interest in continuing the family farming tradition.

By late morning, the Urbachs, Tofell, Rajnus and others are getting their farms ready for planting. Rice is busy, handling a steady stream of customers and trucks. The pickup trucks are gone from O’Connor’s, but they’ll return for lunch and dinner.

And come morning most of them will be lined up at 7, ready for a new day. 

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Source:  http://www.heraldandnews.com/articles/2008/04/23/featured_story/

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