"With every adversity comes the seed of equivalent or greater benefit."  

--W. Clement Stone

The Junction Burger has been another popular product.  It is a 6 ounce burger with a half pound of French fries on a big toasted bun with pickle, tomato, lettuce, cheese, and onion.  This is an item that is sold all day long, seven days per week.

After about a year, we started staying open on Sundays and served breakfast after 4:00 p.m. which proved to be another favorite, and one of our biggest days.  

Several years ago, we started a fish supper on Friday nights.  Alaskan Pollock or Gulf shrimp with a baked potato or fries, dinner salad or cole slaw, and home-made bread or biscuit sells for only $3.95.  This has been a super drawing card, with people coming for miles around for Friday night's supper.  The real plus is that the same people come back Sunday at noon, or other times for birthdays and special suppers and parties.

Erma Fuller, Wilbur Ray, Wilma Hughes, Betty Lee, Dennis Brown, and Bob Hayden

The Saturday night entertainment was an accident that proved very successful.  We had a group entertain for our first anniversary at the cafe, and sales doubled those two weeks.  Later, we did it again for Betty's birthday, and sales doubled again.  So, we started doing it weekly and it has been a special time for a lot of people who just never miss Saturday night at the Junction Cafe!

Real potatoes, home-made beef or sausage gravy make the base for each meal, seven days a week, with home-baked pies, bread pudding, cherry cheesecake and the large cinnamon rolls and large or small strawberry shortcake.

Over twenty employees, some of whom have been with us since the beginning, are the key to great home-cooked meals and service that has made the Junction Cafe a great place to eat and meet with friends and relatives.  However, Betty always makes the ham balls (a Sunday noon favorite) and the home-made noodles for beef or chicken and noodles.  Our shortcake recipe is the same today as it was nine years ago, as are many of the other recipes.

The horse ranch, Rockin' Diamond, and the Cafe are just a half mile apart and have been a very good dual business.  There are times that we are working with a newborn foal and then we clean up and help with the noon meal at the Cafe.  But the proximity to each other helps it to be possible.

We have both shown horses a great deal.  At one show in Pickering, Missouri, we came home with nine 1st place trophies.  Betty showed Lucky Bar Step in many shows in Western Pleasure, and then later showed several younger horses very successfully as well.  Then we won the Two Year Old Snaffle Bit at Maryville's 4-Rivers Futurity and went on to win the big Two Year Old Futurity at Des Moines.  In 1998, we got involved in cutting with the horses we had been raising and selling for years.  We found that they were versatile, as we won the Cutting Futurity in 1998, 1999, and 2000!

For now, the Cafe takes the big part of our time, but we still raise twenty good colts yearly and sell them on the web.  We just don't have the time to commit to be gone to sales or shows as we used to.  

Everette Lee has used show photos, prints, and trophies to decorate the Cafe.

The Cafe has been a fun time to see our customers and friends.  Some we see daily, and some just once per year.  It is a special time each day!  We have customers that live in northern towns and who pass through to visit family in Kansas City.  But always, they stop while coming and going, and have become just like our home-town people.  We look forward to seeing them.  We also have customers that come several times a week from Shenandoah, Maryville, Clarinda, Corning, and other towns.  They come for suppers, family reunions, and parties.

Our customers are all special to us!

--Everette, Betty, and Chad Lee