Brady’s Chuckwagon – Part 2

1972 Brady's Chuckwagon Menu
(Note that Wild West Sarsaparilla is on there!)

Here's the second part of the article about Brady's Chuckwagon Catering that ran in the Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine back on July 30, 1972.

In this portion of the article, supervisor Marge Gender explains how one chuckwagon employee found romance. We also learn how John Brady was able to brew and stock his trucks with so much coffee.

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Teamsters in hotpants (Part 2)

Photostory by Tom Kaib

Marge Gencur and John L. Brady

Romance? It happens. Marge recalls one girl who was on the job only a month before she married a customer. “But I think she took the job just for looking. It’s not good for business.”

So besides the faint prospect or long odds of romance, the trucks carry The Plain Dealer, peanuts, cough drops, Alka-Seltzer (no reflection on the chow), chewing and smoking tobacco, cigarettes, flint and lighter fluid, Kleenex, hair combs and gloves. Pie is 35 cents a slice – ample, home-baked and luscious.

Although some of the trucks come with refrigeration units, Brady disconnects them and uses crushed ice for cooling. “Too much trouble with the units,” says Marge Gencur. And although she can’t and won’t discount the sales persuasion of a Midge Gore, Linda McIntire, Helen Bennett, Harry Bell, etc., Marge maintains the food quality helps immensely. Coffee is a key. Many caterers brew the coffee right on the trucks.

Marge and Brady feel that in order to keep water hot enough to brew coffee, you necessarily burn it too strong. So almost all of the coffee from Brady’s is brewed at the commissary (capacity is 160 gallons every 15 minutes) and pumped to the trucks through a metered system designed by Brady. This is also ordered ahead by the driver, say 11 or maybe 25 gallons. The pumping capacity is five gallons every 18 seconds. Only Harry brews his own. He simply sells too much to carry it all pre-brewed. But he has a walk-through van specially-designed and can turn out pretty acceptable mud. Trucks driven by most of the girls are pickup-mounted, so they have to get out in the weather, which in winter tends to turn hotpants into ski pants over a layer or two of thermal underwear, which makes for a whole new ball game, and the big cheap doughnut guys get their at-bats.

But then you can imagine how much ice and snow and wind a really sincere molasses-dipped “thanks hon, have a nice day” is going to melt.

Gabby Hayes and Walter Brennan, eat your hearts out.

Right on, wagonmistress!

Helen Bennett of Lorain serves workers at Ohio Brass on W. 150th Street

Brady’s Chuckwagon – Part 1

Food trucks seem to be all the rage these days, providing a wide variety of delicious and inexpensive foods to communities full of people in a hurry.

How did food trucks get so popular? Well, sometimes it's been pointed out that food trucks have their roots in the old chuck wagons that served the cattlemen.

That's why it's very appropriate for me to post this article about Brady's Chuckwagon Catering that ran in the Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine back on July 30, 1972.

It's an interesting article that once again shows how John L. Brady of Brady's Restaurant fame was way ahead of his time with his fleet of mobile food trucks. (I have a lot of great, new material about Brady's Restaurant and John Brady's other business endeavors that will be showing up here on the blog soon.)

The Plain Dealer article is kind of long, so I'm serving it up in two digestible portions.

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Teamsters in hotpants

Photostory by Tom Kaib

Midge Gore

There’s a Teamsters unit in Lorain that tends toward blue eyes, various hues of blonde hair and, during the warm season, hotpants. Local 52, Bakery Drivers, during this season, pushes a lot of doughnuts and coffee at plant gates and construction sites on Lake Erie’s south shore.

“It was just a fact of life in Lorain County,” says John L. Brady, “that a boy wouldn’t be caught dead car-hopping. He just wouldn’t and couldn’t make it. He would be laughed out of the county. And this is pretty similar, so I hired girls.”

“This” is Brady’s Chuckwagon Catering, Inc., a 20-route (and expanding) operation he started four years ago with one truck after growing up in his parents’ restaurant business. The girl driver idea is working so well it’s driving competing caterers to such ploys as offering gigantic doughnuts at giveaway prices. But it’s hard to compete with someone like Mildred (Midge) Gore of Vermilion when she jumps out of her little red truck at a stone crusher in the Flats or a construction site at 12th and Superior. She’s a tiny little thing with sky blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair (see cover), a molasses-dipped voice with a Logan County, West Virginia, lilt. She’s filled out like an 18-year-old beauty queen and she can’t not smile.

When Midge hits the changer on her belt and turns her sky blues up into a hardhat with a really sincere “thanks hon, have a nice day,” he looks like he’s been soaking in a vat of Jurgens [sic] lotion for two months. The big cheap doughnut guys don’t stand a chance. One Mohawk high iron worker wants Midge carrying his banner. He put a “Think Indian” sticker on her truck bumper.

But no go. She’s got a husband who runs a service station and races cars and three children, which is why she doesn’t mind getting up at 3 in the morning to drive from Vermilion to Lorain, order her stores, load her truck and be in Cleveland by 5 a. m. That way she can be home by 2 or 3 in the afternoon and be with the kids. And a hard-working smiler like Midge can turn $200 to $250 a week on her salary-with-commission, John Brady says. But the average for 19 girls and one guy is $150 to $200. The one guy is Harry Bell of Grafton, a long-time veteran catering driver who can hold his own with the female competition.

Marge Gencur, another blue-eyed blonde who is a former driver and now supervises routes and is a sales representative, calls Bell “the only rooster in the henhouse.” This is not always true, because Nick Taliano, a college student, fills in during his summer vacations. But mostly it’s girls, in all shapes, sizes and ages. And Brady is happy. His girls, plus Harry, are pushing 9,000 to 10,000 sandwiches a week and 1,500 salads and casseroles. He has between 35 and 40 employees, including a mechanic, and prepares all but the canned food, buns and some doughnuts in the building that used to house his parents’ restaurant at 200 Leavitt Road in Lorain.

He recently went into pizza and has a chicken palace next door. The chuckwagon menu is almost unbelievably extensive and each driver orders what she knows her route wants. She’ll even take special orders for the next day. The top is a half of barbecued chicken or a reuben sandwich at 99 cents. Sometimes there’s even steak, lasagna, beef stroganoff and haddock and flounder. Breakfasts for 75 cents are three scrambled eggs, waffle and coffee with bacon or sausage. It’s all cooked at the commissary and kept at 140 degrees by propane-fueled ovens on the trucks.

“At 140 degrees, everything stays moist,” Marge Gencur says. It’s very similar to airline food operations."

Marge sets up the routes, teaches drivers the geography and trouble shoots. She’s the one who scouts around for the four or five services stations in each city that will make a road call to fix a flat or get a stalled truck going. The drivers just carry the phone numbers, they don’t have to worry about repairs.

Next: Brady's unique solution for preparing and delivering hot, fresh coffee

The Pizza Puppies Mascot!

Here's something I didn't know existed: a Brady's Restaurant ad featuring an advertising mascot for Pizza Puppies™, the special hotdog creation that was covered with pizza sauce and melted cheese.

The ad above appeared in the Lorain Journal on June 30, 1958.

I like the chef's hat-wearing doggie mascot. He looks sorta like a cousin to Rover, the Dog 'N Suds mascot.

Anyway, I'm continually impressed by the amount of advertising that Brady's Restaurant did in the Lorain Journal in the 1950s and 60s. It really imprinted the restaurant's name in the consciousness of the local citizenry to the point that even thought the restaurant has been closed for decades, I still get asked if I'm related to the Bradys who ran Brady's Restaurant.

Brady's Restaurant Ad – May 12, 1958

It's been a while since I featured Brady's Restaurant in this blog.

So, to rectify that oversight, here's an ad that ran on May 12, 1958 in the Lorain Journal – 55 years ago this weekend. The theme of the ad is the return to 1946 prices (1946 being the year the well-remembered restaurant opened).

Remember the discussion about Pizza Puppies back here? Well in this ad, John Brady's unique hot dog creation is front and center with its own logo. And he even spells out the recipe for those of you trying to figure out what to make for dinner tonight.

I love the 1950s stylized cartoon heads with their enthusiastic smiles in this ad.

Brady's Restaurant Ad – October 1957

Here's a cute ad for Brady's Restaurant (one of my favorite topics for this blog, natch) that ran in the Lorain Journal on October 30, 1957 – 55 years ago today.

I love the stylized black cat clip art.

The ad hearkens back to an era where the Halloween parade was a pretty big deal in Lorain, along with the Downtown window-painting contest. Things like that really united the city back then.

As for Brady's, I'm constantly impressed by the creativity that went into the restaurant's promotions (such as the "Lucky Chair" mentioned in the ad). The owners ran a lot of ads and the restaurant must have really achieved top-of-mind awareness for so many people to remember it fondly.

Easter at Brady's Restaurant 1958

Here's a couple of newspaper ads from the pages of the Lorain Journal from April 1958, promoting Brady's Restaurant, the late, great eatery on Leavitt Road. The above ad invites you to have Easter dinner there, while the below ad suggests that if you decide to eat at home on the holiday, why not enjoy one of Brady's pies?

Both ads feature great Easter clip-art, as well as maintaining the distinctive Brady's Restaurant branding!

Name the Previous Restaurants at this Leavitt Road Location!

Here's yet another restaurant whose building was previously home to a series of both forgotten and well-known businesses. Today it is the Marco's Pizza at 2130 Leavitt Road in Lorain, but you may have forgotten some of the previous restaurants (and even some non-food businesses) that called that location home.

Fortunately for you, I'm here to remind you!

Believe it or not, the very first restaurant at this location was Minnie Pearl's Chicken. For those of you unfamiliar with this popular country performer from the Grand Old Opry, that's her at left, in front of one of her franchised fried chicken restaurants.

The one on Leavitt Road first appeared in the Lorain phone book in 1969. It had a sign just like the one in the photo, and I remember as a kid wondering who Minnie Pearl was. But then I saw her on Hee Haw and then it all made sense.

Unfortunately for Minnie, she didn't have much time to compete with Colonel Sanders in Lorain, because the restaurant was gone from that location by 1971. The story of the demise of the chain due to some financial problems is told in a well-written article in Franchise Times Magazine which you can read here.

But the chicken fryers weren't turned off at that location just yet.

From 1971 until around 1976, 2130 Leavitt was the address of local favorite Brady's Chuckwagon Chicken House. As I noted back here, "chuckwagon" fried chicken had been on the menu for years at Brady's Restaurant.

Around 1977, the building was listed as vacant.

By around 1983, a new tenant was in the building and maybe even using the same fryers: Mister Donut. But that didn't last long, because the building was empty again in the 1984 and 1985 city directories.

Lorain Auto Sales became the first non-food related business at that location, being listed in the 1986 city directory. Buy Rite Used Cars followed, in the 1987 directory.

By 1988, the cars were out and the place went vacant again.

Around 1989, someone had a good idea: why not sell pizza at that location? Two Jeff's Pizza appeared in the 1989 City Directory, and by 1991 the twosome was replaced by Marco's Pizza, which has been there ever since.

Brady's Restaurant & Pizza Puppies

One of the interesting things about doing a blog like this is the fact that many people don't read what I've written until months, or perhaps even years, later. Thus, even if some topic generates only yawns right now, it might result in comments or feedback at some point in the future (which makes me happy that the topic wasn't a dud)!

A good example of this is the ad (at left) for Brady's Restaurant, which ran as part of a 3-part series back here in November 2009, discussing the history of this popular, well-remembered business. You'll notice that the ad very prominently mentions that the restaurant is "Home of Pizza Puppies."

I had mentioned that I had no idea what Pizza Puppies were, and that if I ever found out, I would let you know. Well, that time has come, you lucky reader.

I recently received a very nice email from Dave Shook, who has kindly allowed me to quote him. Here is his long-awaited explanation about Pizza Puppies:

"On one of your pages there were pictures of Brady’s Restaurant along with some newspaper ads. You made the remark that, if you found out what a pizza puppy was you would pass on the information. I, like my brother before me, worked at Brady’s. He worked at the restaurant, as among other things, as a car hop. Twelve years later I went to work for John at Brady’s Dairy Land and often helped out at the restaurant.

The pizza puppy was a hot dog, always deep fried, in a toasted bun, with a pretty decent pizza sauce and cheese (maybe cheese wiz?). It was great! John invented the dish and even patented the name - but not the recipe."

Thanks, Dave, for sharing your memories of working at Brady's and solving the mystery!

I don't know about you, but that recipe sounds pretty good, almost a cousin to a Chili Dog. I may just have to rustle up one at home sometime (and send a royalty check to Mr. Brady!) 

1968 Lorain Part 3

Here's another photo from the 1968 Greater Lorain Chamber of Commerce booklet. It's a great photo of something I've blogged about before, Brady's Restaurant. (Love that name!) It was located at 2200 Leavitt Road.

The booklet text reads, "One of the most popular restaurants in the Lorain area is Brady's, which has served 'Quality Foods Since 1964.' Brady's is famed for the finest "Chuckwagon" fried chicken in Lorain County, delicious home-made pies, and home-made ice cream and donuts fresh from Brady's own Dairyland and Donut Shop. Industrial catering, residential home delivery, and carry-out service available at all times."

I blogged about Brady's back in November in a 3-part series that started here, continued here and wrapped up here. To my family, Brady's was a nice place to celebrate special occasions.

I'm not sure why the above ad copy seems to indicate that the place was in business since 1964, since the roots of the restaurant go back to 1946. If Mr. Brady has his Brady's Good Food wagon out this summer, I'll have to get some of the inside scoop, Brady-to-Brady.

Brady's Restaurant Part 3

Around 1970, catering was introduced as part of the business. This new enterprise took its name from the popular "chuckwagon" fried chicken that had been on the Brady's Restaurant menu since the early 1960's.

The catering business was called Brady's Chuckwagon Catering, and shortly after the restaurant became known as Brady's Chuckwagon Chicken House.

A 1973 ad is shown above.

Around the mid-1970's, things began to wind down. By 1975, only the catering business was still being advertised in the phone book. And by the time the 1978-79 phone book came out, neither the catering business or the restaurant was still listed.

For a little while in the early 80's, the restaurant made an apparent comeback as Brady's Coffee Shoppe. But that didn't last long.

Since then, John Brady has kept the spirit of Brady's Restaurant alive with his Brady's Good Food trailer, which in past years has been set up in different locations around Lorain as a seasonal enterprise. Painted bright orange and rimmed with lights, the trailer is a beacon for hungry Lorainites looking for – what else? – good food.

I didn't see Mr. Brady (who is a nice guy) out with his trailer this past summer, and I'm sure that I'm not the only person who missed his excellent corn dogs! But here's hoping he and his family are doing well and that we haven't seen the last of his restaurant on wheels. It's a real Lorain landmark!

Brady's Restaurant Part 2

By 1958, Chester L. Brady had passed away and John L. Brady was manager of Brady's Restaurant. A 1958 Lorain telephone book ad (above) listed several innovations, including outside drive-in electronic car service, as well as delivery anywhere in Lorain. (The ad also indicated that Brady's Restaurant was the Home of Pizza Puppies; I don't know what Pizza Puppies are, but if I ever find out, I'll let you know!)

Also seen in the 1958 ad is the restaurant's distinctive logo lettering.

Going into the 1960's, the business was still evolving. In 1965, it was listed in the City Directory as Brady's Restaurant & Dairyland, and in 1967 it was joined by Brady's Dairyland & Donut Shop on W. 21st Street nearby.

Whatever the restaurant was called in the mid-1960's, I remember that my family stopped there at least a few times, for ice cream or a snack. I'm sure we enjoyed the novelty of eating at a restaurant 'named after us'!

Brady's Restaurant Part 1

I mentioned the old Yeager's Acres restaurant in a blog last week, and decided that long-gone restaurants might make a good string of topics. So first up in this series is a well-known landmark Lorain restaurant with a great name that I actually remember eating at: Brady's Restaurant.

Although Bradys in Lorain County are now a dime-a-dozen (or a dime-a-Bunch), back in the 1960's there were only two Brady families on the west side of Lorain: the Bradys who owned the restaurant and us. And we aren't related. But it was incredible how many times I was asked over the years if we were the ones who owned the restaurant.

Brady's Restaurant was located at 2210 Leavitt Road, at the intersection with 21st Street. (The small white building is no longer there, having been finally torn down a year or two ago.)

The 1955 newspaper ad shown above provides a nice early history of the business. (Click on it for a larger version.) The ad reveals that the restaurant opened its doors in November of 1946 and was originally owned by Chester L. Brady and his wife Esther. The business appeared in the Lorain City Directory as Brady's Drive In. The restaurant's advertising mascot was a whimsical cook on a unicycle, most appropriately since the restaurant was in a fast-paced period of growth and innovation.