Thursday, April 27, 2023

A Cold Time On The Old Town

We have been eating at Shoney's in Oak Ridge, Tennesse since at least 1989. We say it is the best Shoney's in the world!

On our first visit to Beechfork Holiness Church, I preached Homecoming with dinner on the ground in June 1988. When we went back for revival in 1989, we began our long relationship with the Oak Ridge Shoney's.

For many, many years, we ate at Shoney's every single night of revival and twice on Sunday. All of the waitresses knew what we wanted to drink and what we wanted to eat most nights. Most of those revivals lasted two weeks too.

For our recent revival, we stayed in the Holiday Inn Express right behind Shoney's. Guess where we every day for lunch? Pastor Herman and Sis. Margaret Woods live about twenty minutes away and they drove to meet us for lunch each day and we loved every moment of it.




We had good meals, and great fellowship. We made wonderful memories and laughed about a lot of old memories through the years.

This is just one of our Shoney's memories. One Friday night after church many years ago, there were at least 30 of us in the back room at Shoney's eating and talking and laughing. There was a roar going on. It is no wonder they put us in the back room.

A brand new waitress was standing at my back preparing to hand something over my left shoulder. She made a sudden move and accidentally dumped the tray on me and my suit and tie.

The new waitress was trying to reach a drink to the table and knocked over the ketchup bottle on her tray. The falling ketchup bottle was going to knock over another drink on the tray so she instinctively tried to catch it. While trying to catch it, she knocked over a FULL pitcher of ice water in the process.

The pitcher of water hit my shoulder and ice and water poured all the way down the front of me. All I knew at the time was that I was suddenly soaking wet and very cold. The room went silent, I breathed in deeply through my teeth in shock and after a heartbeat or two, the room erupted in laughter.

We laughed for ten solid minutes.

When we arrived where we were staying lat that night I was not only wet, but completely sticky. I had not only taken a full pitcher of ice water, down the front of my suit, but a couple of glasses of sweet tea too!😂

No wonder we love that particular Shoney's so much!

Thank you for stopping by today.

Davy