Café closing changes community rhythm

NAPLES, TEXAS – Opening at 6 a.m., Nett’s Restaurant was a six-day-a-week operation, a part of the rhythm of the start of another day. There was profit in Friday’s fish fry. The other days covered overhead and paid Billie Boyd, the cook who came with the place.

On days that made her fantasize about retiring, which had become more frequent in recent years, Jeannette Ennis hadn’t noticed a line of buyers beating their way to the door. Just locking up and walking off was the only clear path.

So she didn’t.

Looking at that just right, which means appreciating irony, she could make it funny.

“Back in the day,” she said, “before the interstate opened, this place was a deal.”

Call it providence.

Fate.

That phone call out of the blue, corporate location hunters picking the hill where the restaurant overlooks U.S. 67 as the next location for a combination Dollar Tree and Family Dollar store.

After a 30-year run waiting tables, 26 of those being after she bought the place, “I got really lucky,” she said, less a grand scheme, more what happened next.

Life’s like that.

One Saturday in 1991 Virgil’s wife called and asked if she could fill in for a girl who wasn’t going to be in to work Sunday’s lunch. So she did. And she never left.

Time was, the restaurant was part of a bigger idea.

Before I-30, when U.S. 67 was a leg of the most traveled east-west route across Texas, Naples community leaders pulled together a band of investors to build a motel. They incorporated. They pooled their money. They pitched the plan at civic clubs.

 

“Inn stock sale over $70,000,” read the headline in the May 10, 1962 Naples Monitor.

“That is a gain of $22,000 in the past week. The goal is $82,000 – the down payment on a half million dollar motor hotel,” the story said.

Listed by name and business, four new investors were in at the $1,000 level. Broken down in increments, the lists of names got longer at $500 and longer again at $250. At the $100 level, 38 couples and individuals made front page news that week.

“A site for the motor hotel has not been picked,” the story said, but none was needed to catch the vision. The Monitor described a 24-hour coffee shop, three dining rooms and space for shops along corridors off the lobby, a place putting Naples on the map as a preferred stop on the road between Dallas and Texarkana.

The motel was still operating when Nette went to work for Virgil Kirkland. When the motel was running, the restaurant opened on Sundays.

Dane Shaw bought out Kirkland, “and talked me into buying it when he got ready to go,” Nette said.

The bank approved.

A week after hitting $70,000, stock sales “now are in smaller amounts and the windup of the campaign will require maximum effort,” the Monitor reported.

Project Chairman W.C. Sullivan made an appeal to investors to “try and sell others in order to close out the sale and get on with the project.”

Headquartered in Nacogdoches, Community Inns of America (CIA) surfaced in that story, managing work behind the scenes to open the facility “by next spring,” said the May 17, edition. A funeral home and a Texarkana couple were reported as new $1,000 investors. At the $100 level, individuals from Daingerfield, Maude, Mt. Pleasant, Daingerfield, Linden, and Wake Village were among another 24 buyers at $100.

 

“The motor hotel is a Chamber of Commerce project,” said the June 21, 1962 story announcing it to be built on a 32-acre tract west of the business district. It was to be managed by the CIA, “which began operation with the Fredonia Hotel in Nacogdoches.”

Rather than wrapping up, construction began in the summer of ’63.

“All signs are that the Naples Community Inn is nearing completion and will be open for business pretty soon now,” reported the April 9, 1964 Monitor.

“One of the most impressive groups of news people ever to gather in an East Texas town was here Friday night for a press party and opening of the Naples Community Inn. Radio, television and newspapers sent representatives,” said the May 14, 1964 paper.

Dressing up the press, the motel comped rooms and meals.

“Saturday, especially the young guests were fascinated watching Sam Dale’s mule pulling an old traditional slip as he leveled the patio area,” the newspaper said.

Years later, when the motel was auctioned off on the courthouse steps at Daingerfield, the Monitor’s November 26, 1970 edition reported that “agreements with Community Inns of America went sour soon after the motel began operation and CIA was relieved of its management responsibilities within a few months. The motel has been looked after by a board of unpaid directors since that time.

“The sale notice issued by the Dallas office of the Small Business Administration came as a surprise, though there had been private talks with representatives of government bureaus and elected public officials,” the paper said.

However it came to pass, the motel and the restaurant became separate businesses.

“For a while, before they had dorms at the community college, there were a lot of students living at the motel,” Nette said, remembering a phase of the motel operation before it became apartments.

Nette kept the women of the Naples Women’s Bridge Club, which met weekly at her restaurant, abreast of news about the pending sale to corporate.

“They’re moving their weekly game up town, to the tea room,” Nette said.

When word of Nette’s Restaurant’s closing rippled out, it went a long way. Men from the sheriff’s offices in Bowie and Franklin County came for the last fish fry and she was touched that a lawman from Daingerfield, who has moved away, heard about it and drove up from somewhere around Austin that Friday.

She didn’t put in a food order for that last week but she planned to stay open and cook as much as they could sell before quietly locking up and going home.

Balderdash, said friends. Instead of letting it happen that way, that last day it was customers and friends who switched roles and cooked at home, and brought cakes and pies and finger food they made and invited anybody wanting to take time to say bye.