Hello, Ruby Tuesday

I'm not exactly sure how the McDaniels ended up having real estate dealings with two of Blount County's Big Wigs: Ruby Tuesday and the Coach. But we did.

Granddaddy left the store to Mom. This was when I found out that Granddaddy owned it all along. He built it with O.K. Spears, the father of one of Daddy's good friends, Oliver Spears, who owned a furniture store out off East Broadway. Oliver's son, Tommy, one of my classmates, eventually bought the store from Sissy and me.

Daddy continued going to the store for several years after he retired. It was his home-away-from-home. As previously mentioned, it was a place where his friends and colleagues frequently stopped by to say hello and visit. In addition to the taxidermy and such, he eventually installed a couple of tables filled with Indian artifacts he had found over the course of his life time. He kept the row of chairs and the fridge filled with Coke. Though there was no T.V. in later years, everyone still sat in the chairs and chewed the fat.

However, eventually the Parkinson's prevented him from driving and he stopped being able to go down there on his own. At this point, he and Mom decided it was time to sell. Sissy, heroine of the family saga (I mean this), took it upon herself to get it ready. She spent hours cleaning and sorting and packing. She found a company to do an estate sale.

I just realized that I did not attend the estate sales for the store or the house. I mean, I knew I didn't but it just now hit me that I didn't. What was wrong with me?! (Well, I lived in California, that's what.)

I'm not sure how long after the estate sale happened that Ruby Tuesday expressed an interest in the building. But in January of 2003, they signed a twenty year lease with us and, thankfully, agreed to leave the underground gas storage tanks in place, rather than force Mom and Daddy to pay to have them removed. Soon after the lease was signed, RT began extensive, and expensive, renovations.

Although there are many things about that corporation that are baffling (it is run as a real strange mix of good ol' boy, home spun country-ness and high falutin' big spending that is part of a very strange business "plan"), I have to give them credit on the transformation of the store. They took a stark, former gas station and turned it into a gleaming modern showcase of a building with fancy fixtures and landscaping. We figure they spent a million dollars.

The building became an employee training center. The top floor was, for a while, not only their training kitchen but also their flagship restaurant, open to the public, a place to try out new dishes and ideas. The second and third floors were an employee recreation center, housing massage rooms and a gym.

Sissy, Mac, a friend of Mac's, and I had dinner there once. It was a very strange thing to be sitting in my Daddy's store drinking an alcoholic beverage. In addition to that unsettling oddness, Mac was in a very manic phase at that point in time. He brought his camera and, oblivious to the fact that the restaurant was full of diners, went around taking pictures of various and sundry architectural features. To say that the staff and diners looked at him with wariness, suspicion, and a touch of horror would be an understatement. Of course, attempts to get him to see that maybe he shouldn't be doing that without permission were met with his usual derisive dismissal of our concerns. What do we know? We're women!

The restaurant didn't last very long and now, for the past eight or nine years, the building just sits there, unused as far as the outside world can see. It's become Maryville's very own Willy Wonka Factory. No one is ever seen going in or coming out.

And thus the mysterious fates of our family buildings began.