In a world of Walmarts and chain restaurants, it is good to have a few outliers. If you are experiencing Applebee’s angst or you’re in a Carlos O’ Kelley’s conundrum and you are looking to eat some local fare the Olpe Chicken House could be your place.

Located nine miles south of Emporia on East Highway 99 is the 52-year-old slice of local history. You can read positive restaurant reviews of the Olpe Chicken House on tripadvisor, mytravelguide.com, and americantwons.com. The Chicken House was even featured in the “Town and Country” magazine some years back.

The thing is I don’t think about restaurant reviews when I am at the Chicken House. I don’t even think about chicken. I think about my maternal grandma Mary Lucille. The chicken house was “our place.” We went there almost every time I came to visit her-which was often. I think she liked it because she recognized and chatted with so many people.

I still visit the Olpe Chicken House, but I go without my grandma now. I like eating there because it helps me channel up memories of Grandma Mary. In the physical sense she is very much alive. But my family lost her a couple years back. Alzheimer’s.

A lifelong Emporia area resident, she started out at a one room school house south of town. She rode a horse to school as there were no buses. She later graduated from Emporia State with a degree in teaching. She saw a lot of things take place in Emporia over the years.

Like many in her generation, she struggled with the demographic changes that took place in Emporia with the arrival of commercial meat packing plants and migrant workers. “I’m going to have to learn Spanish just to live in Emporia” she’d say. She believed-perhaps correctly that some of Emporia’s new residents had immigration/citizenship issues that were not entirely in order.

Upon the celebration of her 80th year, my family held a birthday party for her at a hotel in town. I jocularly threatened to pass out fliers printed in Spanish at every factory plant in Emporia inviting workers to her party. There’s going to be all these Hispanic people saying “we’ve known Mary Lucille since she was 75” I said. She laughed and promised to “shape up”.

In third grade for grandparent’s day I painted a picture of her holding a small electric saw cutting brush on her farm. Chainsaw Grandma says “die tree” the caption read.  She laughed at that too.

Mary Lucille is approaching 90 now. She doesn’t have any more trips to the Chicken House left in her – her body having outlived her brain.

But I like to think of her as a young girl galloping off to that schoolhouse.  A lone rider silhouetted against a Kansas sky.

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