Historic midtown restaurant Pappy's Place BBQ sold at auction. New owners say what's next

After an auction that crammed 40 people into its small storefront, Pappy's Place BBQ in central Springfield has a new owner — and the place won't be turned into a Jimmy John's, as previous owner Scott Keese speculated earlier this week.

Pappy's will remain Pappy's, said new owners Wayne and Susan Rader, shortly after an auction that lasted just a few minutes. It included about 15 potential buyers and ended with a $75,000 sale price for the restaurant, which has been open under one name or another since 1926. Local history aficionado Richard Crabtree told the News-Leader earlier this year that Pappy's has the oldest continuous liquor license in Springfield, dating back to 1933.

The sale must close within 45 days, said auctioneer Mike Easterly, and includes the Pappy's real estate, its trademarked name and its recipes. Easterly said that before the auction, previous owner Keese had promised to stay on for several weeks to ease the transition — provided that the new owners "kept it Pappy's."

"Pappy's is a piece of Springfield history," new co-owner Wayne Rader said shortly after the auction. "The whole interest was to keep it going, invest in it."

The Raders, who have bought and renovated a number of midtown Springfield properties (among them the seven-month-old Rader Manor Bed & Breakfast at 924 N. Main Ave.), said they would make a few changes to Pappy's, but nothing drastic.

"If you totally change it, it loses that touch," co-owner Susan Rader said. "We don't want to strip the Pappy's out of it."

The Raders said they plan to keep on the current Pappy's staff, which includes a chef who's been there at least 25 years.

"I have to keep the same staffers," said Wayne Rader. "I'd love for the staff to stay."

They will do some cleaning and minor renovations, the Raders said, and they plan to add a few new items to the menu.

Wayne Rader said he also wants to add catering business for community meetings and events to the Pappy's lineup.

Regular customer: 'They inherited me'

Attendees at the auction shared many fond memories of the place.

Shortly after the auction, Marcia Langley said she's been coming to Pappy's since the restaurant went under that name in 1970. She's a friend of the previous owners, the Keeses.

"They inherited me when they bought the place," Langley said.

Langley said she has eight siblings. All but one worked at Pappy's at one time or another, as did her mother, she said.

For her 40th birthday — 29 years ago — Langley's family and friends threw her a surprise party. She and six of her sisters danced on the Pappy's bar. The Garbanzo Bean Band was playing.

Even during 20 years when she lived and worked in Kansas City, she was a Pappy's regular. The place had a "gravitational pull" on her, she said.

"As far as sentiment goes, I have a lot of it," Langley said. "It's just one of those landmarks where old people like me just don't want it to disappear."

Langley praised the Raders for pledging to keep the Pappy's staff under the restaurant's new ownership.

"I think that's wonderful," she said.

Mike Dailey, Katherine Pratt and Dave Welker were there for the auction as well and said the new ownership's plans were "definitely" good news, in Pratt's words.

"It's like this," Welker said following the auction. "This is our community center with beer."

Welker has been a regular since '73. Dailey said he's been one for 10 or 15 years. Pratt pointed to her friends and said, "They're the real regulars."

A few minutes before the noon auction, Springfield resident Michael Shikany said he’d been coming to Pappy’s since he was a college student in 1972. He has fond memories of the owners from that time, Paul and Dorthy Ankrom. They were nicknamed "Pappy" and "Mammy."

“Dorthy Ankrom” — the co-owner nicknamed “Mammy” — would come out and say ‘you boys still hungry?’” Shikany recalled. “And she’d bring more food.”

Would Shikany buy the place at auction?

“I might,” he said. “I could. It’s very unlikely.”

Kelly Cox, owner of Comfort Zone Heating & Cooling, also planned to bid and expected the bidding to be competitive. A few bidders went back and forth as the price climbed from $40,000 to $75,000 during the auction.

Taylor Sparks and Clay Bailey, entrepreneurs in their 30s, said they weren't there to bid, just to watch history unfold.

A few minutes before the auction, Sparks pointed out a few spots along Pappy's walls — festooned with newspaper articles and other memorabilia — where it looked like plaques had been taken down from the wall.

Pappy's Place history

There's been a restaurant at the Pappy's Place site since 1926, but Pappy's overall history stretches back to approximately 1892, when the house at 941 N. Main Ave. was built, local real-estate agent Richard Crabtree said back in April.

Crabtree is a history buff who runs a Facebook group called Springfield, Missouri History, Landmarks & Vintage Photographs.

Crabtree said that in the last decade of the 19th century, Franklin "Frank" Plummer and his wife, Mary E. "Molly" Jones-Plummer, lived in the Main Avenue home. The Plummers moved from Mexico, Missouri to Springfield, where Frank worked for the Frisco Railway. They adopted a daughter, Mary Hellen Plummer.

Around 1900, Plummer's Grocery Store opened, and around 1904 Frank Plummer left the railroad to work at the store, according to Crabtree.

Frank Plummer died in 1911, at the age of 70. Around 1920, daughter Mary Hellen Plummer married George William Bills, who managed the Sansone Coffee Shop in downtown Springfield.

At some point between 1920 and 1925, Crabtree said, a shoe store opened in place of the grocery store. Two other restaurants came and went, Crabtree said, but in 1926, Bills left the coffee shop. He and Mary started George Bills Cafe at the location.

It was also known as The Main Street Eat Shop and Bills Cafe, Crabtree said.

"The restaurant has the oldest continuous beer by the drink license in Springfield," Crabtree said. "It was acquired by George William Bills in 1933 after Prohibition."

The Bills family continued to operate the cafe through the 1940s. George Bills died in 1952, and the restaurant on the site went through other names in the ensuing decades: Beezley's Cafe, Main Eat Shop, Leatha's Cafe and Doc's Cafe, Crabtree said.

In 1970, the "Pappy's" name came into play when Paul and Dorthy Ankrom — nicknamed "Pappy" and "Mammy" — started the Pappy's Place barbecue restaurant.

According to News-Leader archives, Dorthy Ankrom said that in the '70s, Pappy's sold "about 200 pounds of barbecue beef a day, back then."

She attributed their success in part to their sauce in a 1983 interview.

"I made the sauce," she told the News-Leader. "That was the thing. The folks just licked it up."

In 1978, Jon Moore acquired the restaurant, according to News-Leader archives. A News-Leader account from 1983 reported that at that time, the restaurant served breakfast, lunch and dinner ranging from $1.25 to $6.50.

Moore told the newspaper that Pappy's central Springfield location was "hit," or burglarized, about once a year at that time. But nobody ever stole from the trail of 10 one-dollar bills that "Pappy" Ankrom had posted on the walls leading from the front door past the bar toward the kitchen. (The day of the auction, dozens of dollars were tacked to the ceiling, along with scads of memorabilia items hung from the walls.)

According to a 1995 News-Leader account, in the '80s and '90s, Pappy's hosted an annual celebration that became a midtown Springfield tradition: Hacker Day.

A "three-beer-a-day regular" since 1953, Korean War veteran Jim Hacker began experiencing significant health problems around Christmastime in 1980.

Based on doctor predictions, Hacker's friends expected him to die, so they visited him in the hospital. But shortly before Christmas, Hacker recovered.

Pappy's Place and the community threw him a party at the restaurant. And for many years, they had a party every year on the Saturday before Christmas or Dec. 23, according to various newspaper accounts. Former regulars living as far away as Florida called the restaurant to share their holiday greetings.

Hacker lived 13 years longer than his doctors predicted, the News-Leader reported in 1995.

Moore, the young entrepreneur who bought the restaurant in 1978, sold Pappy's to Gary Harper in 1987. In 1993, the restaurant was taken over by military veteran Raymond "Boots" Wilson, who later sold it to Scott and Debra Keese and Mitzi Rupert.

The Keeses announced in April that they planned to retire. Earlier this week, Scott Keese said it was not clear when or if Pappy's would close down.

"Someone that buys it would be crazy to not continue it," Keese told the News-Leader Monday. "But who knows, someone might want to come put in a Jimmy John's."

Keese said that he expects to keep running Pappy's at least through the end of the month. He said it was not clear how long it would take to close a sale following Friday's auction.

"I might stay until someone else opens it," Keese said.

Pappy's Baked Beans: 1983 recipe

Adapted from the recipe that then-owner Jon Moore shared with the Springfield News-Leader for the print edition published July 27, 1983. Moore said at the time that in that era, Pappy's made five gallons of this recipe every day.

1/2 gallon pork and beans

1/2 cup ketchup

1/2 cup mustard

1/2 cup sugar

1 small onion

1 small green pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Chop onion and green pepper. Add to pork and beans. Fold in ketchup, mustard and sugar. Pour mixture into a large dish and bake "a couple of hours, or something like that," said Jon Moore.