Rose Wilcox began in the restaurant business in Tacoma about 1917, and spent twenty-two years there before she and her husband Bill moved the business to 26851 Pacific Highway South. She had been running the Colman Lunch in the Colman Building on the Seattle waterfront with her sister Sarah Atkinson, carrying sandwiches — mostly chicken — up to the attorneys with offices in the building. By Darrell Anderson's account, which he had from the daughter of one of them, it was those lawyers who told her to open a restaurant and then put up the money when she said she had none.
Rose's Highway Inn opened in 1939 and she ran it for twenty-five years, with a personal touch the whole time: a white lace tablecloth and fresh flowers on every table, a rose garden south of the building that Bill tended, and a family on the payroll — Sarah on pastry, her brother Roy Luxton managing, her sister-in-law Laura on the door. She kept a chicken ranch to supply the kitchen until the fried chicken outgrew it. In the early years she had to close the dining room at three o'clock, because the building shook when the freight trains went through.
She retired on 16 August 1964, the inn's silver anniversary, and handed it to Darrell Anderson, the chef she had hired in 1954. A newspaper that week called her a very young seventy-five. She was a member of Eastern Star, the Daughters of the Nile and Amaranth.
Her birth and death years are not recorded in the archive. The age given here is the one the press reported in August 1964.