It opened in 1939 and burned in 2003, and for most of the years in
between the only thing that changed about it was the price of the chicken. What follows is
drawn entirely from the scrapbook Darrell Anderson kept — the menus, the clippings, and
the pages he and Catherine typed themselves.
Curated by Darrell Anderson Culinary Archives
Two sisters and a lunch counter1939
Rose Wilcox and her sister Sarah Atkinson ran the Colman Lunch, in the
Colman Building on the Seattle waterfront, for twenty-two years. They were never separated,
one clipping notes, all those years.
Among the customers were the attorneys with offices upstairs, and most of what Rose
carried up to them was chicken. Darrell Anderson heard the rest of it decades later, from a
customer he met at a potluck in an Arizona RV park: her father had been one of those
lawyers. Rose you should open up a restaurant — she said I do not have the
money. They backed her, and in 1939 she and her husband Bill moved the business out to
26851 Pacific Highway South and called it Rose's Highway Inn.
They kept their own chicken ranch to supply it. The fried chicken got famous faster than
the ranch could grow birds, so the ranch was sold. The menus after that said it plainly:
We serve only strictly fresh Chicken — raised especially for us. No Cold
Storage.
Seventy-five cents, before the war
The earliest menu in the scrapbook is printed on blue stock and offers a
75¢ dinner: half fried chicken, French fried potatoes, tea biscuits, coffee. Home-made soup
is a dime. A New York cut steak dinner, the most expensive thing on the card, is $1.50. The
back cover explains where to find the place — on the Seattle-Tacoma Hiway just two
miles south of the Kent turnoff, on your right going south — and what to expect:
Only the best the market affords cooked as it would be in your own kitchen.
Twenty-odd years later the format is the same and the arithmetic has moved. Family Style
Chicken Dinner, $3.00. Rose's Special Chicken Dinner, $2.75, our chicken is pan
fried. Half chicken to go, ninety cents. Biscuits, four for twenty. Down the side of
the card runs a pen-and-ink border of roses with two ribbons in it reading CATERING and
WEDDING RECEPTIONS, and at the bottom: Reservations accepted throughout the year except
Easter and Mother's Day.
Every menu says some version of the same sentence. Come as you are. Bring the
family.
The creating chef1965
Rose Wilcox hired Darrell Anderson as a cook in 1954 and paid him $300 a
month. He had been a 6th Army food instructor at Fort Lewis, and when he mustered out in
1950 he went to Edison Technical School to study under chef Paul Mullet, working evenings at
Rose's while he did it. He left to be chef at the Walla Walla Elks Club, the Seattle Golf
Club, the Auburn Elks Club and Gleneacres Golf Club, and came back in 1964 as chef-manager.
Rose, he said, was like a mother to him.
In 1965 he took five baked chickens — one pound through five — to a chefs'
convention at the Olympic Hotel and laid them out on a blue mirror. He glazed them in
gelatin and beaded the birds with pan drippings thickened and run through a pastry tube. The
garnish was frosting roses and glazed leaves cut from chicken hearts, with giblets set in
gelatin and orange gelatin molds alongside. The Beacon photographed Rose standing behind
it.
He did the same sort of thing for a newspaper at Christmas, working up three Wellingtons
— beef tenderloin, a canned ham, a boned and rolled chicken — so that, as he put
it, the homemaker has a choice. That recipe is in this book.
Family operated
An advertisement in the scrapbook prints the whole staff around a
lace-covered table, and under it their years of service, which is the most eloquent thing in
the collection. Sarah Atkinson, pastry cook, twenty-five years. Laure Fearon, twenty-three.
Chris Costando, twenty-two. Violet Neil, eighteen. Betty Markwell, twelve. Margaret Denton,
ten. Rose's brother Roy Luxton managed; his wife Laura was hostess; Rose's husband Bill kept
the rose garden south of the building. The families lived in houses built on about ten acres
behind the inn.
Catherine and Darrell Anderson moved into one of those houses with four children —
Deborah, Dana, Darwin and David — and Catherine went to work as hostess. The children
walked down past the garage and the well that supplied the restaurant, in the back door, and
sat at the chef's table. When Darrell's own parents came up from Oregon and ate out front,
the waitress refused to believe he would charge them. He charged them, and slipped his
father a twenty-dollar bill on the way in.
Once a skunk got under the house and let go, and the school telephoned an hour after the
children arrived and asked the Andersons to come and collect them.
Three hundred pounds of cake1964
Rose Wilcox retired on the inn's silver anniversary, Sunday 16 August
1964, at seventy-five, after nearly fifty years in the restaurant business. The invitation
was public. In celebrating our 25th anniversary, a 300 pound cake will be served as
dessert in The Rose Garden on this date.
Anderson had asked Jim Binkerd, a pastry cook at United Air Lines, for a small favour. It
turned out to be two layers, forty inches by ninety, with a raised heart of cake about
thirty-three inches across, and it weighed every ounce of the three hundred pounds. Binkerd
started making rose buds a fortnight ahead — about a thousand of them — so the
frosting would harden in time. It took six men to get it out of the garage where it had been
assembled.
More than a thousand roses were at her fingertips that day, and 650 people sat down to
dinner. Rose helped serve the cake and set a frosting rose bud on each slice herself. The
heart, with a red rose in it and the lettering Rose, stayed on display in the
restaurant for a few days. What was left of the base layer went to the Masonic Home at
Zenith. She was planning a fishing trip, then maybe Alaska, then California until
March.
Don't you change a thing2003
Shortly after Anderson took over, an elderly customer cornered him with a
lecture. Don't you change a thing, she said. We like it just the way it
is.
He didn't. He held the lease with an option to buy: $150,000 would have bought the
restaurant, four acres on Highway 99, two houses and a business that served a thousand
people on some holidays. But after four years Catherine pointed out that they could not go
fishing and could not raise their children, and that between gardener, owner, manager, chef
and a full-time teaching job at the Occupational Skills Center, something had to go. We
gave up Roses. They bought a GMC pickup and a camper and were gone thirty-eight days
through the western states, Canada and Mexico.
The owners who followed didn't change anything either. The lace tablecloths, the
rose-coloured carpet and the dark-stained wood stayed exactly as they were; one of them
eventually painted stripes in the parking lot. Rose's Hiway Inn caught fire at half past
three in the morning on 17 March 2003 and the roof was down inside an hour, ending
sixty-four years of unbroken service. Nobody was hurt. The building had been put up in 1939
and grandfathered past modern fire codes, and it had no sprinklers and no alarms.
Darrell Anderson, seventy-three, stood in the parking lot and took photographs of the
business he had run. He would share plenty of recipes, he told the reporter, but not that
one. That's the only one I can't give up.
