Eddie and Janelle Cook, owners of the Klondyke for the past 20 years, help Alonzo Anderson as he picks up some lunch. (Jon GiffinThe Vicksburg Post)

[5/17/04]The Klondyke on North Washington Street has been open for more than 60 years, but its history is cloaked in mystery.

“My dad bought it in 1946,” said Don Miller Jr., but he quickly added it operated years before that.

Just how long is anyone’s guess, just as how it got its name is a mystery.

The service station/convenience store/diner/bait shop has been an all-around meeting place for generations.

Miller said he was told many years ago when the Mississippi River flowed directly past Vicksburg a man was either headed to Klondike, Alaska, or coming back from there when he pulled in at Glass Bayou, which at that time formed a natural harbor off the Mississippi River. The man is said to have built a little store on the bank of the bayou and called it his “little Klondike.”

Since 1946, the Klondyke was operated by the late Lewis Miller Sr., the late Don Miller Sr. and the late V.K. Miller.

Today’s owners, Eddie and Janelle Cook, have been there for 20 years.

Cook said he had heard another version of how it got its name.

“There used to be a little one-room shack right out here on this creek. An old man by the name of Klondike run it,” he said.

How the name morphed from Klondike to Klondyke is another mystery.

Cook said he was working for The Merchants Co., a wholesale grocery company, and had been calling on V.K. Miller.

“We bought it from Mr. Valerie about two months before he died,” Cook said. “And we been hard at it ever since.”

At the time of the sale, the business was much as it had been for years, a service station that also sold fishing tackle, bait and a little food. As time passed, the gas and oil business was dropped and the Klondyke now focuses on food and some fishing tackle and bait.

“There was so much more live bait back then,” Cook said. “It was nothing for us to come in on a Saturday morning and bag 150-200 bags of minnows and put them on the floor to have them ready to open up at 4:30.” But that has all changed now, Cook said.

“Now, we sell more food than anything else,” he said, and the steady stream of customers around lunch time proves that to be true.

Cook said V.K. Miller was selling a little food when he sold the business.

“They were cooking maybe five boxes of hamburger patties a week. Now, we’re cooking 40 boxes a week,” he said.

And the volume of other food is also impressive. Cook said his breakfast business accounts for 250 to 300 biscuits a day. Where once the business used two or three boxes of chicken a week, he now goes through 16 in the same period of time.

And the steady stream of lunch customers shows the Cooks must be doing something right.

He said many of his customers come from the E.W. Haining Industrial Center and the Anderson-Tully Co., and many of them only have a half an hour off for lunch.

“Most of them are blue-collar,” Cook said.

Archie Barnett, who works at Anderson-Tully Engineered Wood, was one of those working people who came in to get something for lunch.

“I can come in, get it and get out,” he said.

Morgan Spivey, an employee at Ergon, said he gets his lunch at the Klondyke two or three times a week and finds the convenient location and the speed at which he can get lunch attractive.

Butch Henley, an employee of the Kansas City Southern Railway car shop, said he and his friends stop in whenever they are in Vicksburg.

“We work with the railroad, we work a lot and come over here,” Henley said. “It’s easy to get here and it’s quick to get to and it’s really good, too. A lot better than fast-food places,” he said.

The food is good,” said Pat Rouse, an employee of Shell Oil Co. who goes to the Klondyke nearly every day. “And they are nice people. I just enjoy it.”

But not all of Cook’s customers are from close by. Alonzo Anderson comes all the way from his job with the Vicksburg District Corps of Engineers on East Clay Street.

He comes “not as often as I used to. Maybe once a week now,” he said clutching a bag containing his lunch. “It’s good food.”