Goldie’s celebrating in third home

Published 12:30 am Sunday, November 7, 2010

The doors opened in November 1960, on Washington Street in a small building with a big view of the river.

The restaurant has changed locations twice and transferred ownership once, and the menu’s more extensive, but the meat and the sauce that coats it are just the way it was when Gola Marshall, nicknamed Goldie, started barbecuing ribs, steaks and hamburgers there a half-century ago.

The restaurant he started, Goldie’s Trail Bar-b-que, will celebrate its 50th anniversary Saturday with a day of specials and giveaways for customers, many of whom grew up visiting the original Washington Street site and now bring their children and grandchildren to the South Frontage Road restaurant.

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“I’m hoping he would be proud of where Goldie’s is today,” said Randy Wright, who with his wife, Rhonda, has run the business since 1980. “I hope he’d be pleased to see how far we have taken a business that was a little-bitty diner, to where we are today.”

When Goldie’s opened, the menu offered hamburgers, cheeseburgers, barbecue and steaks, Wright said. Side dishes were french fries and a salad, no matter what the main order was. The meat was cooked on outside pits.

Today, Goldie’s makes about a ton of barbecue — beef brisket, Boston-butt pork ribs, chicken and smoked sausage — every week in an indoor pit that can handle 300 to 400 pounds at a time. No longer can hungry raccoons sneak up behind the pits and grab a rack of ribs like they used to.

Homemade side dishes include cole slaw and potato salad, plus Goldie’s offers barbecued beans and corn on the cob.

About 150 gallons of Goldie’s original recipe barbecue sauce are made each week, too.

“It’s the same recipe,” Wright said. “He made it up.”

Goldie’s began at 4148 Washington St., where the entrance to Ameristar Casino is today. Old U.S. 80 met Washington Street — then U.S. 61 — nearby, and the two ran south together for a short distance before 80 veered west across the old Mississippi River bridge.

The building itself was originally a White Castle hamburger stand in St. Louis, brought to Vicksburg in 1949 on a railroad car by L.C. Latham, who owned the Rose Oil Company and some land along the river. Latham set up the building as the Rosette Grill, named for his wife, Rose.

Marshall and his wife, Hattie Mae, a native of the Yokena community and Wright’s aunt, leased the building from Latham after previously running a restaurant and adjoining liquor store in Arkansas, which they closed after the county in which it was located voted to outlaw liquor, Wright said.

Wright recalled a day in the early 1960s when the old Mississippi River Bridge iced over, traffic was slowed and cars and trucks backed up in front of Goldie’s. He and his two brothers went out and sold sandwiches, coffee and soft drinks to the people in the cars, only too willing to get a hot meal and not lose their place in line waiting to get over the bridge. “We sold a ton of barbecue that day,” he said.

The old Goldie’s also had a carhop named Ed “Junior” Segrest who’d deliver customers’ orders to their cars, Wright said.

In 1970, an addition was built onto the back of the building, and business continued to grow.

Sandra Byrd Turner was hired by Marshall as a cook in the original building in 1980 and has been there since.

“As we worked, we all would wash dishes,” Turner said. “We rotated on cooking the meat on the old pit, and everybody got a chance to learn how to cook.”

Marshall would just call out the orders without writing them down, Turner said. She and the other cooks just had to remember them.

Later in 1980, Marshall, then 72, turned the business over to his nephew. “He called me up and told me, ‘You’re the only family member I’ve got that I can think could take over the business,” Randy Wright said.

After Marshall died in 1982, and Latham around the same time, lease payments were raised high enough that the Wrights decided to buy a lot almost directly across Washington Street and put up a new building. They moved in 1983.

Five years later, Goldie’s was one of 19 Southern restaurants featured for its “as good as I’ve ever had” barbecue by Southern Magazine. The endorsement caused such a run on barbecue they had to shut their doors for a day to go buy more meat in Shreveport, he said.

The event is surpassed in Goldie’s history only by the “who shot JR?” episode of “Dallas,” said Wright. “Everybody stayed home that night. You could have heard a pin drop in the dining room.”

The Wrights’ two children also have worked at Goldie’s for many years, Randy Wright Jr., managing the restaurant and Rebecca Antwine, a Vicksburg accountant, managing the books. “Both the kids bussed tables, helped cook, did anything that was needed when they were younger,” Rhonda said.

Her brother, Gary Thomas, opened the double-drive-through Goldie’s Express on Pemberton Square Boulevard in 1993, with a slightly different menu but the same Goldie’s barbecue sauce.

After 23 years at the second Washington Street address, Ameristar Casino purchased the site from the Wrights in 2006 and they moved to their current South Frontage Road location.

“It’s been a good move,” Rhonda Wright said. “It was hard to move, after so many years on Washington Street, but then it had been hard to move across the street and lose the river view earlier.”

Goldie’s has survived Marshall’s death, the coming of the casinos with their buffets and offers of freebies, two moves, Randy Wright’s quintuple bypass surgery in 2008 and the current economic downturn.

“It’s been a family business that we hope to continue on, not only for our own family but for the people of Vicksburg,” Rhonda Wright said. “There are a lot of people that have grown up eating at Goldie’s and there are people who’ve moved away, that when they come back, Goldie’s is one of the restaurants where they just have to eat.”

Marshall sponsored men’s and women’s softball teams, and the Wrights have continued the involvement with youth sports; sponsoring football, baseball and soccer teams; and catering for and helping with the Red Carpet Bowl committee annually for about 15 years, Wright said.

“Rhonda and I have always tried to keep Goldie’s a good member of the Vicksburg-Warren County community, have always tried to be there for the local people,” he said. “We’d like people to realize that a business that’s been around for 50 years, well, we know that it takes a community to keep it going. We appreciate all the people who have helped keep us in business.”