German twist fits fine in Simpsonville country store's community chemistry
Last May when Upshur County's Union Hill School graduated its seniors, you couldn't buy a decent plate of German food anywhere in Simpsonville.
Turn one lock at The Red Store and the whole town's shut down, like when Angela Keller's boyfriend graduated.
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She waits tables at The Red Store, and besides her boyfriend, the owners had lots of friends with Union Hill graduates in the family, so they closed for the night.
South of Pittsburg, Simpsonville is at the junction of two Texas farm roads, not far from the Camp - Upshur County line. The winding paths back to Pittsburg, west to Quitman or Winnsboro, or back east out to U.S. 271 are all country roads, roads as contoured to the land's curves and dips as the wagon lanes they've grown from.
Good roads for a bike.
In 1947, the Simpsonville school closed and consolidated with 1-A Union Hill.
Thursday through Saturday nights at The Red Store, about $8 buys a plate of sauerbraten, German sausage, varieties of schnitzel and other stuff that evolved from the peasant hearths of Old Europe.
Sherilyn Summers is the force behind the food. She and husband John run the only business in town, where John stocks the store with what's needed by his patrons.
Nuts, bolts, hardware and plumbing supplies. Hydraulic fluid.
"Poultry and cattle people," John says, describing the "neighborhood" sprawling across miles of country.
It's been 40 years since John was a pioneering computer programmer, back in the punch card days when East Texas State's lone computer filled a room, had a fraction of the horsepower of your laptop, and took several people to operate.
He's a Texan.
Sherilyn's a native of sunny Oakland, California.
They are versatile people.
His early computer stuff opened the door at Bell Helicopter, then Braniff. He's an electrician and was a steel worker.
Sherilyn's education put her in medical labs. Moving about the globe, she's also waited tables and managed a New Braunfel's restaurant with a wait staff of 30 -- her German connection.
Lone Star Steel was the job connection that brought them here when he left Braniff.
He brags about the first years they were in Simpsonville, when she turned herself into a truck-patch farmer, a parking-lot tail gate entrepreneur in town, and at home a lone field hand nurturing five acres of watermelons reflecting her experimental nature.
"The only kind of watermelons she didn't grow were those she couldn't find seed for," he said.
Whatever she does, variety is a critical element.
For example, as a restauranteur, "I like changing up my menu," she said. "I like changing recipes."
During John's 1970's Bell Helicopter days, they lived in Iran, where ancient wisdom provided a simple solution for unexpected guests at meal time.
Add water to the pot.
In Old Europe, much like Simpsonville when this part of the world was the Old South, the answer was similar.
More gravy.
Besides mushrooms, and something tart in Sherilyn's gravy, Germans, she said, make rich sauces of things.
With meat, potatoes and cabbage, Germans developed heavy food, high calorie, carbohydrate-packed diets to fuel the feudal field hand.
Roll thinly-sliced beef steak about sausage and bacon - ruladen.
Sherilyn's version is spiked with a mustard sauce.
In days of Germanic yore, they might have stuffed the dish with any number of things - pickles or bread dressing spiced with sage, she says.
It was her love of classroom chemistry, she supposes, that made her a lab tech.
There's chemistry in her kitchen too, where steel pots steam on a four-burner stove.
It's the chemistry of bacon blended with pears, cooking with white beans until breaking down into a "chowder-like thing," she said.
The oven warms baked apples, a pork roast stuffed with spinach, mushrooms, onions and sage. There's saurbraten, beef marinated in red wine vinegar, slow cooked with bay leaves and onions. There's a potato salad, steeping warm in a tin-foil tent.
Before they got the store, back when John was still with Lone Star and she was farming, he once tried buying it at a bank foreclosure on the courthouse steps.
G.B. Clark out bid him, then hired Sherilyn to help him get it back up and running. Something strange happened.
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John kept wanting the store in the days that followed, days that stretched into a year before he asked if Mr. Clark would sell it.
Mr. Clark turned him down, which caused the computer programmer and electrician's mind to short circuit, repeating a thought like a song stuck in your head. A mantra.
"The store is mine," it kept singing, and 28 days later, it was.
They work Mom & Pop 70-hour weeks. Since graduation at Union Hill, they've shut down one other night. In August, the Summers drove to Nebraska to see a new grand child, then turned around and came back, as fast as they could.
"This is great," John says, a straight enough description of Simpsonville.
The Red Store isn't making anybody rich, but dreams depend on the dreamers.
There's an important and massive old oak on the lawn of the Summers' place, a home site generations before they arrived.
"The Red Store," Sherilyn says, is the store's time-worn moniker, a simple enough phrase for a child who might struggle saying "Simp-son-ville Store," the name on the sign at the place where popsicles are.
A magic marker on butcher-paper breakfast and lunch menu covers the old meat case. The 6-day-a-week 7 a.m. opening launches the morning coffee crowd, the table of knowledge tradition, the village elders manning the city's last business gate.
Noon burgers of nothing less than ground chuck sizzle on the griddle, drawing lunch hour lawyers and bankers over from the county seat, Gilmer.
If gear oil and popsicles are kept for the locals, the inventory also includes local offerings, like knitted-in- Simpsonville kitchen towels.
There's a line of Pittsburg-labeled lotions, greatly reduced, a bit of dust on the bottles.
Making room for friends goods and wares is important in John's merchandising concept.
The store's newest employee, Deb, makes possible the smooth juggling of work schedules built around Angela's academic and senior year sports schedule.
In her second year at the store, as she prepares for a return to the Texas 1-A Regional Power Lifting meet while boning up for nursing school entrance exams, Angela is getting this German cooking thing down, Sherilyn said.
And she can dead lift 185 pounds.
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Describing life centered about the store, John's calculating mind swirls in thoughts related more like kitchen chemistry than the logic dictated by his computer career or electrical careers.
It's about a place where common things -- like good food and hydraulic oil -- make life rich. It's about locking the doors when family or friends are more important than business.
Not everybody figures out.
Sherilyn smiles when she's cooking.
To get to Simpsonville, take FM 556 south from Pittsburg.