Dad Keathley

Cheryl’s grandfather is the only inventor that I have ever known. Certainly, I have known many people who have patents registered with the US government, but I have never considered them as real inventors. They have come up with a better way to do some process or they have been a part of a team that has produced the screen for the first cell phones, or they have developed a new ceramic filter. Granted all these people are geniuses, but when I think of an inventor, I think of Dad Keathley, Cheryl’s grandfather. He was the fourteenth son of an Obion County, Tennessee farming family.

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Dad Keathley pedaled pies in the Ford Motor Company Assembly Plant in Memphis after he was laid off from work at the factory. Cheryl’s grandmother, Rubye, made the fruit pies using her mother-in-law’s recipes in her 8-foot square kitchen at 997 South Cox Street, and her grandfather, Maurice Franklin Keathley, Sr. sold the pies to factory workers. It was a tough way to make a living, but times were hard. Rubye was a good cook and Maurice was a good salesman, so they made their living in the pie business. He purchased a truck and painted “Keathley Homemade Pies” in yellow and blue on the truck. Soon the Keathley name became famous in Memphis for its “nickel pie.”

By 1939 Keathley’s Homemade Pies had its first big contract with Tom’s Peanuts to make pecan pies under the Tom’s label. Maurice built a factory on Young Street in the Cooper-Young area in mid-town Memphis.

Over the next 30 years Maurice turned that home kitchen business into nationally famous brands of pies. His first major brands in the new factory were Keathley’s Pies and Tom’s pies. His factory was located just two blocks from the original entrance to the old Mid-South Fairgrounds on Airways Boulevard.

His most famous product from this factory was the little pecan pies that we baby boomers grew up eating. The factory also made other small pies in the little aluminum pans for national brands such as Hostess, Dolly Madison, Colonial, Stuckey’s, Tom’s, Little Debbie, and many other companies. They made a brownie in a machine that Maurice invented that stretched the entire length of the second floor of the factory. Dad Keathley liked to say that he produced the longest brownie in the world stretching from New York to Philadelphia, since the factory building was a block long from New York Street to Philadelphia Street.

Maurice ventured into another type of pie in a business called Progressive Foods, Inc. in a factory one block from Cooper Street and Central Avenue. Here he registered the first ever patent on the fried pies that every fast-food restaurant sells today. He called his fried pie “Cheryl Lyn’s” named after Cheryl and her younger brother, Randy Lynn. Over the years he patented many machines that made all their products. One early fried pie machine that he invented and fabricated in their shop at the factory produced 11,000 pies in an hour.

Cheryl and I enjoyed playing a game called Aggravation with Mamma and Dad Keathley. It was a game kinda like Chinese Checkers that we played as kids. Dad Keathley surprised everyone in the family when he had the garage on their house converted to a large game room and he added a pool table. He became very adept on the pool table, and he enjoyed good competition.

Dad and Mamma also owned a restaurant across the street from the original pie factory. They opened it so their factory workers would have a place to eat nearby as most of the neighborhood around them was residential. Town and Country Restaurant attracted a much wider audience than factory employees, and its popularity soared. It was unusual because on one side was the town part where you ordered from a menu like most restaurants. The country side was family style where they brought out vegetables, breads, meat and desserts and you served yourself. The country side also served fried strips of “fatback” as an appetizer. I can still savor the taste of the crispy fried thick bacon. Over the years only once have I ever been served fried fatback, and that was at a country style restaurant in Medellin, Colombia. However, I was a guest in the home of friends in Novosibirsk, Russia, and they served me raw frozen fatback! Yes, they eat this in the fall to put on more weight to make it through the harsh winters in Siberia.

Dad Keathley was a quiet man of few words. When he spoke people usually listened. When Cheryl and I met with him at his Town and Country Restaurant for lunch to tell him that we were engaged, his first response was “Many a slip between the cup and the lip!” That was disheartening for us, but we remembered that his words were few and his humor was not very funny.

Dad Keathley was a generous man with his treasure, his talents, his time, and his opportunities to influence. He contributed during his life and through planned giving after his life to the cause of Christ. He served for three terms as a trustee of Union University, for many years on the board of Memphis Rescue Mission, and with many other organizations.

A sweet memory of Dad Keathley was when he sang in a musical at their home church in Memphis. He sang “The Longer I Serve Him the Sweeter He Grows.” Cheryl’s family sent us an audio cassette recording of his singing that song in the musical, and as I listened to that song I was crying because it was an emotional moment for me. Dad Keathley played the guitar while blowing a triple harmonica held in a wire holder around his neck. When he wasn’t playing the harmonica, he was singing.  He also composed several songs. The one that I like best is “Metrecal Stole My Gal and Took Half My Love Away.” For those readers who were not living in the 1960s, you will have to look up Metrecal, or this will not be so funny to you.

Here was a man who was near death. He had lived a full life; he had worked hard, and he had been successful in the marketplace; he had loved his family and provided for them, and every day he had served the Lord with all his heart. At that moment, I determined that I would finish well. Thank you, Lord, for every day of life. May I sing in my heart until my last breath “The longer I serve Him the sweeter He grows.”