OM DENNE EPISODE
Debra Staples didn't set out to open a restaurant. She set out to be home with a two-pound baby.
When Rylan was born at 35 weeks he weighed two pounds, two ounces — a growth restriction called IUGR that Debra had never heard of until it was hers. He spent 24 hours in Glasgow before a plane came for him, then ten weeks at Kosair. Somewhere in there she and Shannon split a single cheeseburger in the hospital McDonald's, because that was all the money they had, while four kids at home were being raised by grandparents, aunts and uncles. They got him home. Then he caught whooping cough and went back for twelve more weeks. He coded five times. The longest was two and a half minutes.
She'd been at Walmart twelve years managing sixteen departments, and she loved it — but a preemie's calendar doesn't fit a shift schedule, so she never went back. She mowed 55 yards instead, with a nine-year-old running the weed eater and an eleven-year-old on the mower. Shannon had been catering on the side for years as S&S. Their first real setup was a fundraiser in front of her sister's store in Albany: $300 that Saturday, and they felt like the richest people on earth. They went back the next week, and the next. In the fall of 2013 it became Hog Wild. Then a 10x20 tent on the Mix House lot. Then Brookie Baxter told her flat out she had the wrong lot and drove her over to North Magnolia that same evening. Then a storage building with two windows — order at one, pick up at the other. Then a contractor named Tim Anderson, who she met because she talked him out of a shoulder sandwich and into a hamburger, looked at what she was trying to do and said, “You have big dreams. I just want to see where it goes,” and let her build it a piece at a time and pay as she went. That building is eight years old now.
And when Rylan was sick, Monroe County passed the hat for them. Debra told Shannon that if they ever got to where they had an extra ten or twenty dollars, it was going back. Santa's Christmas Blessing is in its ninth year. The first one drew more than 500 people to the National Guard Armory. Last year it was over 1,600 plates — and the people who couldn't come get one, shut-ins, folks with disabilities, veterans, had theirs delivered by the sheriff's office and the police department.
We also get into:
• Why she gutted the entire Hog Wild menu two weeks ago and rebuilt it in about three hours
• What a “usual” is actually worth to a small-town restaurant, and why twice a week keeps the lights on
• Franchising, the creek, and the property line she has already run out of
• Whether Christmas stays magical when you're the one making it happen for everybody else
• Judge Carter, a go-kart, and a mailbox that didn't survive
