Eatery is home away from home for owner, patrons

WHITE BIRD, Idaho – Don’t ask “Hootie” McReynolds about weekends, 40-hour weeks or vacations. She only knows about them vicariously.

The one-woman conglomerate is the owner-operator of Hoot’s Cafe and Motel, a roadside landmark on U.S. 95 just south of White Bird. (The name on the sign out front is “Hoots” because “Hootie’s” wouldn’t fit.)

She also owns the adjacent self-service gas station and Hoot’s Gas and Diesel Auto Repair, which she leases to a mechanic who operates it.

If she knew how to overhaul an engine, she’d probably be doing that, too.

McReynolds has been flipping burgers and baking pies on U.S. 95 for 31 years.

Before that, she ran the original Hoot’s Cafe for 11 years on the old highway through White Bird.

That’s 42 years of feeding Idahoans on the go.

“She’s an Idaho institution,” says Hoot’s regular Bruce Fuller, a Boise-Winnemucca Stages bus driver. “For me, her place is like home away from home. She’s everybody’s friend, and her cooking is why I weigh 240 pounds.

“I never have to order at Hoot’s. She knows when I’ll be there, knows what I like and has it waiting when I get there.”

Her work days begin at 5 a.m., when she comes in to prepare for the cafe’s 5:30 opening. She waits tables as needed and works in the kitchen until a hired cook arrives at 2 p.m.

Then she holes up in her office to do bookwork for the Hoot’s businesses and her husband’s contracting business. That takes until at least 6 p.m. She routinely works 12- to 14-hour days seven days a week.

She’s never taken a weekend off, doesn’t believe in taking vacations and has no intention of retiring.

“My husband goes fishing, but I don’t like to fish,” she said. “I like to work. I never get tired of it. As far as retirement goes, why would I want to retire? I’m 70 and in perfect health. You retire, you get sick.”

She claims to know three of every four customers who walk through the door.

Midway between Spokane and Boise, Hoot’s is a logical and popular stopping point. It’s a stage stop for buses and delivery trucks and is close to recreational sites.

Truckers, bus drivers, anglers and hunters comprise a significant portion of the clientele.

Team buses stop there en route to games.

“Eagle, Kuna, Borah and Centennial all call whenever they’re going to Lewiston,” McReynolds said. “They eat here because they know they can get in and out quick. There aren’t many places where buses can stop and stay on schedule. They have to have an awfully big load for us not to be able to get them in and out in 15 minutes.”

The food isn’t fancy – she says most of her customers would rather have a cheeseburger than a steak – but it’s reasonably priced and substantial.

A corn dog is $2, a tuna sandwich $3.20, a deluxe burger with bacon and fries, $5.95.

The fries aren’t frozen.

“Have you ever had frozen fries?” she asked, practically shuddering. “Or frozen hash browns? They aren’t any good. I make mine up fresh.”

The same goes for her salad dressing, pies, maple bars, jams, jellies and syrups.

“Her turkeys are real turkeys, baked right here and stuffed with her own dressing,” waitress Vicky Glover said.

“Her beef is the old-fashioned roast beef. All our meat is local. When it comes to cooking, she’s an old-fashioned granny.”

Literally.

McReynolds has four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

She’s been in the restaurant business longer than they – or her children – can remember.

“I started when I was 12 in a little restaurant in White Bird,” she said. “I cooked, waited tables and washed dishes. I made 40 cents an hour.”

By then, people had been calling her “Hootie” for years.

Her real name is Viola. She got her nickname the day she was born.

“An old guy who lived across the creek came to see the new baby. He said I looked just like a hoot owl. I’ve been Hootie ever since.”

Her owl collection, at last count, numbered more than 1,100.

Scores of owls are ensconced in a cabinet mounted on a wall of the cafe. She has owls as small as thimbles and one as big as a barrel.

She has glass owls, porcelain owls, metal owls, wooden owls. Perfume-bottle owls, owl clocks, owl coffee mugs, wind-up owls and owl pen sets.

“I have them from all over – Hawaii, Germany, Switzerland. When I first started the restaurant, everybody that came along gave me an owl, so I built a cage for them.”

The “cage” is the cabinet on the wall. Notable owls too large to fit inside include a real owl, killed in a collision with a car in Missouri, and an owl carved from an Idaho tree trunk.

It was a gift from three bus drivers.

Her house in White Bird has owls in the yard, owls painted on the garage door.

When she isn’t dusting owls, cooking or doing bookwork, she’s likely to be setting up for a banquet, family reunion or wedding reception in the cafe’s back room, calling recipients of packages that delivery-truck drivers leave at the cafe, or taking care of business at the 16-unit Hoot’s Motel.

Five employees, one at the motel and four at the restaurant, help her keep up with it all.

Waitress Diana Wilford talked about a side of her boss most customers don’t see.

“She’s very caring and generous. She’s financed cars for employees, paid doctor bills, made interest-free lends. When my husband got hurt on the job and couldn’t work, we had some fairly serious financial problems, and she helped us out. When I paid her back, I put in an extra $100. She wouldn’t take it.”

Born just over the hill in Grangeville, the woman who has spent her life feeding travelers on a U.S. highway is immune to the lure of the road.

She’s spent all of her 70 years at White Bird.

Asked where else she’d been, she had to think about it.

“Let’s see. I went to Nevada once. Oh, and California! Clarence (her husband) was tired, so I drove for a while. All of a sudden, four lanes were eight lanes. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I never went back.”

That was as close as she’s been – or is likely to get – to a vacation.

“Why would I take a vacation? I got nowhere to go and nothin’ to do.”

No hobbies? “Nope.”

Gardening, perhaps?

“No. My brother Smiley’s the gardener of the family. He has 1,000 tomato plants. But I’ve never gotten into it.”

Reading?

“Nope. Clarence is the brains of the family.”

“She doesn’t even collect the owls herself,” Wilford said. “Everybody brings them to her.”

What she does collect are friends.

“I’ve collected a lot of them over this many years,” she said. “They stop here all the time. Maybe they even give me an owl.”