A trio of older Festus men sit at the counter inside Gordon’s Stoplight Drive-In, sipping coffee and chatting with one another and anyone else who stops by. The three meet four or five mornings each week at the 20-odd-seat, counter-service diner, which is celebrating its 75th year of selling burgers and other fare at the corner of Bailey Road and Truman Boulevard in Crystal City.
“I had my first burger here in probably 1955,” recalled John Isenman, 86. His friends, Ray Stoecklein and Jim Naeger, nodded in agreement.
Looking north on Truman Boulevard past the intersection of Bailey Road toward the railroad trestle, before Stoplight was built.
The late Gordon Heddell opened the restaurant in 1948, and the menu has remained largely unchanged ever since. The restaurant is known for its burgers, cooked on an open grill barely 4 feet from customers, and its shakes, made from real ice cream and whirled smooth in a metal cup.
“We have some people here seven days a week, sometimes twice a day,” current owner Chris Grass, 46, said. “A lot of customers are five-day-a-week people.
“We’ve watched a lot of families grow up here.”
Kelley Skaggs Gray said she used to eat at Stoplight with her father, the late Wayne Skaggs.
“Gordon Heddell gave my dad and his brother, John Skaggs, their first jobs in about 1949,” she said. “My dad was proud of working there. As a little girl, he took me to Stoplight for our ‘date,’ and I sat by his side at the bar, with my legs dangling. He taught me how to blow the paper off the straw. I always ordered a cheeseburger, French fries and a Coke, and that’s still my go-to.”
Mike Statler, left, and Jerry Trask during a shift in 1960.
Each fall, social media comes alive with messages from Jefferson County natives making plans to return home for Twin City Days, for class reunions, for the holidays. They talk almost reverently of stopping in for a juicy Jumbo (topped with barbecue sauce, onions and slaw), a bowl of chili or a hand-dipped shake. They speak of sitting on the worn orange stools and reminiscing about the good old days.
“I go to Stoplight Restaurant every time I come in town,” said John Felgate of Florida.
“I am retired and living 850 miles away,” Festus High graduate Steve Primo said. “I wish I could be there more often.”
“Every time I come home from North Carolina I stop there,” Chris Kinder said. “Got to have a Stoplight!”
Down through generations
Dozens of young Twin Citians – and their siblings, their cousins, their neighbors and now their children and even grandchildren – worked at the restaurant over the years.
“It really has been a family affair,” Grass said.
He should know; he took over the business from his parents, Kurt and Lori Grass, who bought it from Heddell in 1997. Turnover among employees is traditionally low.
“We almost never hire anyone who isn’t a relative of one of us,” Grass said. “They stay through high school and even college, coming back on holidays and weekends.
“We have three 20-plus-year employees. We’ve got two girls who fill in for us — one’s a teacher and the other a bank employee. Both started here at 15, and they work a few days a year because they like it.”
Bernard Laiben working meal prep at Stoplight in 1985.
Carole Dutton Thomure of Crystal City and several of her family members worked at Stoplight over the years.
“My uncle Terry and my brother Mike both worked for Gordon Heddell, who everybody called ‘Gar,” she said. “The boys wore white pants and shirts, and we girls wore dresses. The boys had to wear little white paper hats. I started at 15 in 1966. I think I made $1.10 an hour, plus tips. If you got a quarter tip, you did good.”
She said in those days a hamburger sold for a quarter, and a Big Burger was 50 cents. In the early years, Stoplight offered curb service.
“I think there were about 16 spaces, some in the back, on the side, or along the side of the building just to the west,” Thomure recalled. “Each space had a little speaker, and the customer would order the food and us car hops would bring it out.”
The ordering system made for some interesting experiences.
“When you took an order, you went to the board and pushed down the button to hear them and took their order,” Thomure said. “You could leave the button on and hear what was being said in the cars. You got a lot of good gossip that way!”
Thomure’s daughter, Laurie Pruneau Portell, worked there in her teens, and grandson Eric Portell worked there around 2010.
Minor struggles
Like any long-standing business, Stoplight’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed – much like the Mississippi River that was the restaurant’s bane for many decades.
The restaurant was flooded numerous times over the years when the river backed up, and employees grew skilled in the process of moving furnishings, sandbagging the building, running the pumps and then pitching in for the cleanup effort that inevitably followed.
Stoplight was only about five years old when it was first flooded. This shot is from the edge of what is now the First Baptist Church toward the south, with the restaurant on the right.
Although flooding was fairly frequent, the biggest ones seemed to come at 20-year intervals starting in 1953. Local high school students were pressed into service as sandbaggers in 1973, and the building received national media attention in 1993 when it was submerged up to the roofline.
But the advent of the Rita Lovelace Twin City Flood Control Levee in 2006 put an end to the flooding cycle, and now the business stays dry year-round.
Luckily, the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t have much of an effect on business.
“We were maybe down 10 percent,” Grass said. “We do most of our business out the (carryout) window anyway, so it was just a matter of getting more packaging materials. We didn’t have to lay anybody off.”
One sunny afternoon in May, a car crashed through the front window, narrowly missing customers who were enjoying their lunch. Luckily, no one was hurt and service resumed a day later.
Stoplight has received kudos over the years for its solid menu and service. The Travel Channel chose the restaurant as top burger in Missouri in 2019, and St. Louis magazine named the Jumbo one of the Best Burgers in St. Louis in 2022. The business received the Jeffersonian Award in October from the Jefferson County Growth Association.
Grass and his wife, Kristy, encourage customers to share their memories.
“We’d love for people to bring in any photos they have from the old days, either as employees or as customers, especially from the curb service time,” Kristy said. “They can bring them by here or post to our Facebook page.”
Life goes on at Stoplight, mostly as it has for 75 years. There’s now an ATM where the jukebox used to sit, and online orders make up a quarter of the daily transactions.
But parents still bring their small children in for a hot dog. Grandparents come for a Jumbo and regale their families with tales of the carhop days. Students stop by before homecoming in the fall or prom in the spring, eschewing the snobbishness of a fancy restaurant in favor of the hometown classic burger and fries as a pre-event meal.
“There’s not much we can do to expand, and we don’t want to change,” Grass said. “Hopefully we can just keep plugging along another 75 years.”
