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Grumpy’s, a Ketchum institution, celebrates 40 years in business.

Published May 2, 2018 in the Idaho Mountain Express.

Winner of the National Newspaper Association Award for Business Story in 2019.

Billy and Wendy Collins raised a family in a small, gray house at the south end of Warm Springs Road. Billy was fresh out of the Navy. Wendy ran an alteration shop out of the unattached garage. They spent five years in that house, before packing up for Triumph in 1976.

It went to renters, then into disrepair. Cars, unused, rusted in the front yard. Checks bounced, then stopped altogether.

Eventually, Roger Egan and Gary Goodenough approached the Collinses with a plan. Egan decided Ketchum needed a burger joint—a place to get a bite and a beer. They rented it, turned it into a restaurant, and, in 1978, hung a sign out front: “Grumpy’s,” it read.

“Sorry, we’re open.”

From noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, May 5, Grumpy’s will celebrate 40 years in that little house on Warm Springs Road the only way it knows how: with burgers, beer, and four decades of local lore.

In a town where the high-end seems to know no ceiling, it’s Ketchum’s cheap eats that have shown staying power. Lefty’s is 25. Apple’s just turned 30. Irving’s hot dogs celebrated its 40th earlier this winter. And Grumpy’s? Sorry, it’s still open.

Goodenough was there for the first 30 years. From the beginning, the place was his. He built it. He ran it. Depending on which story you believe, he named it after himself.

“Gary Goodenough—that’s Grumpy,” said longtime Mountain Express photographer Willy Cook, who worked for Goodenough in the 80s. “If you want to know about Grumpy’s, you’ve gotta get a hold of Grumpy. Everything else is hearsay.”

There’s a lot of that around Grumpy’s. Like any good seasoned hangout, its history is coded in the ornaments along its walls, the scuffs on its floor, the graffiti in its bathrooms. But Goodenough—that part checks out.

He grew up in Newport Beach, Calif. He moved to Idaho to work ranches in Hagerman and Picabo. Then, he moved to Ketchum to work the bars. There was a bar back home, Blackie’s, and Goodenough was tight with the owner. When Egan approached him with the idea for a burger place, Goodenough already knew the type of place it’d be.

“I started it, I remember that,” Goodenough said. “It’s named for my dynamic personality.”

The signs—“Sorry, we’re open,” “Glad we’re closed”—those were Gary’s idea. So was the original menu: a quarter-pound burger, a half-pound burger, a foot-long hot dog, chili, and a lot of beer.

“Gary only made things one way,” said Dave Voss, who was Goodenough’s partner from 1981-86. If a customer complained about the lettuce, tomato and onions he put on every burger, he’d hold up five fingers, and demonstrate how to remove the offending vegetables. If a customer came in asking for fries, he’d hold up one finger, and point to the door. (Grumpy’s didn’t install a fryer until 1993.)

“If you cut somebody’s burger, you’d be fired,” Cook said. “If you delivered somebody their burger, you’d be fired. It was Grumpy’s for a reason—but it was good.”

Over the years, the menu has expanded. They’ve added chicken, salmon, ahi sandwiches and daily specials. They’ll go off-book, if you ask. There’s the Caribou (chicken, barbecue sauce, ham and cheese), the singlewide (corn dog, french fries, chili and cheese), and the doublewide (take a guess). There’s still only one type of cheese—cheddar—and if you want pickles, you’ll have to bring your own.

“It’s the KISS principle personified—’Keep it simple, stupid’,” said current owner Pete Prekeges, who partnered with Goodenough in 1998 and took over outright when Goodenough retired in 2008.

“We serve anyone from the town drunk to Tom Hanks, and they all get treated the same.”

Prekeges started as a Grumpy’s regular. He worked at Smoky Mountain Pizza for his first three years in town, from 1993-96.

“We’d cut out after lunch, go put down a few schooners, and come back to cover dinner,” Prekeges said. “I’m the guy who was able to the buy the place where I always hung out.”

“The restaurant industry is like rock ‘n’ roll,” he added. “For a partnership to go to the end like it was planned, without someone going into rehab? That’s a rare thing. Gary might have been grumpy, but he’s an honorable guy, and we made it work.

“But, once we got Gary out from behind the bar, tips got better.”

The place itself has stayed basically the same since Prekeges took over as manager in 1996. With Voss, Goodenough had expanded the deck and knocked out the back wall, at last making the place big enough to accommodate a full-size pool cue.

Before River Run had a lodge, almost everyone drove past Grumpy’s to and from the mountain. Voss and Goodenough set a goal: $200 a day.

“If we could do $200 a day, we could keep the place open,” he said. “It was a labor of love.”

Goodenough worked days, Voss nights. They sold schooners—32-ounce beers in a chalice that resembles a scalped fishbowl—for 90 cents a pop. At its peak, Grumpy’s sold more Rainier than any bar outside the state of Washington. It served more Budweiser than any place in Idaho besides the racetrack—all out of an 1,100-square-foot house. If you ordered anything smaller than a mug, you’d catch hell from the staff.

“Gary wanted a place where he could insult people and get away with it,” Voss said. “Everybody had this subtle, sarcastic wit. Everybody had personality. They give us a bad time, and we’d give them a bad time. Depending on who was working, and the mood they were in, you might catch the bartender’s wrath on occasion. It lived up to its name, but it was all in fun.”

Back then, Mike Levy could walk out of his building next door and tell time by the cars parked in front of the bar. 10 a.m., 11 a.m., lunch.

“It was pretty much locals—cops, plumbers, construction workers,” Goodenough said. “But we’d also get Clint Eastwood, or Steve Miller. And we’d handle them like anyone else. I think that was part of the attraction.”

His favorite customer was the late Bill Wrigley, the chewing gum tycoon and one-time owner of the Chicago Cubs. Wrigley was a billionaire; he’d come in in a pressed shirt and a jacket, and file into line.

“Gary,” he once told Goodenough, “the best part about this place is that nobody opens the door for me.”

“I imagine in Chicago, he couldn’t touch a door handle by force,” Goodenough said.

Today, the demographics are different. Construction workers aren’t putting back two 32-ounce beers at lunch. You’re more apt to sit next to a family of four than a table of hardcore drinkers. Mike Levy needs a watch.

“The town felt real small back in ’78,” said Fred Anderson, who owns River Run Auto Parts next door. He’s been in with Grumpy’s since the beginning. Both his sons worked there; his nephew, too. And, while they don’t see each other as often as the used to—Goodenough spends half the year in Arizona, and Anderson no longer spends every night at the bar—Anderson calls Gary one of his closest friends.

“Gary was a little on edge when he was working—he was all business. I’ve heard people ask why he was in a bad mood, and he’d yell, “Well, you don’t see ‘Happy’s’ on the sign, do you?’

“He’s set in his ways, but who isn’t? He’s a sweetheart, as far as I’m concerned. He’s A-1.”

Anderson has his stories from Grumpy’s, “but they’re better left unsaid.” Same with Willy Cook. And Voss, and Goodenough, and Prekeges—and plenty more who’ve came through Ketchum, for a night or a lifetime. Like the any worthwhile drinking tale, they translate best to the people who lived them, and the regulars they drank alongside. To the “Pro Corner” on the east end of the bar. To the “Native Corner,” on the west. And to those caught between the insults they lobbed back and forth across the tap, about the rights afforded to transplants, and the New York Yankees versus the world. About, in lower tones, Grumpy himself.

“We all grew up in the ’60s,” Voss said. “Our culture was screw the establishment. We were here to have fun—and we did it quite well. Look down in the Pro Corner. The people who are still alive—they’re liable to be in the same chairs. We were young back then. Then, we all grew up.

“I was only there for five years, but it was a good five years. I loved being Gary’s partner. If I’d have known that 40 years later, it would be what it is, I never would have sold. Wouldn’t have a liver, but I never would have sold.”

Grumpy’s still doesn’t have a phone. The number online goes straight to Prekeges’ personal cell. It is, as it was, a place to hole up, to have burger, maybe a beer, and hear a story.

“We just thought that Ketchum needed a hamburger joint,” Goodenough said.

“And I’ll be damned, 40 years later, it’s still here.”