#trumann ar

These are astonishing times around the GPC home office.   I get notifications every week of estate sales in the area. One of them had this picture of these Little Pigs of America items, things I've never seen for sale.

 The Memphis-based Little Pigs of America barbecue franchise operation has been a focus of this site for years, so I was stoked. I've picked up the occasional LPOA postcard and matchbook off ebay, but never anything that wasn't paper.   Needless to say, Thursday morning I was in line at 8:30 to try to get these items. The folks ahead of me were record dealers, so I was hopeful. Once inside, I couldn't find them right away because the house was crammed with stuff. I was starting to get nervous as minutes passed, but finally found them in plain sight, on a table right as you entered the house. I was lucky. Anyway, they are painted on masonite, each one just a bit different.

According to the LPOA commissary and promotions catalog, they appear to be counter easels.

    I had the feeling there was more. The homeowner was clearly a barbecue cooker -- contest trophies and pig knicknacks inside and a trailer smoker out back. Then I found a box of Koozies printed up for a barbecue team, and I recognized one of the names, which turned out to be the homeowner. I realized I had corresponded with her -- very likely LPOA related -- but I couldn't dredge up the connection immediately.   Back home, I looked up my LPOA letter file, and I had written her 10 years earlier after reading her mother's obituary in The Commercial Appeal that mentioned the family's Little Pigs restaurant in Trumann, Ark. A visit to the Trumann public library confirmed that the restaurant was indeed an LPOA franchise. (I never did pin down its the exact location.)

   The woman called me back after receiving my letter, and at the time she was fairly certain she didn't have anything related to the restaurant. But now I had the connection -- these counter easels came from the Trumann shop. I had a greater feeling there was more.   Friday morning I was back at the sale. A lot of stuff was gone, but a lot remained. If you hadn't been there Thursday, you would think Friday was the sale's opening day. The house has a strange floor plan -- easy to lose track of where you've been. After an hour of walking through the rooms and on the verge of calling it a day, I picked up a binder from a shelf I had somehow overlooked and found this --

   I've seen an operating manual only one other time -- at the LPOA "mothership" in Statesville, N.C., an LPOA restaurant that has remained unchanged and in the same family since it opened in 1963 (they have EVERYTHING). It is a stunning artifact. Besides all of the franchise information, it has LPOA promotional material, menus from the restaurant and a hand-written log of the shop's daily receipts from late 1963 through 1964.