Stephanie Stuckey’s Road Trip into the History of an Icon

For those of us taking road trips with our families in the ’60s and ’70s, a stop at Stuckey’s was a fun treat. They were the original roadside stop before Love’s, Racetrack, WaWa, or Bucee’s. You could get candy, snacks, drinks, souvenirs, enjoy a clean restroom, and fill up the tank.

Stuckey’s was more than fun for Black families traveling American roads. During the days of Jim Crow Laws, businesses could and often did refuse service to Black travelers. Things were so bad that in the mid-1930s, Victor Hugo Green, a black postal worker from Harlem, New York, created a guidebook, The Negro Motorist’s Green Book, made it a little easier for African Americans to enjoy a road trip. Stuckey’s was named in his book as a safe place for a Black family to stop. W.S. Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s, believed “every traveler is a friend.”

The Stuckey Story

The Stuckey story began in 1937 when Stephanie Stuckey’s grandfather started the business with a roadside pecan stand on US-1 in Eastman, Georgia. When he got the brilliant idea to use the pecans to make candy, he rushed home from the stand and enlisted his wife to start making homemade pecan rolls, pralines, and other southern-style candy.

It worked so well that Stuckey’s grew to 368 stores in 40 states, mostly in the Southeast. But he sold it in 1964, so when Stephanie was growing up and taking road trips with her family, they would stop at Stuckey’s almost like any other family because it was out of family hands. After W. S. Stuckey sold the company, it passed through several management companies and fell into decline. In 2019, Stephanie got a chance to buy the failing company. She invested her life savings and bought the company, but she didn’t realize what a journey she was beginning.

Stephanie Stuckey Shares Her Story

When I met Stephanie a few months ago, she told me how much she loves road trips. As she spoke about doing road trips to Stuckey locations, I was struck by how she realized how the trips changed her outlook, something I have found so true. Every trip I take, I learn something new. So did Stephanie.

She said, “In life and on road trips, you have to understand where you’ve been to know where you’re going.” So, she set off on trips to visit the remaining Stuckey’s. There are only about a dozen left out of her grandfather’s over 350 Stuckey’s. When she saw the condition of some of them, she was devastated. She visited one of the original, blue-roofed stores in Marion, Arkansas with her son, Robert.

Two of the four gas pumps were broken. The roof displayed traces of the original teal trademark color peeling through the darker blue paint. Stuckey’s logo on the rooftop was barely hanging on. The spectacle brought tears to her eyes. What gave her the strength to even get out of the car and enter the dilapidated building was her tacky dashboard Jesus she had picked up as a souvenir when she began the road trip. She snapped a picture with the Jesus in the foreground of the building and posted it on Instagram with the caption, “My ‘Come to Jesus’ moment in the parking lot of a rundown Stuckey’s.”

Stephanie Stuckey Journeys Down Memory Lane

Stephanie summoned enough courage to enter the store and was surprised at what she saw. It was surprisingly clean, well-stocked, and busy inside. She asked one man why he stopped there, and his answer gave her hope. He said, “I love Stuckey’s. I remember when they were the place to stop. Yeah, maybe this store is a fixer-upper, but so am I. And so is this country.”

Stephanie returned to her car with a new realization. Her new-to-her company didn’t own any of the stores. The franchise option no longer existed. Their agreement just lets them stock Stuckey products. Some stores had seen better days. But the Stuckey’s brand was what people remembered and valued and that was what she had bought.

Back home, she began digging into family and company history. She said, “I believe in respecting the past, but not living in it.”

Exploring History

Stephanie learned the early history of pecans, America’s only commercially grown native nut. They grew wild around the country. Native Americans gave them their name “pacane,” an Algonquian word for “nut that’s hard to crack.”

It was an African American enslaved man named Antoine on Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana who grafted them to create thinner shells and more robust meat in the 1840s.

In looking over the company’s history, she saw some things that disturbed her. Most of the white men who had been with her grandfather in the early days of Stuckey’s had become store owners, stockholders in Stuckey’s, and wealthy. The same was not true of the Black men.

Lessons From the Past

One case she talks about is a Black man who worked with her grandfather before Stuckey’s was Stuckey’s. In the earliest days, her grandfather and this man, a farm worker named John King who worked for her great-grandfather, drove around the dirt backroads in an old Model T buying pecans from local farmers. Over the years, as Stuckey’s became famous and her grandfather prospered, John King worked at odd jobs but always came back and worked for Stuckey’s. There were others like her grandfather’s Black chauffeur, Boots Fluellen, who helped build Stuckey’s and got little of the recognition they deserved.

As a lawyer, environmental activist, and state representative, Stephanie admits she had little background to become the CEO of a famous brand. She said, “Studying the history of my family’s brand taught me lots of lessons on how to revive it, including to always be open to innovation and change.”

Whenever I see Stuckey’s Pecan Log Roll at a road stop, I’ll always envision the rich history behind this simple sweet treat I remember from my childhood.

 

=