F4 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022
production of Frommer’s print
guidebooks. (The Frommers re-
purchased rights and resumed
printing guidebooks.)
That’s how 2013 became the
year of essays trumpeting the de-
mise of travel guidebooks, eachattributing cause of death to some
combination of apps, influencers,
online searches and digital pow-
erhouse Tripadvisor. But the
doomsaying was nothing new.
“The whole time I’ve been work-
ing on guidebooks, people havebeen like, ‘The end of guidebooks
is nigh,’ ” said author Zora O’Neill,
who wrote her first travel guide-
book in 2002 and has penned
titles for both Moon and Lonely
Planet.
Although the end never came,O’Neill saw the industry change.
Rates have fallen or stagnated in
the past two decades, while in
many cases, work-for-hire ar-
rangements replaced traditional
royalty contracts. And the once-
dominant role of guidebooks incompany. I felt as if I was sleep-
ing on sacred ground, or at least
in the shadow of royalty.
Stuckey, 56, laughs at the idea,
although the Atlanta Journal-
Constitution did call her a pecan
log roll “heiress,” a title that
seems to both amuse and annoy
her. “I thought heiresses were
supposed to have money,” she
said. “I got debt.”
A lawyer and former Georgia
state legislator, Stuckey grew up
in D.C., the daughter of Rep. Bill
Stuckey Jr., who represented
Georgia’s 8th Congressional Dis-
trict for 10 years. Every summer,
she would road trip with her
family in a “woodie” station wag-
on to Florida, seeing her last
name on billboards and stopping
at every Stuckey’s store along the
way.
Inspired by these memories,
Stuckey says that, in 2019, she
invested $500,000 to purchase
the vastly diminished company.
The chain now has just 13 free-standing original stores in 10
states sporting their signature
sloped roofs. (The Gallman,
Miss., location recently took a
“terrible hit” when a truck
slammed into it, wrecking the
front half, Stuckey says.)
In addition, it has about 65
licensed Stuckey’s Express loca-
tions housed in larger stores.
That’s why you’ll find a couple of
shelves of Stuckey’s products at
places such as the sprawling
Border Station souvenir shop
and gas station along Route 168
in Chesapeake, Va.
The company recently bought
a pecan-and-candy plant in Geor-
gia. It’s also online, shipping
candy and an endless variety of
Stuckey’s merchandise (socks,
hats, hoodies) that once were
available only to those wander-
ing in off the highway. Also
available, of course, is Stuckey’s
grandmother’s pecan log roll, a
cylinder of nougat and maraschi-
no cherries coated with carameland pecan pieces. The treat isn’t
subtle: It’s a soft, chewy, crunchy
sugar bomb. It remains the big-
gest seller.
The company has seen its
annual revenue more than qua-
druple to $11 million in the past
two years, Stephanie Stuckey
says, but like its fans, Stuckey
seems driven by nostalgia, travel-
ing across the country to visit her
outlets and other roadside at-
tractions. “I love rubber alliga-
tors. I love snow globes, mugs,
salt and pepper shakers, spoons,
shot glasses, piggy banks, any of
those kitschy collectibles. The
tackier the better,” she said.
She also takes pride in her
family’s legacy. “My grandfather
really paid attention to what
people wanted when they pulled
over. We’re part of the DNA of the
American travel experience by
car.”
Indeed, the chain — which
promised customers a place to
“Relax, Refresh, Refuel” — made
its mark on American culture. A
1995 article in the Society for
Commercial Archeology Journal
calls Stuckey’s “the forerunner of
the modern convenience store.”
In the first years of the inter-
states, it was often the lone place
to get a meal or gas. At one point,
it was the nation’s largest seller
of Texaco fuel, and its stores lined
12 major highways heading to
Florida, notes the journal.
The chain also was an unex-
pected beacon of tolerance in the
Jim Crow South, welcoming
Black travelers as a companyIf You Go
Stuckey’s
stuckeys.com
Locations are listed on its website.
To find a free-standing location,
filter by “Original Stuckey’s Store”
when searching.BY JEN ROSE SMITHRick Steves is hyped. That’s not
so unusual: Infectious joy is sure-
ly one key to Steves’s success as
America’s kindly vacation guru.
Still, when he leaves next month
on a 40-day trip to update his
European guidebooks — a ritual
he used to perform each spring —
it will be the first such journey
since covid-19 erased his travel
calendar, which explains his cur-
rent level of euphoria.
“Just to get back in the saddle
has got me so filled with adven-
ture, with energy,” he said. “I can
hardly wait.” The trip follows a
pandemic-long dry spell that qui-
eted presses across the guidebook
industry. U.S. travel book sales in
2020 were down about 40 percent
from the previous year, according
to NPD BookScan. (The category
includes, but doesn’t single out,
travel guidebooks.)
Facing stalled sales and the
prospect of ongoing upheaval
amid the pandemic, many guide-
book print runs were postponed
or canceled. “We put all the guide-
books on pause,” said Pauline
Frommer, co-president of the
guidebook company her father,
Arthur Frommer, founded in 1957.
“It was very clear from the begin-
ning of the pandemic that things
were going to change drastically,
and I did not want to print guide-
books that were not worth the
paper they were printed on.”
The pandemic knockdown
came following uncertain dec-
ades for the guidebook industry.
After reaching 19,005,029 in
2006, U.S. travel book sales halved
over the next decade. In 2013, BBC
Worldwide sold Lonely Planet, a
move followed by massive layoffs.
Then, having acquiring From-
mer’s, Google quietly stopped all
travel culture changed, too.
As an old millennial who start-
ed traveling in guidebooks’ sup-
posedly halcyon age, I’ve watched
that transformation with interest.
Sometimes with nostalgia, too: I
miss swapping annotated, dog-
eared books with fellow travelers
in bars or hostels. Now, you can
reliably find those same places
filled with people glued to their
screens.
Twenty years ago, however, I
would have said guidebooks con-
tributed to an informational
monoculture I found aggravating.
I noticed that people using the
same brand of travel guides
seemed to follow each other,
slightly abashed, from place to
place.
On one months-long trip
through Central America in 2002,
fellow owners of Lonely Planet’s
hefty “Central America on a Shoe-
string” became familiar faces as
we popped up at the same places
in city after city. When new busi-
nesses opened, owners struggled
to get the word out. Lurid tales of
questionable guidebook ethics
circulated. Outdated or incorrect
entries in a book could leave you
stranded, but few other sources
existed.
“When I started writing, the
problem was that there was not
enough information,” said Steves,
noting that, at one time, guide-
books were almost the only way to
decide where to stay in an unfa-
miliar city. As times changed, that
sameness gave way to the un-
tamed, thrilling diversity of to-
day’s digital wilderness.
“It got to the point where there
was too much information,” he
said, noting that proliferating
sources made it harder to know
what was reliable. Researching a
SEE GUIDEBOOKS ON F5After years of uncertainty, guidebooks are finding their way again
RICK STEVES’ EUROPE
A selection of Rick Steves’s guidebooks. After years of falling sales and then pandemic upheaval, the guidebook industry has evolved
— and today’s guidebooks are more useful than you might think.BY LARRY BLEIBERGI’m 45 miles away when the
first billboard appears. “Famous
Pecan Log Rolls,” it declares. “An
American Tradition Since 1937.”
I press on the accelerator a
little harder.
The sales pitch steadily amps
up. “Saltwater taffy,” promises
the next sign. A few miles later, a
Godzilla-size squirrel peers out
from another towering adver-
tisement: “I need to stop at
Stuckey’s to get my nuts!” it
declares.
When the roadside shop final-
ly appears on the horizon in
Mappsville, on Virginia’s Eastern
Shore, there’s really no choice but
to pull over.
I step inside Stuckey’s, and
even on a chilly winter day, it
feels like a beach vacation, with
spinner racks of T-shirts, piles of
Mexican blankets and shelves
and shelves of candy.
“A lot of people who come here
say they remember traveling
with their grandparents during
the summer, and they would
always stop,” said Jennifer
Fletcher, who has worked the
counter for 32 years.
I nod knowingly. The truth is
those memories had prompted
me to detour miles out of my way
to visit the last free-standing
Stuckey’s in Virginia.
The emporium traces its roots
to a Georgia pecan dealer who
started a stand to sell nut candies
made by his wife. As the country
emerged from the Depression,
W.S. “Sylvester” Stuckey Sr. be-
gan to build stores and soon was
outfitting them with gas pumps,
lunch counters and gift shops.
His newly founded chain, with a
signature blue roof, grew along
with the country’s new interstate
highway system, reaching 368
locations in more than 30 states,
with a concentration across the
South and Southwest.
For baby boomers, it became a
road trip staple, an oasis of
souvenirs and sweets, plus clean
restrooms. But it was sold a
couple of times to conglomerates
and began a downward spiral
after the oil embargo of the 1970s
temporarily put the road trip out
of fashion, and fast-food chal-
lengers sprouted along the high-
ways.
Now it’s trying to launch a
comeback.
I had fallen anew under the
Stuckey’s spell a few months
earlier during a visit to Atlanta,
when I stayed at a Stuckey’s-
themed Airbnb furnished with
brightly branded coffee mugs,
vintage candy boxes and even a
rubber alligator, one of the
stores’ treasured souvenirs. They
all brought back memories of
childhood trips across Virginia,
with Stuckey’s stops in Front
Royal, Williamsburg and points
beyond.
The guesthouse belonged to
Stephanie Stuckey, the founder’s
granddaughter, who recently
bought the financially troubled
policy. It even makes an appear-
ance in the film “Green Book,”
when White driver Tony “Lip”
Vallelonga and his client, Black
musician Don Shirley, share
burgers in South Carolina, sip-
ping soda from canary-yellow
Stuckey’s paper cups with a blue-
roofed store behind them.
Stuckey’s was a relentless ad-
vertiser, boasting 4,000 bill-
boards at its peak. It wore down
parents’ defenses with an on-
slaught of signs alerting every-
one in the car that a Stuckey’s
was ahead. The company would
typically locate stores on the
northbound side of the road,
knowing that southbound vaca-
tioners were so eager to reach
their destination that they were
less likely to stop, Stuckey said.
Her grandfather also sought hill-
top sites, so they could be seen
from a distance.
The Mappsville store, which
opened in 1964, was strategically
located about an hour north of
then-new Chesapeake Bay Bridge
Tunnel on U.S. 13. The thought
was that drivers or their passen-
gers would be ready for a rest-
room break, owner Kathy Kal-
moutis tells me.
“They also put the bathrooms
in the back-left corner, so you’d
have to walk by everything.” Her
store’s sugar-rich inventory in-
cludes variations of pecan treats,
bags of vintage candies and box-
es of fireworks. Another separate
section features Virginia pea-
nuts, jams and wines.
Although a little worn around
the edges, the store is one of the
best-preserved of the original
designs. The partner stores host-
ing the Stuckey’s Express loca-
tions aren’t nearly as enticing. At
the Border Station, I had to
navigate around beer coolers and
electronic betting machines just
to find a few shelves of Stuckey’s
candies and nuts.
How did we get here? Some
attribute the start of the decline
to Stuckey’s grandfather’s choice
to merge his chain in the 1960s
with Pet Milk Co., which made a
number of food products, includ-
ing evaporated milk. In the late
1970s, Pet was purchased in a
hostile takeover by Illinois Cen-
tral Industries, which started
closing Stuckey’s stores, partly in
the face of new competition from
fast-food and convenience store
chains. By the time Stuckey’s
father, who came up with the
Stuckey’s Express concept, re-
purchased the chain with some
other investors in 1985, it was
down to 75 stores. After her
father retired in 2014, Stuckey
says, there was only a “skeleton
crew” managing the company;
she bought it from his fellow
investors.
Today, Stuckey’s is also facing
off against 24-hour family-
friendly truck stops and upstarts
such as Texas-based Buc-ee’s,
which has 41 stores in four states
and lures travelers with its mam-
moth size and services. Some
sites offer more than 100 gaspumps, and inside the stores,
shoppers can find surprises such
as a barbecue counter, a jerky bar
and an endless variety of merch
emblazoned with the chain’s
toothy beaver mascot.
Stuckey isn’t intimidated.
“There are way too many exits on
the interstate highway system to
think we can dominate the high-
ways. We’re going to be small,
curated, unique and special.” Her
plan is to win over a new genera-
tion of customers by embracing
the company’s roots. “We have a
history that’s uniquely tied to the
American road trip.” To that end,
she promotes her travels and
company through a barrage of
postings on TikTok, Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram, along
with podcasts and blogs.
“She’s the queen of social me-
dia,” says Brad Moore, 56, of
Overland Park, Kan., who runs a
Stuckey’s Facebook page.
“They’re doing their best to keep
their name out there.”
Moore knows the original
stores well. An architect by train-
ing, he lovingly built a scale
model of a Stuckey’s that now sits
in what he calls its “forever
home,” the Chamber of Com-
merce in Eastman, Ga., where the
chain was founded.
For him, Stuckey’s brings back
memories of family road trips
from the Midwest to visit rela-
tives in the South. He and his
sister would see the billboards
and start counting down the
miles.
But now, instead of billboards,
the landscape is filled with for-
mer Stuckey’s buildings. In fact,
there’s a certain sport in finding
them. In Elkton, Md., I recently
located a long-abandoned Stuck-
ey’s off U.S. 40, marked with a
faded “Happy 40 Discount Li-
quors” sign, the 4 hanging at an
angle like a digit that had too
much to drink.
Some of the old Stuckey’s
buildings still operate as gas
stations under different names,
but many appear to be aban-
doned. At least one has become a
church, and several have been
transformed into adult book-
stores. (A chain called Lion’s Den
seems to have an affinity for the
buildings, Moore said.)
So, Moore feels lucky to live
within 100 miles of two opera-
tional Stuckey’s, one east of him
on Interstate 70 in Missouri and
one west in Kansas. He manages
to visit a few times a year, and
he’ll inevitably pick up a T-shirt
to add to his collection, now
numbering 60. The stops are an
homage to his childhood.
“It makes me think of my
parents,” he said. “All of a sudden,
it’s 1974 again, and I can see my
mother smoking her cigarette. I
can see my father pumping the
gas. It’s nostalgia, the power of
memories.”Bleiberg is a writer based in
Charlottesville. His website is
larrybleiberg.com. Find him on
Instagram: @lbleiberg.Trying to stage a comeback, Stuckey’s wants you to drive down memory lane
LARRY BLEIBERG FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTSTEPHANIE STUCKEY
TOP: The Border Station in Chesapeake, Va., is branded as a
Stuckey’s Express. ABOVE: Stephanie Stuckey, seen during a
Route 66 road trip. A granddaughter of the Stuckey’s founder,
she has been trying to rebuild the chain for the past few years.