Williamstown ? A bunch of local farmers may burst into tears June 30, not because of drought or problems with their crops.

That’s the last day Sharon Dodds will hang her “Open” sign in the window of Sharon’s Billtown Cafe on U.S. Highway 24-59 north of Lawrence, the last day she’ll serve up her homemade biscuits and gravy, pies and chicken and noodles. The dozens of regular customers – a group Dodds calls “my boys” – will need to find a new place to spend their mornings.

“It’s like a death in the family,” said Bruce Berns of Perry, who has been farming in the area since the late 1960s.

“There’ll be a lot of lost farmers around here,” said Butch O’Trimble, another regular.

Arthritis in the spine, knee and foot are forcing the 63-year-old Dodds into retirement earlier than she’d like. The cafe sits on land owned by the local quarry and landfill operator Hamm Cos., and though Dodds has a lifetime contract to run the place, she said it won’t continue once she retires.

Dodds said she tried to arrange with the company to keep the restaurant going without her, but it didn’t happen.

“I’m selling everything out, piece by piece,” she said. “That’s all I can do.”

As for the building itself, “it will probably be down in Hamm’s dump,” she said.

Chicken and ribbing

If you come to Sharon’s, you should bring an empty stomach and a thick skin. One thing that isn’t on the menu, but is served up constantly, is good, old-fashioned ribbing.

“They bring their lunch,” O’Trimble said on a recent morning, as Dobbs’ two employees, Judy Newman and Donna Stephens, walked in the door.

Neil Gantz, a Kansas State University fan, said one problem with the cafe’s closing is that he won’t be able to make fun of Berns about his Kansas University allegiance. Berns said that going to the cafe starts the day off with “45 minutes of B.S.”

“We’re going to have to drive to each others’ farm to pick on each other,” Gantz said.

From behind the counter, Dodds doesn’t just get in on the act. She sets the tone.

“How would you like to wear this?” she asked a mouthy customer as she served up a breakfast plate.

“And to think that I’m cooking your breakfast right now!” she said to another.

When Dodds says, “The customer is always right,” it isn’t a motto. It’s a tongue-in-cheek joke that draws laughter from the table full of regulars at the middle of the room.

“She runs it the way she wants to,” regular Roscoe Keesling said.

That includes the dancing, battery-powered chicken that sits on the counter and the cow-themed clock that moos at the top of the hour.

Giving back

Dodds typically starts her day before sunrise, making gravy, biscuits and pies by hand. On Fridays, she mixes 18 eggs with flour to make the noodles for her famous chicken and noodles, which sometimes are gone before noon.

Despite her feisty attitude, she extends her hospitality to strangers, not just regulars. Every Christmas for the past 15 years, she and her husband, Leon, have prepared a free dinner for anyone who walks in the door, complete with four bone-in hams, biscuits and gravy, cinnamon rolls, fruit, juice and an assortment of quiche.

“There’s nothing worse than sitting home on Christmas by yourself when you can come down here and mingle,” she said.

The secret to running a restaurant, Dodds said, is “you have to be there and work.”

“If you’re going to hire it done, it’s not going to be done the way you want it done,” she said.

Part of the community

Dodds has been running Sharon’s for 18 years and previously operated restaurants in McLouth and Ozawkie. There’s been a diner on the site at Hamm’s since the 1940s, when Norman Hamm, founder of the companies, used it as a place to serve food to his help, she said. The tiles on the floor are the signature turquoise color that decorates the fleet of Hamm trucks.

Dodds said that when she opened the restaurant, Hamm tried the food, approved of it, and told her, “I’m going to take care of you.” He told her she could lease the place for as long as she wanted to stay.

Hamm died in 2003.

A series of calls to the Hamm Cos. seeking comment on the future of the diner weren’t returned.

Some farmers who now are gray-haired have been eating there since they were kids. When Berns, then 23, moved to the area in the late 1960s from the Flint Hills and started farming, he was scrutinized because of his long hair and because he was an outsider.

“Anytime you move into a community and you start farming, people just wait for you to fail,” he said.

But the cafe, which was run back then by Lila Pearson, was the one place he felt welcome.

“I hate it” that the restaurant is closing, he said. “But there’s nothing we’re going to do about it.”

When Dodds talks about the closing of the restaurant, the jokes and the ribbing stop.

“I love everybody that comes in here,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot of tears.”