John T. Edge

Open House

A visit to my old stomping grounds turns up some dark shadows

 

I arrived at the University of Georgia as a seventeen-year-old freshman in September of 1980. The night before classes began, I pledged a fraternity, shotgunned a six-pack of Country Club malt liquor, and gulped down a pint of Pepe Lopez tequila. Around two that morning, in the company of my new brothers, I went carousing through the narrow streets of Athens, bound for an all-night diner known as Blanche’s Open House. Once there, I scarfed a platter of eggs and grits, before excusing myself to vomit in the direction of the toilet. I missed. When I walked to the counter to tell someone what I had done, a middle-aged woman with a tight henna bouffant threw me a rag and screamed, “Don’t give me that; I don’t want to hear it. Clean up your own shit!” This, I learned, was Blanche Guest.

Set on the seedy side of downtown, between a tire plant and a coin-operated Laundromat, Blanche’s Open House was the place to be late at night. Though Blanche opened at nine each evening, the real action started around one or two in the morning, after the bars closed, after the frat parties began to peter out.

The floor was a checkerboard of red and white tiles. At one time the interior walls had probably been painted white, but years of cigarette smoke
had rendered the bricks a dull beige. If there were posters or paintings, I can't recall them. A jukebox stocked with George Jones and Parliament
Funkadelic hunkered by the front window. Seven red vinyl stools faced a scarred linoleum counter, behind which Blanche worked the grill and the cash register. On a typical Friday night the wait for one of the eight tables approached an hour, and on football Saturdays the line stretched out the door and onto the sidewalk. The food, as I recall, was greasy but generous.

Blanche fascinated me. I remember her as a cross between Minnie Pearl and Daisy Mae with a fondness for wearing silk tops and a tremulous voice that sounded like a buzz saw. I never recall seeing her without a lit cigarette dangling from her bottom lip. And I swear that I never heard her utter a sentence that was not punctuated by an expletive. Yet strange as it may seem, there was something maternal about her manner: When a friend of mine, for reasons I still cannot fathom, tried to climb on top of the glass-fronted jukebox, she screamed, “Get down, goddamn it, or you’ll cut your damn fool legs off.”

For my fraternity brothers and a host of other university students, Blanche’s Open House served as a kind of late-night purgatory, a holding tank where young drunks loaded up on grease and caffeine in an effort to ward off a hangover or stymie a Breathalyzer test. Sure, we’d heard that Blanche’s husband, Herbert Guest, had a troubled past, that he had been somehow implicated in a murder back in the 1960s, but the word was he had never been convicted. When we caught wind of rumors that Herbert was once active in the Klan and that the Open House had functioned as a gathering place for the local Klavern, we just turned a deaf ear and ordered another cheeseburger. What right did we have to stir up the past?

 

 

Six or eight years back, I read a book, The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg. The author examines how communal bonds are fostered, not at work, not at home, but at “third places” like taverns and coffeehouses and cafés, where unrelated people relate as equals. I have a peculiar affinity for such institutions, but until I read The Great Good Place, I had never been quite sure why. Emboldened by his theories and a budding interest in the Civil Rights Movement, I began exploring the role of third places in the public life of the South. In the name of research, I ate smoke-charred ribs at Aleck’s Barbecue Heaven in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. and his lieutenants plotted marches and sit-ins, kneel-ins and wade-ins. I wolfed a pig ear sandwich at Jackson, Mississippi’s Big Apple Inn and listened as the owner regaled me with stories of the days when the NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers kept his office upstairs. And I made a trip to Washington, D.C., to sup at Ben’s Chili Bowl, the U Street hot dog joint that served as a de facto community center and SNCC command post during the riots that followed King’s 1968 assassination.

It took me a while, however, to warm to the idea of exploring the dark side of the South’s third places. But there was no getting around it. Third places take on the attributes of the regulars who populate them, and if a third place could serve as a staging ground for the Civil Rights Movement, as a home away from home for the Beloved Community, then a different kind of third place with a different kind of clientele could serve as an incubator of opposition, as an incubator of violence. In January of this year, with all this top of mind, I went back to Athens in search of the truth about my old haunt, Blanche’s Open House.

 

 

I do not have to wait long for answers. Early into my research at the University of Georgia library, I find a photocopy of an FBI teletype dated July 19, 1964:

Investigation to date has placed suspects Guest, Phillips, Lackey, Myers, and Sims as frequenting the Open House restaurant, hangout for rabid Klansmen located at 234 West Hancock Street at various times between twelve zero one a.m. and five thirty a.m., July eleven last.

The matter being investigated was the murder of Lemuel Penn, a black Army Reserve officer. During the early morning hours of July 11, 1964, Penn, en route from Fort Benning in Georgia, to his home in Washington, D.C., was killed near a bridge twenty-two miles north of Athens. A shotgun blast blew out the back of his head. According to newspaper accounts of the day, he was singled out by the Klan for the color of his skin and the out-of-state license plate bolted to the bumper of his car.

Inspired by my discovery, I spent the next few days hunched over a microfilm viewer in the library basement, scanning contemporary newspaper accounts and a newly declassified fifty-six-hundred-page FBI file on the Penn murder. One in a while, I surfaced from the depths to comb through city directories, tracing the lineage of the businesses that have occupied the two hundred block of West Hancock Street, and to read memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement.

My life in Athens took on an ascetic quality: I passed way too much time, book in hand, at the Varsity, a storied chili dog drive-in that, during the spring and summer of 1964, was a site of nonviolent demonstrations by black youth and a target of violent counter-demonstrations by hooded white thugs from Clarke County Klavern 244, United Klans of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. When my body cried out for something green and crunchy, I dined at the Grit, a hipster vegetarian restaurant of more recent vintage. But the summer of 1964 hounds me: During the course of my research, I learned that the space above what is now the Grit had, during that same fateful summer, served as the meeting place for the local Klavern.

 

 

Accounts of the summer of 1964 almost invariably mention the Open House. In June, Klansmen from the local 244 terrorized the residents of an Athens housing complex, firing shotguns, first into the air and then later into the back door of an apartment, striking a nineteen-year-old black man in the eye and a thirteen-year-old black girl in the lip. Herbert Guest -- described by the journalist William Bradford Huie as a “282-pound garage operator with a first grade education. . .blackhaired, with several front teeth missing” -- was arrested in the first round of shootings and charged with disorderly person. He paid a $105 fine. Paul Strickland, one of the triggerman dredged up an alibi: he claimed to be drinking coffee at the Open House when the shots were fired.

Almost eighty FBI agents descended on Athens during late July 1964. They canvassed residents of rural Madison County, where Penn was shot. They questioned college students who claimed to have purchased amphetamines from Guest’s Garage. They interviewed a man who spoke of buying bootleg whiskey from Guest and another man who claimed that the garage was involved in the white slavery trade, specifically the transport of prostitutes from Athens to Jacksonville, Florida. Guest’s Garage was also the alleged home base for the Klan security patrol, a group of four to six men, some of whom were known to wear side arms and drive about town with KKK placards fixed to the sides of their cars. A July 14 FBI memo described them as “ a terror group, ostensibly operating without the knowledge or approval of Klavern officials.”

The FBI knew Herbert Guest to be a Klansman, and they listed Blanche as one of eight members of the Ladies Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan. At the time of Penn’s murder, Blanche and Herbert worked together at Guest’s Garage, four blocks away from the Open House on West Hancock Street. The Open House was a regular stakeout sight. On the evening of July 19, FBI informants observed the following patrons at the restaurant: a filling station employee, a drive-in theater worker, several college students, a midget, two state patrolmen, one Athens policeman, and a man who bragged of “ hitting and killing a nigger with his car.”

It was a fairly typical night.

The Guests were under constant surveillance. On July 31, Herbert’s thirty-seventh birthday, two FBI agents delivered a cake to Guest’s Garage. “Herbert wanted to sit down and eat it,” Blanche told the Atlanta Constitution reporter Bill Shipp. “But I wouldn¹t let him. I told him he didn¹t know what the FBI might have put in that cake.” Frosted with white icing and topped with the appropriate number of candles, the coconut cake was understood to be a message: “I believe it was just their way of letting Herbert know they knew all about him,” said a friend.

On August 6, suspect James Lackey confessed to FBI agents that he, Howard Sims, and Cecil Myers were on “security patrol” the morning of Lemuel Penn’s death. Lackey was driving, with Myers in the passenger seat and Sims in the back. Sims and Meyers were armed. According to witness interviews, they spent the majority of the evening shuttling back and forth between the Open House and Guest’s Garage until around four in the morning, when they spotted Penn’s car. “The original reason for our following the colored men,” Lackey told investigators, “was because we had heard that Martin Luther King might make Georgia a testing ground with the new Civil Rights bill. We thought some out-of-town niggers might stir up some trouble in Athens. . . . I had no idea they would really shoot the Negro.”

That same day, on the strength of Lackey’s confession, FBI agents arrested him along with Sims, Myers, and Herbert Guest -- who at the time was pegged as the ringleader of the group -- on federal charges of violating Penn’s civil rights. A state murder indictment followed for Lackey, Sims and Meyers. Guest, who was arrested as an accessory after the fact, corroborated Lackey¹s statement. Conviction seemed inevitable. But by the time of the murder trial, Lackey and Guest repudiated their testimonies. On September 4, an all-white jury found the defendants not guilty of murder. Almost two years later Sims and Myers were convicted on the civil rights charges, but as far as the courts are concerned, the murder of Lemuel Penn remains unsolved.

Though Herbert Guest was never convicted in the Penn case, he did serve time for the sale of amphetamines -- a turn of events that compelled Blanche to try a new career. When Herbert headed for the federal penitentiary in late 1966, she closed the garage and bought the restaurant that her husband and his cronies had called home. She dubbed it Blanche’s Open House. Assisted by Herbert after his release from prison, Blanche operated the Open House until 1985, when she sold her lease to a man named Herbie Abroms, recently retired from a career in the ladies” apparel industry.

 

 

Before I departed for home on Sunday, I drove by Blanche’s old spot on Hancock Street one more time. There were no reminders of her tenure in the redbrick building. No beer cans littered the parking lot like they once did. Gone was the Coca-Cola sign that advertised OPEN ALL NIGHT. Instead, a hand-painted sign hung above the entrance. It read: FOUNTAIN OF LIFE MINISTRIES. It was around eleven o¹clock in the morning when I drove up in front of the adjacent beauty shop and climbed out. There was a crowd milling about in the parking lot of the storefront church. As I moved closer, I heard music. Every face I saw was black. Since I was a little underdressed for church, I hung back at the edge of the crowd, unsure if I should join them inside.

A pickup soon pulled alongside me, and when the driver emerged, we fell into conversation. I told him I’m writing about the restaurant that used to be here. He told me that he doesn’t remember it as a restaurant. When I told him about the Guests and the Klan, he squinted into the morning sun and shook his head. I stammered an attempt at explanation, but he cut me off. I tried to tell him about third places, but he just kept shaking his head. “I don't care what it was before,” he said, his voice rising, “It’s a church now.”

 

Coda:
Sweet Tea With Blanche and Herbert

A few days into my research on the 1964 murder of Lemuel Penn, I think to ask a rather elemental question: What happened to Blanche and Herbert Guest, proprietors of the late night diner in Athens, Georgia that hosted Klansmen in the 1960s and drunken frat boys like me in the 1980s? I had pegged Blanche as ancient when I met her twenty-plus years ago. Had she and Herbert passed away?

A quick check of the phone book tells me they are both alive. When I call Blanch to set up an interview, I am rather vague about my intentions. I am not disingenuous, but I also am not keen on letting Blanche and Herbert know that this reformed frat boy has been leafing through their old F.B.I. files, trying to make sense of their past and, by extension, my own.

Early one afternoon, I drive out Prince Avenue to Whitehead Road where Blanche and Herbert live in a brick, ranch-style house. Blanche is vacuuming when I knock. Her face is now deeply lined, and her hair has turned ashen, but she looks spry for a seventy-one-year-old. Herbert hasn’t fared as well. His already formidable weight has ballooned, and he wheezes when he walks.

Soon after I take a seat at the dining room table, Blanche hands me a tumbler of sweet tea and launches into a serial recollection: “We were known for our barbecue goat omelets.” And, “Did you realize that I always bought fresh eggs, I never did take to store bought eggs.” And, “ I can’t remember when we installed bars on the men’s bathroom window, but we had to do it. There were just too damn many drunks crawling out and not paying.”

On two separate occasions Herbert begins a story about a past indiscretion, only to have Blanche cut him off, redirect my line of questioning, and plunge headlong into another tale. As she talks, my mind begins to wander. I concoct a daydream in which I return to my car, grab my file of F.B.I. clippings, dump them on the walnut tabletop, and shout something akin to ‘J’accuse!’

Instead, I smile and nod and swallow hard. This is not one of my prouder moments: Rather than give Blanche and Herbert a chance to explain themselves, rather than lay claim to the bully pulpit for myself, I defile the hospitality of my hosts, and deny the empirical truth of my research.

Later that afternoon, I return home from the library to find that Blanche has left a message on my answering machine. “I found an old matchbook from the restaurant,” she says. “Stop by the house tomorrow and I’ll give it to you as a souvenir. Ain’t too many of these left, you know.”