‘The heart and soul of our community’: Overcoming challenges and heartache, Pam Guffey reopens her popular cafe

Pam Guffey was exhausted and her heart was already broken that morning of March 15 when she and her husband, Junior, finally drove into Bakersfield to see if the cafe Pam had taken over five years earlier was still standing. 

A monstrous EF-3 tornado had roared through the area the evening before, and Pam and Junior had spent several hours at Baxter Healthcare in Mountain Home, Arkansas, where Pam’s mother, Emma Zastrow, 79, had been taken after being severely injured as the storm swept over the hilltop outside of town where her home had stood. Waiting together to hear about Emma’s injuries, the family was reeling after learning that Emma’s daughter Tammy Zastrow, 41 (Pam’s sister), had died in the storm, and so had another woman, Dana “Ray” Morris. A third woman, Erika Ryan, died of injuries shortly after arriving at the hospital.

Pam and Junior had driven home from the hospital around 5 a.m. after being assured that Emma, despite her severe injuries, was expected to survive. In shock and feeling overwhelmed, they lay down and rested an hour or so. Then Pam said wearily to Junior, “Let’s go see the damage.” 

They drove into town to check on the old building that housed Guffey’s Cafe. Tammy was “instantly nauseated” seeing the destruction as they headed into town. The homes on Zastrow Hill, where Emma lived, were completely gone. 

As they arrived at the crossroads in the heart of Bakersfield and turned toward the cafe, Pam’s first glimpse of the cafe was the parking lot. It was full of parked cars. And all over and around the building, which was badly damaged but still standing, friends, customers and strangers were working to clean up the mess and protect what was left.

“So many people, out there cleaning up, doing whatever they could to secure things,” she said. “A crew was already tarping the roof, and people were cleaning up glass and working inside. You’ve never seen such an outpouring of love and compassion. I can’t tell you what that did for me, to see that.”

The tornado had ripped off most of the roof, broken out all the windows and left an interior, load-bearing wall leaning precariously. The dining room was a mess, and the Guffey’s Cafe sign was broken. Miraculously, though, the kitchen was basically untouched, Pam said. 

Seeing how the little community responded to the possible loss of the town’s only restaurant, any thought of not reopening evaporated. But nothing about that journey to get back in business was easy, especially as Pam and her family also grieved the death of their beloved Tammy while also helping their mother recover, not only from several broken bones and multiple lacerations that required more than 100 stitches, but also the loss of her house, which was totally destroyed by the storm.

Coming back from those tragedies and getting back in business might have been an impossible situation for many people. “But I’m a determined old gal,” Pam said last week. 

Pam had hoped to reopen Friday, May 23, but some contractor delays and health complications kept that from happening. Now she plans a “soft opening” soon, resuming full operation and the usual seven-day-a-week schedule, including the Friday fish special. The “determined old gal” says the cafe is going to open Thursday even though, over the weekend, she came down with the flu. 

It’s been 11 weeks since the tornado turned their lives upside down and threatened to end the business that had started out five years earlier as Pam’s dream come true. 

A Bakersfield landmark

Guffey’s Cafe operates at 106 E. Main St. in a building that had housed a Bakersfield eatery since the 1960s or earlier. Through the years, the restaurant and the building had several different owners and operators, as well as many different names, including the Bakersfield Cafe, Old Time Cafe, and, about six years ago, Emmy’s Cafe. Some variations lasted a long time; others were short-lived.

In 2020, the latest version of the restaurant had closed, and the town and its surrounding area were left with no place where people could go out to eat. That’s when, unexpectedly, building owner Gwenda Belt contacted Pam Guffey and asked if she would be interested in operating a cafe there. 

“I didn’t even ask my husband,” Pam recalled with a laugh. “I just said yes.”

She had no restaurant experience (except dining in them) and knew nothing about running one. “But it’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” she said.

She accepted Gwenda Belt’s proposal and was closing in on an opening date a few weeks later when, in March 2020, her daughter Gretchen, then 15 and a student at Bakersfield High School, participated in a basketball shootout in Couch. Seven days later, Gretchen said, “Mom, my throat feels like I swallowed a dish scratcher.”

Pam took her to a medical office in West Plains, and two days later, a clinic employee called Pam with Gretchen’s test results. “She had covid,” Pam said. “She was one of the first ones in Bakersfield to have it.”

Pam and Junior were quickly tested for covid. “He tested positive. I was negative,” she said. It was a mystery. “He sits his coffee cup down, and I come behind him and drink out of it,” she said. “How he could get covid and I didn’t, we’ll never know.”

Pam persisted, and soon after Gretchen and Junior recovered, she opened Guffey’s Cafe. But the first few days were  slow. “People were afraid of covid,” she said. 

Then, six days after they opened, the cafe shut down. “Closed for covid,” she said.

As covid cases and deaths spread nationwide, turning into a pandemic, governors, including Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, issued stay-at-home orders, restricting residents from traveling outside their homes except for essential work and living requirements.

Missouri’s shutdown lasted a month. When it was lifted, Pam reopened the cafe and, with a few exceptions due to winter weather, Guffey’s Cafe was open every day afterward – seven days a week from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., except Fridays, when it was open until 7 p.m. to serve a very popular Friday fish special.

Pam’s sister Mary Bales was the restaurant’s main cook, with assistance from well-known Bakersfield VFD assistant chief Punk Stone, who came in on Fridays to fry the fish. In fact, on Friday, March 14, the day of the tornado, the cafe offered a fish and crab legs special and had its best day of business ever in the restaurant’s five-year history. 

A loud storm as wide as five football fields

That night, Pam and Junior were in their double-wide mobile home outside Bakersfield when Junior’s granddaughter Brooke Lair, called and asked, “Are you guys coming over?”

The granddaughter had been watching the weather reports on TV and following online as storm chaser and reality TV star Reed Timmer live-streamed updates about the ferocious system that was bearing down on Bakersfield. Timmer had arrived in Ozark County earlier that day, traveling with his crew in his unusual storm-chasing vehicle, the “Dominator,” ahead of the predicted bad weather here. The Dominator had attracted quite a crowd when it stopped at a service station in Gainesville. 

Brooke’s home is about one mile away from Junior and Pam’s and has a basement. She persuaded them to come and asked if they needed help with Junior’s 81-year-old father. They didn’t. They hopped in their truck and drove the short distance to Brooke’s house. 

Meanwhile Tammy Zastrow, Pam’s sister, was with her kids in the basement of her home on Water Tower Street in Bakersfield. They felt safe, but as the storm approached, Tammy told her family she was worried about her mother, Emma Zastrow, on Zastrow Hill about 2 miles away. 

“I’ve got to check on Granny. She’s by herself,” she told her children. 

Tammy’s family tried to persuade her to stay, assuring her that Emma would be okay. “But Tammy was always headstrong,” Pam said. “You couldn’t tell her no or anything else.” 

Tammy headed out to find her mother on Zastrow Hill, where the various family members lived in two houses and several camper trailer residences. Then the devastating storm struck – as wide as five football fields and, said storm chaser Timmer, having “the loudest roar of any tornado I have chased since Philadelphia,” referring to an EF-5 storm that hit Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 2011.

Several Bakersfield-area homes, barns and other structures were obliterated. Vehicles were tossed and totaled. Hundreds of trees were knocked down. The school’s ballfields and park were badly damaged. 

Pam and Junior live in a double-wide mobile home a short distance from Zastrow Hill, where every structure was blown away. Pam and Junior’s property had only minor damage – a broken window and a big piece of tin that blew in from somewhere to land in their yard. 

“But if we’d had one more big gust of wind,” things would have been different for them, Pam said. “We have two big carports that are open on both ends. They would have been gone because their stakes were pulled out of the ground 10 inches.”

‘More than just a place to eat’

After the storm, as Pam and Junior struggled to cope with the family’s bottomless grief and help Pam’s mother and nieces cope with their sorrow at Tammy’s death and the devastating loss of their homes and everything they owned, somehow, with lots of help, Pam began working to reopen the cafe.

Pam’s employee Marinda Loftis posted this on the cafe’s Facebook page: “If you’re familiar with our town at all, you know Guffey’s is more than just a place to eat—it’s the heart and soul of our community. The food is always delicious, the atmosphere warm, and Pam and the crew make everyone feel like family. We know that the road to recovery won’t be easy, but we are all standing strong together in support of Guffey’s and the incredible people who make it such a beloved spot in our town. We’re eagerly awaiting the day we can all gather again and enjoy the wonderful food and company that Guffey’s has always provided. Please join us in sending thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes to Pam and the entire crew as they work through this difficult time.”

Those prayers extended to the family of another of Pam’s six sisters, Mary Bales, Guffey’s Cafe main cook, who was already enduring the challenge of dealing with her husband Chuck’s terminal illness. “With the cafe closed, she had to get a job,” Pam said. 

So Mary joined another of their sisters, Patti Hicks, who owns H&H Septic Service in Mountain Home. Cooking for a bustling restaurant was a big job, Mary told Pam, but working for a septic service was even harder. “Her first day on the job, she called me and said she couldn’t wait for the cafe to reopen,” Pam said, laughing.  She added that, as Mary and Patti drove around in the big company truck servicing septic systems in the Mountain Home area, “people started calling them the Poop Sisters.”

The family continues to find ways to laugh and move forward despite the many challenges they’ve been through. For Mother’s Day, Emma Zastrow, mother of nine children and known as “Granny” to everyone who knows her, got a really special gift.  “We bought her a house,” Pam said. Emma’s family outfitted their mom’s mobile home with furniture, filled the kitchen with groceries and celebrated another step toward recovering from the hardships and heartaches they’d endured together. 

After the heartache, good things to celebrate

The little town of Bakersfield is also moving forward, recovering from the tornado as well as two other destructive events it sustained this spring. A week before the tornado, a ferocious 400-acre fire destroyed several structures and threatened to sweep through the town before valiant volunteer firefighters brought it under control. Soon after the tornado, heavy rains brought floods that added to the misery. 

Despite those calamities, however, residents in the close-knit town of 200-some residents, plus the outlying area, gathered for a benefit auction for Mary’s husband, Chuck, on May 16 and raised an amazing $16,000 to help with their medical expenses. 

Now that same supportive, love-powered community is ready for more good things to happen, and the reopening of the little town’s only cafe on Thursday will be something to celebrate. 

Guffey’s Cafe will be open 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily, except Friday, when it’s open until 7 p.m. The cafe’s landline phone still hasn’t been reconnected due to a backlist of work orders, but employee Marinda Loftis will update the Guffey’s Cafe Facebook page when possible.