LITTLE ROCK — There are two types of people in central Arkansas. Oh, that's not true. There are more types of people here than varieties of cereal. But here's a fun way to demographically categorize: Ask a native Arkansan if he or she remembers a pizza place named Shakey’s.

Well, don't ask a teenager. Or anybody in their twenties or thirties. But forty and up?

Yeah, that'll work. Then you're bound to hear stories like this one from a woman who grew up on, and at, Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Little Rock:

“When I was a kid, I threw such a fit at Shakey’s, my parents had to drag me out of the restaurant. I remember Jerry Van Dyke was playing on stage in his red-and-white-striped shirt. I was so mad they made me leave.”

That must have been a doozy of a fit. Because once Shakey’s got rollin' with the musical acts — Van Dyke and others of local and generational note — and the Little Rascals films and the kids screaming at birthday parties and the pizza makers shouting out names for pies and the teenagers running back and forth from the game room, well, quiet and relaxing, it wasn't.

But that's not what you wanted from Shakey’s. If memory serves, and all that's left of the Shakey’s locations in Little Rock and North Little Rock are memories, the appeal of Shakey’s was the atmosphere. Or, rather, the din. To enter Shakey’s was to enter an arena at game time. Action competed with sound, food and drink with performance art of a kind. For a kid, a visit to Shakey’s was a full sensory experience.

A generation or two grew up on Shakey’s pizza, partly out of necessity. There weren't many alternatives back in the 1960s and '70s. Let's see. You could go to Shakey’s on Rebsamen Park Road in Little Rock. Or you could go to Shakey’s near what was then Ole Main High in North Little Rock. (Both buildings are long gone, although Dixie Café marks the spot of the Little Rock locale.) Pizza Hut? What was that? And delivery was something out of the movies, not real life.

At either place, you knew exactly what you were getting, which may have been part of its charm. What's the old Holiday Inn motto? No surprises? That was Shakey’s. You could count on the servers wearing straw hats and striped shirts of bright red and white. You could count on the long tables with those back-wrenchingly uncomfortable benches. You could count on the window into the kitchen, where — Look Ma! — you could see the guys twirling the dough, ladling on the sauces and spreading the cheese. With their bare hands! (This was before the days of over-panicking about germs.)

The yellow-ish orange front windows looked like giant Lifesaver candies, and, when you were 12, the performers sounded good enough to make an appearance on the Glen Campbell Show. Some of them were. Ragtime was the music of choice — with the likes of John “J.B.” Griffith playing his upright piano with J.T. Malone on banjo.

“Shakey’s was the first old-time pizza parlor in Little Rock and J.B. and J.T. had a following for several years,” Gordon Norrell, a friend of the late John Griffith, once told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “If they were playing, they had quite an audience.”

Others from the Shakey’s Generation might remember Charlie Wiseman on piano or Bud Bell on banjo, harmonica, and vocals. David Treadway backed Bud up on fiddle, guitar and mandolin. Lynn Fitzgerald on bass. Shane Gray on percussion. Shakey’s was as much of a local musical venue then as Cajun's Wharf or Juanita's would become later.

It's hard to admit that Shakey’s was a chain restaurant. Still is, too. They have a website and everything now, but when I punched in a Little Rock zip code to find the nearest Shakey’s, the closest turned out to be in Alabama. But Shakey’s was one of those chains that just felt local, felt like ours. It's worth noting that the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Little Rock was co-owned for a time by Billy Moore, the former all-American quarterback for the Hogs. Listen: If a Razorback owns part of a restaurant, it's local.

So what did Shakey’s pizza taste like? How would it have fared in Sync’s pizza contest, which featured more than 40 pizza places in Central Arkansas?

Heck if I know. And I don't want to know. I'd rather savor my memories than any slice of pepperoni.

But I do know this: It would have been fun.

And loud.