LITTLE ROCK — I’m not the first person to tell Vivian Shadden that I wouldn’t have stopped at her store unless someone had suggested I oughta.
“It looks like a junk store,” says Vivian, whose family has owned the 100-year-old building about 50 years. “I’ve had a lot of people tell me that. Once they get inside and look at all the old antiques ... they ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh.’”
Most of the oohs and ahhs, however, weren’t over the decor. In Marvell, Shadden’s spells Bar-B Q.
Wayne and Vivian go way back. Their families lived across the highway from each other. Wayne joined the Navy, where he was a cook, served in Korea and married.
Vivian, a registered nurse, was home to visit her mother when she learned that Wayne was back and divorced. They married in 1964.
They took over the store in the mid-1970s while Wayne still worked for Mohawk. When Mohawk closed in 1979, he went into barbecue full time.
As Wayne perfected his technique, he and Vivian couldn’t find a sauce worthy of Wayne’s pork.
“Finally,” Vivian says, “I just mixed my own.”
Wayne, upon tasting it, declared: “Well, this is it.”
Vivian, then, had to remember exactly how she had made it.
“I’m a dumper,” she says.
“I don’t measure anything.”
She cooked the sauce 20 gallons to 30 gallons at a time, in 5-gallon pails.
As Wayne won barbecue competitions in Memphis, they found the sauce didn’t last. So Vivian made it evenings after work and on her days off.
Arthritis forced her to retire and entrust the secret recipe to a company in Mississippi for bottling, which required her to finally quantify her recipe, which took a day of weighing and measuring.
They spent another day ensuring the new sauce maker could make it right, which took about four batches.
“I was sick of barbecue that day,” she says.
Wayne had been sick for the last couple of years, and he died on May 21. For the first time in nearly 40 years, his cooker went cold and stayed that way.
“I’ve closed the store for now,” says Vivian, 70, who was seven years younger than Wayne. “I was trying to take care of him. I didn’t realize how tired I was until he died.”
She hopes to reopen, but if she doesn’t in the near future, their son Bryan and daughter Melanie Moreland plan to return to Arkansas.
“Bryan has big plans,” she says.
She will continue to sell the sauce, however, which they bottle in Memphis and is for sale at Food Giant and Hays in Helena-West Helena, J and J’s in Marvell, and at Dockers Bar and Grill in Hot Springs.
Or you can buy it directly from Vivian, who was putting up tomatoes and corn when we talked Monday.
“I have it here at the house,” says Vivian. “Call me.” Sweet Tea appears on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Contact Jay Grelen at (501) 378-3858 or at sweettea@arkansasonline.com.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 06/29/2010