JOHN DAY – Do you remember the clam strips fried in that delicious batter at the Prairie Maid? Or how about the highly spiced french fries? Licorice ice cream?

Were you one of the high school students who smoked out back?

Remember when the school bus pulled in for ice cream after games?

An era is crashing to an end. Grant Union School District 3 will bulldoze the Prairie Maid Drive-in restaurant if negotiations to purchase the site are successful. The district recently put down earnest money on the proposed $75,000 sale.

To some, the building is a catalyst for a trip down memory lane.

“After my dad closed it, I tell you there wasn’t a day that went by probably for many years that someone didn’t say, ‘When’s your dad going to open it up again?'” recalls Canyon City resident Lisa Valade, 46, daughter of George Neiss, the last owner of the Prairie Maid.

Neiss, 78, now lives in Ohio.He operated the Prairie Maid from 1969 to about 1989. Other owners operated the restaurant before 1969.

“When we first opened, we made all of our own french fries…The slicer is probably still on the wall there,” Valade said. The restaurant fashioned its own hamburgers, too, buying meat bulk from Idaho and forming patties based on Neiss’ secret ratio of meat to fat. He bought the hamburger buns at Emery’s Bakery in John Day.

Anna Neiss, of Hermiston, also worked at her father’s restaurant. “I did everything. I cooked, I waited on people, cleaned and did the dishes,” she said.

The inside of the restaurant appears as if someone just shut the doors one day and left everything, kind of like a modern day Kam Wah Chung building. The ice cream case is still there, syrup, pots and all manner of cooking equipment.

The menu board on the north window could have been placed there yesterday, except for the modest ice cream cone prices.

“My mom was kind of the head honcho there. She did the books, the whole bit,” said Vickie Larkin, 56, of her mother, Arlene Fleury, who is deceased.

Fleury managed the restaurant from the early or mid-1970s to about the time it closed.

“Everybody said The Prospector was the best hamburger you could buy in Oregon,” Larkin said. Families would come, buy their meals and sit and eat north of the restaurant in a makeshift eating area which is now overgrown.

Fleury would often call her daughter, who worked at Effie’s Cafe, to come help her out at the Prairie Maid.

“She’d call and say, ‘Vickie, I need you. We have a school bus full of kids,'” Larkin said.

“One time mom called me and said, ‘Vickie, I need you up here.’ She was really busy. Someone comes up and orders a banana split, and I said, ‘Mom!’ She told me how to do it, and the guy took the banana split and he left. About 10 minutes later, mom said, ‘What are these bananas doing here, Vickie?’ I forgot to put the bananas in the banana split,” Larkin said.

Mark Bagett, 48, of Prairie City, used to hang with his pals at the restaurant.

“Of course, that was the 70’s hangout,” Bagett said. “Basically, it was your typical hamburger and ice cream place. However, they were pretty well known for both their french fries and their clam strips…They also had chicken strips and that kind of thing.”

Bagett likened owner Neiss to Al of “Al’s Diner,” in the 1974-84 television show “Happy Days.” “He knew all the kids and the kids knew him,” Bagett said.

The Prairie Maid wasn’t a place to meet girls, Bagett said, “because you already knew everybody.”

However, he does recall a joke he and his friend played on unsuspecting members of the opposite sex.

“I’ll give you an exclusive: One of my favorite tricks of my buddy and I,” he said. It was back in the days when smokeless tobacco, or ‘snus,’ was popular.

“The girls would be standing out front licking on these ice cream cones,” he said. Bagett and his pal would put a little bit of snus in their mouths and then ask to taste the ice cream.

“They obliged, and we would leave a few grains of the snus on the ice cream cone…You’d point it out to them, and you’d end up with the whole cone. They weren’t interested in it after that,” Bagett said.

When the Prairie Maid comes crashing down, “Grant Union alumni will lose a very recognizable monument of their school days,” Bagett said.

Justin Rowell, of Prairie City, now works as a cook at the Dairy Queen. He remembers the Prairie Maid when he was age 6 or so.

“After baseball games, we used to go there…That was the place everybody went after Little League…It was the only ice cream place in town. The coach after the game would take the whole team out. I don’t remember if it was only when we won or not,” Rowell recalled.

“No,” he said, it didn’t give him his start in the drive-in and burger business.

At one point, ice cream cones at the Prairie Maid sold for 15 cents and 30 cents, recalls Dave Traylor, of John Day.

“I used to give the gals a quarter and it used to throw them,” said Traylor, who is known for an independent streak. Or, he’d give them 30 cents and ask for a combination of 15 cents of vanilla and 15 cents of chocolate, before the restaurant put in the swirl of the two flavors.

The school district plans to level the Prairie Maid building and use the site as parking. Eventually, the district might expand Grant Union High School on the lot.

“It will be somewhat difficult to see the Prairie Maid building razed, Neiss’ daughter Valade said, “But it’s harder to see it sit there empty and let go to waste.”