HOTSPOT CHANGIN' WITH TIMES: FROM PEOPLE'S CAFE TO THE TASTE LOUNGE

J.T. Nelson and his wife, Lessie, spent over 30 years cooking, caring for and cleaning up after almost everyone who walked through the door at the People's Cafe on Good Hope Street.

Except those who couldn't behave themselves.

"Lessie took care of them mostly," her husband, now 91, recalled.

As Nelson sat in his living room about 100 yards from the Taste lounge, the former owner of Cape Girardeau's first sit-down eating establishment for blacks reminisced. He had sold his cafe, now the Taste, 10 years ago.

The Taste has lost the flavor of the People's Cafe, say Nelson and his children, who grew up working at the cafe.

"Anything goes down there," said Douglas Nelson, now an elementary school teacher in Chicago and the elder Nelson's son. "It has proven itself to be a nuisance over the years."

The loud music, littering and loitering don't characterize the cafe that he built, the elder Nelson said.

The cafe started because her father saw a need, Mary Lou Reddin said.

"He got tired of having to go into restaurants through the back door because of segregation," she said.

After walking mules from Sikeston to Jackson for money and serving as chauffeur for R.B. Potashnick of the Potashnick Construction Co., Nelson decided he wanted to go into business for himself in 1956.

But it would not have happened without Potashnick. Nelson said his boss loaned him the money to build and open the restaurant.

A large black-and-white photograph of Potashnick sits in a frame in Nelson's home. He points it out to a visitor.

For nearly all the years he operated the People's Cafe, Nelson never stopped driving Potashnick.

Although Potashnick died eight years ago, Nelson continues to work for him. Almost five days every week, he will drive to a residence owned by Potashnick relatives to do yardwork and check on mail when the relatives are out of town.

Reddin worries about her 91-year-old father driving to work.

"He takes a couple different pills for his heart," she said. "I don't know what would happen if he had a heart attack driving."

Reddin remembers coming to the cafe after school to help her parents. She could clean up, but she couldn't serve.

"It was because we had alcoholic drinks, and they didn't want us to be handling them," Reddin said.

Reddin's mother, who everyone called "cook" or "chef," prepared pork every way imaginable and mounds of greens. Even now, patrons haven't forgotten her cooking.

"I was standing in line with a man at Hardee's," Reddin said. "A man was telling me how he remembers those big burgers that my momma used to make, and how he could sure use one."

But if customers didn't follow the rules, the Nelsons straightened them out quickly, Reddin said.

Drinks would not be served without food, Nelson said.

If young people got out of line, Lessie Nelson would tell them, then tell their parents.

"But it doesn't mean anything now," Reddin said. "The parks will be full of kids by noon, none of them with a job, and their parents don't care."

Teen-agers who cause problems now don't come from families she knows, Reddin said. The troublemakers are from out of town, she believes.

Signs that Nelson had placed over the bar forbidding cursing, "mooching," or sitting with your back to the bar would be laughed at now, Reddin said.

The People's Cafe had live music, and Lessie Nelson organized "teen town," an evening in the cafe for teen-agers only. It was her mother's way of allowing everyone to have a good time with their peers, Reddin said.

But the music could not get too lively, or Lessie Nelson would let bands know.

"If a band would come in and get too loud, she'd tell them to quiet down because of the neighbors," Reddin said.

A photo in Nelson's home shows the People's Cafe owner standing in front of his building years ago. A white wire fence encircles grass next to the cafe's sidewalk. Back then it was enough to keep people off the grass, Nelson said.

Now, before he drives to work, Nelson starts many mornings picking up trash in front of his house. He has moved his bedroom to the back of his house to escape the loud music.

"It's just boom, boom, boom," Nelson said.

Reddin is not in favor of closing the Taste, as her brother in Chicago wants. But she agrees a change has to come.

Nelson has been approached by some since he sold the People's Cafe, asking him to buy it back, he said.

"Old timers would like a place to go and sit like they used to," Reddin said.

But Nelson said his time is past.

"It was a nice place," he said. "But not now."