Flashback Friday: Owners of 1960s Wichita coffee shop also fed city hall workers
Wichitans in the 1970s and 1980s knew Leo and Lucile Weston as the couple who ran the Wichita City Hall cafeteria. The duo fed city workers from on the second floor for 21 years, always serving chicken on Wednesday and fish on Fridays.
When they retired in May of 1986, they were honored with a big reception attended by more than 200 city employees. At the time, Leo was 77 and Lucile was 73.
But the Westons’ influence on the Wichita dining scene started long before they took over the cafeteria. Not only did they own and operate a popular 24-hour diner at 347 N. Broadway — West-Shack Restaurant — from 1944 to 1969, but Leo Weston also was a former president of the Kansas Restaurant Association and in 1960 was named the Kansas Restaurant Man of the Year.
Recently, I spoke to members of the Park City Senior Center about the research that went into my book, “Classic Restaurants of Wichita,” and one man in the crowd asked for help identifying a restaurant he used to frequent in the 1960s. It was at the corner of Third and Broadway , he remembered, and it had the word “Shack” in the name. His brain was stuck on the name “Sugar Shack,” he said, but he wasn’t sure that was right.
He loved eating there, he said, remembering that it was open around the clock.
After digging through the archives for some time, I finally had to ask for help from Wichita history expert Mike Maxton, who pulled up some city maps from the 1960s and found the name West-Shack Restaurant. It was, in fact, a 24-hour coffee shop that for the majority of its tenure operated at 347 N. Broadway, which today is a parking lot sitting to the north of City Life Church, 216 E. Second St.
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Leo Weston opened the restaurant with a partner in 1944, and he would later describe the eatery to The Wichita Eagle as a coffee shop where cab drivers and police officers sometimes gathered for a morning cup of coffee and to catch up on the news.
Menus printed in newspaper ads touted dishes like a 14-ounce T-Bone steak for $1.50, a Swiss Steak dinner for 75 cents, and a golden brown waffle for 25 cents. The restaurant also offered Sunday dinners that included homemade pies and rolls baked fresh daily in the restaurant’s own bake shop.
Weston, a one-time Wichita Eagle newspaper carrier and Friends University student, had worked at Steffen Ice Cream Company with a man named Frank Shacklett, and the two partnered up to open the first iteration of the West-Shack, a title that combined the first halves of both men’s last names.
The restaurant first was located at 3323 E. Central, which is just east of Hillside where a Walgreen’s operates today. The restaurant’s formal opening, which offered free ice cream, free coffee and flowers for the ladies, was on Nov. 26, 1944.
But by February of 1945, the owners had moved the restaurant to a new location. The West-Shack reopened at 347 N. Broadway on Feb. 24, 1945.
Three years later, it appears, Shacklett was out of the partnership. He would go on to own other restaurants, including Santa Fe Trail Cafe at 512 W. Second and The Chef at 516 W. Second.
During its early years, West-Shack would close for the hot summer months and reopen in September with lots of hoopla. For his eighth anniversary in 1953, Weston paid for an ad in The Wichita Beacon announcing that he was reopening with a “new beautiful dining room” and with the addition of air conditioning “for your dining pleasure.”
While running West-Shack, Leo Weston became a central figure in the Wichita restaurant community. He was elected as the secretary/treasurer of the Wichita Restaurant Association in 1948 and had risen to president of the organization by 1950.
He also was elected president of the Kansas Restaurant Association in 1954 and was frequently pictured in the local newspapers over the years, serving in his various restaurant association roles. His contemporaries included Wolf’s Cafeteria owner Arthur Wolf, Sidman’s founder Jack Sidman, A.J. “Jimmy” King of the King’s-X chain, Jay Conover of Hanover House, Chuck Schoenhofer of Kau-Kau Korner, and Brown’s Grill founder Richard Brown.
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West-Shack operated at Third and Broadway for nearly 25 years, but in 1969, Weston’s lease was expiring, and he decided to close the business and sell everything at auction — including his metal and masonry building.
Since 1965, he’d also had a side project: running the cafeteria on the first floor of the city hall annex building at 104 S. Main. It wasn’t Weston’s first time taking on such an endeavor: Back in 1946, West-Shack was awarded the contract to operate the cafeteria at the regional Veterans Affairs offices, too.
After the West-Shack closed, Weston managed a couple of Wichita restaurants: an Irish place at 808 S. Woodlawn called O’Beefy and the Executive Inn at 8401 E. Kellogg. He was still running City Hall’s cafeteria when, in both 1973 and 1975, he and Lucile put in unsuccessful bids to run the cafeteria at the county building.
But in late 1975, the city finished construction of the $14 million city hall building at 455 N. Main that’s still used today, and it had a full-fledged cafeteria on the second floor. That job became the couple’s focus.
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When the Westons decided to retire in 1986, they were featured in a story in The Wichita Eagle. City Hall employees said they were going to miss seeing the Westons every day.
“Everybody likes Leo,” one employee told the paper. “He’s a good person to talk to, and he’s always telling jokes.”
The Westons, who loved taking cruises, said at the time that they wanted to devote more time to traveling.
“The old body is getting tired,” Leo Weston was quoted as saying. “You have to let go sometime. We’re well past retirement age. I’ve told people that when they carry me out, I don’t want an apron around my neck.”
The Westons had been married for 60 years when Leo Weston died on Nov. 22, 1996, at the age of 87. Lucile was 103 when she died on April 6, 2016.
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