Let's go to the Rocket!
Originally
posted June 6, 2008 — Text
edited/rewritten and re-posted Nov 3, 2022
Let's remember the Rocket Cafe in Rocket
Valley in McMinnville.
Apparently, it opened in the
1950s and closed its door in the 1980s.
While the Rocket no longer
exists, it's remembered by many.
Where Print NW sits now at
the corner of Linfield Avenue and 99W/Baker is where the Rocket Cafe lived. Address:
. 1142 South Baker/99W, McMinnville. Phone: 472-2226. It was easy walk of a
couple blocks from the Linfield campus.
For many years, Linfield; dining hall did not serve Sunday dinner
to its students. So, eating off campus at dinnertime on Sunday was part of the
routine. The Rocket was a popular Sunday dinner
location.
What were favorite items on
the Rocket menu? The Rocket Burger, Moon Rings (onion rings) and Missile Fries.
One frequent customer said
the burger was "not round, but an elongated oblong to look more like a
rocket. And, "A favorite low-priced item was the fried egg
sandwich and a favorite budget beverage was a 'pine float' -- a glass of water and a toothpick."
Why was it called the Rocket? That came from the fact Rocket brand gasoline was sold
at the Rocket service station gas pumps in what was called Rocket Valley. Thus,
Rocket Valley was home of both the cafe and service station.
Open 24-hours a day, it
served breakfast, lunch and dinner any time you wanted. What could be
"more finer" than the Rocket's good food 24-hours? All day, all
night, what could be more handy? It was all at the Rocket.
Flying Saucer
And, there was the "Flying Saucer." One
Linfield grad -- who worked at the Rocket as kitchen help and
dishwasher -- describes it as "a shameful concoction of a butterhorn pastry topped
with a scoop of vanilla ice cream."
The 'Saucer,' said the grad, came in two forms: 1) Flying Saucer (butterhorn
only) or 2) Flying Saucer a la mode (butterhorn with ice cream).
The grad balks at those who insist a Flying
Saucer was always a butterhorn, ice cream and chocolate sauce. Perhaps the chocolate sauce
was a person's “custom order,"
but it was not what was on the menu.
Sometime during 1966-1970 or
so, one of the waitresses at the Rocket was "Fay."
The grad who worked at the Rocket said their
favorite order was Fay calling out "Rocket Burger, Missile Fries and Flying Saucer a la mode."
Photos: Rocket Café drinking
glass thanks for Art Larrance, Linfield Class of 1966. Ads from Oak Leaves
yearbook and Lindex phone directory.
POSTCRIPT --Found online was this posting. The
poster was seeking information about Rocket service stations and cafes. There
used to be both in two Oregon cities McMinnville and Willamina. There also was
a Rocket service station in Yamhill, Oregon. And there were apparently some 30
Rocket stations in the Portland, Oregon, area. Some of those 30 might have
included McMinnville, Willamina and Yamhill. Apparently, the Tower Oil Co.
and/or F. H. Tower owned the Willamina station. I assume either/or also had a
role in the McMinnville and Yamhill stations. An Oct. 19, 1982, United Press
International story with a Portland, Oregon, dateline said ==Tower Oil Co. will
go out of the petroleum business Dec. 31, the company's president says. Charles
E. Schafroth, Tower president, recently informed the company's 30 dealers in
the Portland area of the decision but refused to comment on the matter apart
from allowing a secretary to read the letter he sent to dealers. The letter
said ''the current economy and market situation in our industry have combined
to make it impossible for the corporation to continue to market gasoline and
make a profit, even meager.''== An obituary, published in March 2008, in the
McMinnville newspaper, said the deceased, who died at age 47, began his working
career at Chevron Rocket Gas. It’s a guess that when Tower Oil quit selling its
own gasoline, the Rocket name lived on with some stations selling other brands
of gas, including Chevron. With this post are two photos, one for the
McMinnville Rocket (more cars) and the other for the Willamina Rocket (one
car). Unfortunately, they only show the cafe part of the operations."
