For more than 30 years, June Curry has been serving cookies and lemonade to TransAmerica bicycle tourists on the steps of the Blue Ridge mountains in Afton, Virginia.
Her efforts earned her the nickname “Cookie Lady” to more than 14,000 cyclists who passed by. After they ate the cookies and drank the lemonade, or spent the night in the “Cookie House”, June would snap a Polaroid picture of her visitors. They'd sign the photo and the guest register and be on their way.
Most of those Polaroids are now available online at The Cookie House Registry over at the Crazy Guy on a Bicycle website.
What an amazing collection of photographs!
For bicycle touring enthusiasts, it's like the opening of King Tut's tomb. For those of us who were there, it's like a trip back in the time machine.
A handful of cyclists must have thought that taking a trip in a time machine was worth the effort. Joe and Susan Bousquet, Hank Raines, and Mike Riscica have been working for about a year to reshoot or scan thousands of individual Polaroids into a digital format, remount them in a scrapbook, and decipher and reprint the names of all the visitors recorded in separate journals. The digital photos are arranged, by month, at The Cookie House Registry.
I get a kick just from seeing the clothes we wore, mostly T-shirts, lots of cut-off jeans and running shorts.
The project is dedicated to Peggy (Vahle) Reynolds and her poodle — Poo — credited with being the first cyclist to stop at June's during that Bikecentennial summer of 1976 to ask for water.
My memories
For me, seeing the old Polaroid brought back a flood of memories from that bike tour in 1984. I remember struggling up the switchbacks to the Blue Ridge Parkway and stopping with my buddy Bruce at the Cookie House. I don't remember going without a shirt (man, I gotta remember never to take off my shirt). I wrote about that day, and others, at TransAmerica Journal — 1984.
Fast forward 16 years and I'm back at the Cookie Lady's place. The route for Bike Virginia passed nearby in July 2000, and I thought it would be cool to stop in. I was right. I got to talk with June for a good hour, check out the latest postcards, and get a tour of the Cookie House. She always has time for visitors.
Each time I visited she snapped my picture. She has snapped thousands of pictures. Going through the photos from around my first visit, I see Ricky Iannetti and Richard Martel, who visited the day before Bruce and I. We were to see those two names in cafe guestbooks and campground ledgers halfway across the US. They were always just one or two days ahead of us. We never caught them on our bikes.
The day following our visit, I see the three guys from Connecticut — Keith, Doug and Thomas — who we hooked up with a couple of times in the Eastern states. The last I saw them, they we pulling into Lazy Louie's Bicycle Campground in Missouri after dark.
Guestbook
The chroniclers of the Cookie House are asking visitors to leave a message, and/or pictures, about the Cookie Lady at the The Cookie House Registry Guestbook. They're also looking for help to decipher some of the visitors' names in the guestbooks.
June Curry is still operating The Cookie House. In 2003, the Adventure Cycling Association gave her its inaugural Trail Angel Award to designate a generous individual, or group, who goes the extra distance to help bicycle tourists.
In early 2005, June suffered a stroke, recovered, and later broke her wrist. In spite of those problems, she has kept the Bike House open with help of the Milepost Zero Bicycle Club, based in Waynesboro.
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