Truck Town Founder Traveled The High Road

SNOQUALMIE - One by one they walked to the altar and laid down a token - a golf club, a fishing pole, a bag of cookies, a car key, a deck of cards. Simple tokens, but meaningful mementos of their love for Kenneth Dean Rogers.

To those young people, he was grandpa. To others who filled Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in Snoqualmie yesterday, he was a husband, father, great-grandpa and friend.

And to many men and women who have driven over the Snoqualmie Pass highway over the past half-century, travelers and truckers alike, Ken Rogers was a welcoming host. He was founder of the small cafe that eventually grew to become Ken's Truck Town in North Bend. For more than 50 years, Rogers, his wife, Dori, and his family offered a place to stop, rest, eat and prepare for another leg of their travels.

Rogers, 82, died Sunday of heart failure. As his life was spelled out in yesterday's service, it became evident he was a man who left a legacy of giving.

The grandchildren remembered the breakfasts he would cook for them, the games played in back yards, rides on his golf cart. The Brownie dinner when he accompanied a granddaughter and even bought her a corsage; his love for fishing, for playing cards, for driving fast. And they remembered the cookies and doughnuts he made for them.

"He was forgiving. He always gave a person another chance," said grandson Jed Gunderson.

His children recalled that their father never lectured. He

taught by example. He taught them to serve instead of being served, to give instead of take.

In a 1991 interview on Truck Town's 50th anniversary, Rogers told a story about a trucker who came up to him several years ago and handed him a $5 bill. Seems he had borrowed $5 more than 15 years before.

"I didn't even remember him or lending him money," Rogers said.

Born in Roseburg, Ore., Rogers moved with his family to Yakima as a youngster. In 1934, he married Dori and opened a small cafe in Yakima. In 1941, with two small sons, they moved to North Bend and bought the Highway Cafe on what was then U.S. Highway 10. Help was hard to find in the tiny logging town of 450 people; most adults were working at wartime jobs in Seattle.

He cooked and Dori served customers. Business was good; they soon had enough help to keep the cafe open around the clock. It became a regular stop for truckers and in two years he moved down the street and opened a much larger Ken's Cafe. Dori took time off to begin raising three sons, Hadley, Keith and Neil, and daughter Gaynel.

As each child grew up he or she took a turn at working in the growing family enterprise.

The cafe was a popular coffee and meal stop for long-distance truckers, Eastern Washington farmers hauling produce to Seattle, and cross-mountain travelers. Rogers was forced to expand again. In 1959, he leased a restaurant at a truck stop on the east edge of North Bend. When the truck-stop owners went broke two years later, he bought it and opened Ken's Truck Town.

When Interstate 90 was built, Rogers and his sons had to tear down Truck Town to make way for a new, 16-acre complex at the Edgewick Interchange - Seattle-East Auto/Truck Plaza. Regulars, however, still call it Truck Town.

Rogers eventually retired, turning the business over to Hadley and Neil. But he couldn't keep away. Until a year ago, he and his wife continued to stop by every morning to do odds and ends.

"I've got to straighten up the help and keep the kids in line," he said.

Last September, those daily trips stopped. His health was failing and it wasn't long before he was in a rest home.

Rogers is survived by his wife, Dori; sons Hadley and Neil of North Bend and Keith of Palm Springs, Calif.; daughter Gaynel Gunderson of Fall City; 11 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.

Burial at Mount Si Cemetery in North Bend followed a church service and private ceremony.