Reflecting on my youth: Billy's Ham and Eggs

Back when I was in elementary, middle, and high school, New Bern, NC was kind of disconnected from the corporate world. We still are not a very large community but you don't really have to be anymore to end up with corporations dominating the retail and restaurant world. We have almost any fast-food chain you can imagine and most of the chain dine-in restaurants like Chili's and Outback Steakhouse which isn't the best culinary choices a person can make but it also doesn't suck

But when I was a kid and people were talking about the major breakfast chains like Denny's, Waffle House, Perkins, IHOP, and others, we didn't have any of those. We had Billy's Ham and Eggs and it was just fine to not have those other things.

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Billy's didn't always look like this though. Even back in the 80's and 90's it was just some hole in the wall establishment that appeared as though it was only making it because of lack of other choices... Towards the middle of the 90's New Bern started to become a popular place to live because of the rivers here that lead to the sea and all of a sudden there was a rush of "new money" coming to town and along with them came the franchises.

The next thing you know we had all the major chains and for a while there it looked like Billy's was going to be in trouble despite the fact that it had been an institution for longer than I had been alive.

When Waffle House and others like it started undercutting the prices and Billy's couldn't possibly compete on price, something kind of wonderful happened when the community came together and decided to support Billy's even though it did cost a bit more. This kind of encouraged Billy (a real person, I met him) to focus on hometown service and being a bit more personalized towards the customers than you were ever going to get at a chain store.

They kept this small town appeal inside of it and we started to find the things like the fact that nearly every plate had some sort of crack in them as being endearing, rather than something that was run down and needed replacing.

I do recall some stories though about how it seemed as though the system was kind of rigged against small and independent businesses because all of a sudden things like this were seen as violation of health code when it never had been before.

I remember the day that Billy's ended up with a "B" rating from the health department and the staff and Billy himself were kind of ashamed about this but still, the local community continued to support them because if we don't band together in things like this, the next thing you know the local people don't actually own anything and New Bern would just start to look like a carbon copy of every other city in NC as well as the entire USA.

Billy's has held on over the years and a couple of bands I remember in college actually wrote songs about it and I remember the lyrics even though it has been 30 years.

"The eggs are super greasy, the plates are cracked and broken, this is the hub of New Bern, cause it's the only place that's open!"

I saw this band that was called "Lava Loaf" perform this song at a local outdoor festival and it was kind of funny because it was a band of 20 somethings that didn't have a hit to speak of but the local audience all knew the chorus of this one song.

Unfortunately, Billy's in New Bern eventually couldn't battle the pressure from the corporate overlords any longer and they closed their doors for good sometime in early 2000's. There is a good ending to this story though and that was that the reason why they went out of business was because the real-estate prices had skyrocketed in the part of New Bern that they were located in and a strip mall came along with an offer that Billy could not refuse. It was something like millions of dollars but rather than just take the money and run Billy ended up opening several other diners in other, nearby North Carolina communities that weren't overpriced because of various reasons. Now there are over 10 Billy's all over North Carolina and I love that I was part of the reason why they ended up surviving the corporate invasion that is completely inevitable once a place becomes popular.

These days New Bern unfortunately just kind of looks like every other mid-sized city in America with gigantic strip malls with a massive grocery store surrounded by a bunch of chain restaurants. Other than our downtown area, which isn't even very popular, I would say that New Bern completely sold out. That's just the way of the world. There are very few mom and pop shops left here and the ones that are there, well, I would imagine that once mom and pop pass on that their legacy will go along with them.

They have tried on various occasions to renew vigor in the downtown area to give it some sort of charm but people just don't really appreciate that sort of thing anymore. I myself shop at the large stores now as well and there really isn't any other choice.

There was one guy that fought it to the bitter end though and that guy was named Billy. He is probably no longer alive but we in New Bern will always have the story about the business that refused to leave and even when they did, it was only because they were tired of playing a game that you can't really win.