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16 years of Thursdays at Burger King
For the past 16 Augusts, the Woodard family has had a typical back-to-school routine. Sylva’s Dickie and Kim shopped for school clothes, pencils and notebooks for their daughters, Jessie and Kelli, and on Thursdays they ate breakfast at Burger King.
The four Woodards marked the end of an era this past June on the final Thursday before Kelli graduated from Smoky Mountain High School. Local store Manager Linda Holder, who’s been at the restaurant for 20 years, joined the family for a commemorative photograph.
“I’ve watched those girls grow up from babies to where they are now,” Holder said Wednesday morning.
With Jessie, a 2004 SMHS graduate in her final year at Appalachian State University in Boone and Kelli a freshman at Raleigh’s Peace College, Kim said she’s suffering from what a co-worker called the “empty-barn syndrome.”
The Woodard family – Dickie, Kelli, Jessie and Kim – with Burger King store Manager Linda Holder, center. The Woodards ate breakfast at the restaurant every Thursday for 16 years.
“He said ‘all the little Mustangs have left,’ ” a reference to Kelli’s and Jessie’s SMHS athletic careers, Kim said. Both played varsity volleyball and basketball, and Kelli, a starter on this past year’s state champion Lady Mustang basketball team, is playing volleyball for Peace.
Looking back, Kim said she’s not sure exactly how the Thursday-morning-at-Burger-King breakfasts became a family tradition.
“It started when Jessie went to kindergarten in 1991,” she said. “I think we went because it was her first day of school.”
After the Woodards went back the next Thursday morning, Jessie regarded Thursdays as “Burger King Day,” Kim said.
While Kim, a nurse, didn’t go every Thursday after she started working full time in the Harris Regional Hospital operating room, she said Dickie and the girls were regulars until Jessie went to Appalachian, and then Dickie and Kelli maintained the tradition until this past June.
Jessie was already home for the final Thursday, and Kim took the day off from work.
“I told my co-workers it was a family thing,” she said. “I just wanted to be there one last time.”
Looking ahead to Aug. 30, when local schools will be in full swing, Kim said it just won’t be the same.
“Next Thursday will be so weird,” she said.
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