Earthquake: The Long Road Back : It’s the End of the Road for Okie Girl Restaurant : Tejon Pass: Freeway damage hurts business at the eatery made famous during “Umbrellas” art exhibit.

Promoting a restaurant in the remote Tejon Pass wasn’t easy, but the “Okie Girl” went at it with aspirations higher than her hairdo.

Mary Lynn Chess, 54, who opened the Okie Girl barbecue restaurant and mini-brewery in 1990 alongside the Golden State Freeway about 70 miles north of Los Angeles, could turn everything from a minor skirmish with a state agency to a local look-alike contest into a media event.

And when the Christo “Umbrellas” art exhibition landed in the nearby mountains in 1991, television crews from around the world lined up to interview the Oklahoma-born entrepreneur with the towering beehive hairdo who could discuss moonshine and the latest in computerized restaurant equipment with equal aplomb.

The one thing the tireless Chess couldn’t stand was to be ignored. But that’s what happened during the earthquake, and it proved fatal for her Okie Girl restaurant in Lebec, on the Los Angeles-Kern county border.

Chess and her crew served their last “pasture and pond” special (barbecued beef ribs and catfish) and homemade blackberry cobbler a week ago Sunday. With freeway traffic disrupted by the quake damage in the northeastern San Fernando Valley, business plunged to about three customers an hour, Chess said, and she had no cash reserves to weather the crisis.

“We were going to try to open the next Sunday again, but it was a losing proposition,” said an uncharacteristically sedate Chess, speaking from the closed restaurant.

“The last three days we were open, we took in maybe $500 a day, all day,” she said. “That doesn’t even pay for labor.”

Chess had 13 full-time employees, including a brew master who turned out “River Bottom Stout” and other beers amid the knotty pine and Old West-decor of the restaurant. Proudly, she noted, 10 of those employees had been with her since the day she opened.

“It was a wonderful place, people loved it. The customers came out of their way to support us,” said Chess, her Oklahoma accent getting a little thicker as she shifted into her promotional mode. “But I’m telling people that we’ll be back.

“Even Troy Aikman got sacked during the Super Bowl, but he didn’t lose the game.”

Chess may be best known for her 1990 quarrel with Caltrans, which at one point refused to allow her to advertise on state-controlled signs alongside the freeway, saying the restaurant’s name insulted Oklahomans.

“If anybody has a right to call themselves an Okie, I do,” protested Chess, a native daughter of the Sooner State. “I’m proud of it and I always have been.”

California Department of Transportation officials noted that during the Depression, when Oklahomans were coming to California to escape the Dust Bowl, “Okie” was a pejorative.

But Chess prevailed after a campaign that generated widespread public support. Even the governor of Oklahoma came to her defense, writing to Caltrans an official declaration that, whatever Californians thought, Oklahomans now wear the name “Okie” as a badge of honor, symbolizing their “strong work ethic, character and resiliency.”

Caltrans not only backed down on the sign, a court later ordered the agency to pay Chess $32,000 in punitive damages.

During the 1991 Christo exhibition--during which the environmental artist dotted the mountainous landscape with more than 1,000 giant yellow umbrellas--Chess went into promotional high gear. She whipped up two custom brews--Umbrella Gold and Autumn Umbrella--as a “tribute” to the artist and brought in several young women from Oklahoma as extra waitresses.

She needed them. A post-Umbrellas study by a Kern County business group determined that the restaurant served an average of 1,000 customers a day during the 17-day event.

No wonder that a group of business graduate students from Loyola Marymount University trekked to Lebec to observe her entrepreneurial skills.

“Imagine a little ol’ Okie girl like me talking to those college students,” Chess said at the time, with false modesty that made even her laugh.

The restaurant was a favorite with the local Stetson-and-boots mountain dwellers, and was often crowded on weekends with cross-country skiers, motorcyclists, equestrians and city dwellers who keep weekend cabins in the pine-dotted mountains nearby, where snow is common in the winter. Many praised the food and the homemade beer.

But the major cause of the restaurant’s demise, Chess said on Tuesday, was its “inconvenient location” for travelers.

“People coming up from Los Angeles on a trip were not ready to stop after 60 or 70 miles,” she said. “They had practically just got the family in the car.

“And coming home, they were tired and didn’t want to stop before getting back.”

Chess said she would not move entirely out of the area if travelers have more of a reason to stop there. She has her eye on the intersection of the Golden State Freeway and California 138, just eight miles south of Lebec, because it is the proposed site of an outlet mall.

“The Okie Girl could be back within two years,” Chess said.