Phillip Bearly got a smile on his face when he tried to think of his favorite menu item from the early days of the Johnson’s Corner diner in Johnstown.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said slowly, his smile widening.
After a few seconds of thought, Bearly finally said “I always liked the chicken fried steak we made. But my favorite thing we would make were milkshakes. Chocolate, strawberry, we had all of these syrups. We always used frozen custard and not just regular ice cream. … I made a cherry shake that was to die for.”
“And, of course, the cinnamon rolls,” he added. “It’s a wonder I don’t weigh a thousand pounds.”
It’s not hard to coax memories of the Northern Colorado landmark out of Bearly, who grew up literally in its shadow. Bearly’s parents, Clayton and Betty, managed the iconic cafe and gas station from its construction in 1951 through their retirement in the late 1970s. To make it easier to keep an eye on things around the clock, Clayton Bearly built the family home on the same lot, just north of the original cafe.
Phil Bearly hadn’t yet reached his second birthday when the family moved in, but he remembers his mother baking pies in their kitchen before the diner got its own oven.
“She made every kind of pie,” he recalled. “Lemon meringue, coconut cream, anything.”
Until he went away to college around 1970, Bearly spent just about every day helping his parents around the 24-hour operation, whether in the kitchen at the diner or outside around the pumps. All of these decades later, the details from that time still remain vivid to Bearly and, with the recent closure of the 73-year-old diner, he is determined to preserve them for posterity.
“I believe God has a plan for all of us,” he said. “And he wakes me up at three in the morning saying ‘Well, are you going to do it or not?’”
‘I found the location’
As his son tells it, putting a new Johnson’s Corner cafe in Johnstown was Clayton Bearly’s idea.
“Joe came to my dad and said, ‘I’m going to build another Johnson’s Corner … I want you to go find a location, because you’re going to run it,’” Phil Bearly explained, referring to Joe Johnson, a Longmont-based entrepreneur who owned a string of cafes in northern Colorado.
Clayton and Betty scouted a few locations along U.S. 287, but, coming home from visiting family one Sunday, decided to do some scouting on U.S. 87, a few miles to the east. It would later serve as the frontage road for Interstate 25, which was still eight years in the future.
The pair eventually stopped at U.S. 87 and Larimer County Road 18, empty except for a small chapel and a farmhouse, but surprisingly well-traveled.
“Dad and Mom counted cars and trucks going by there,” Phil Bearly said. “And Dad went to Joe the next day, and he said, ‘I found the location.’”
Johnson took a little convincing, however, but finally saw the light after going there and counting cars himself.
Construction started soon after, and the fifth Johnson’s Corner was up and running in 1952.
From those early days, Phil Bearly remembers playing in his backyard, watching as trucks pulled into the pumps and cars circulated through the parking lot, sometimes without their owners realizing it.
“Numerous times people would forget to set their brakes and their cars would roll down the hill and crash into our house,” he said. “We finally had to pour a sidewalk with a berm and we had to put up a big fence with steel poles.”
He also remembers playing in large piles of dirt with his brother Ronald when construction started on I-25 in 1958.
‘Truckers started coming in and asking for them’
As the only all-night stop in the area, it didn’t take long for the new Johnson’s Corner to attract a steady stream of customers, both from the surrounding communities and from the road. Within a few years of opening, the cafe underwent the first of several expansions to meet the growing demand.
As Phil Bearly and his siblings got older, they were tasked with a variety of duties around Johnson’s Corner, including landscaping and building maintenance, cleaning, kitchen assistance and serving motorists. Along the way, the Bearlys formed a tight-knit bond with employees of the station, many of whom stayed on for years.
One of those was Ida Mae Brunemeier, a Johnson’s Corner cook who made the cinnamon rolls that put Johnstown on the map.
According to Bearly, Brunemeier once left behind a plate of the world-famous baked goods after a Christmas pot-luck for employees and, rather than throw them out, the kitchen manager offered them for sale the next morning.
“The next thing you know, truckers started coming in and asking for them,” Bearly said. “So my dad had Ida May start making them regularly.”
Bearly was sometimes pressed into service as an overnight baker’s assistant, helping mix, roll and cut dozens of batches.
“You’d put them in the bottom tier of the oven while it was warming and the yeast would rise,” he said. “When they were risen, you’d put them in the top tier of the oven to bake. Then you’d start making and rolling more. One night we made 60 dozen.”
As demand for the cinnamon rolls grew over the decades, Brunemeier’s original recipe underwent some tweaks. Bearly is still a fan, even if the latest version isn’t quite what he remembers from his childhood.
The good news for Bearly and other cinnamon roll lovers is that the item will remain on the menu when the cafe reopens this spring as Big Bear Diner.
‘Story after story’
But life at Johnson’s Corner was much more than cinnamon rolls and milkshakes for Phil Bearly and his family. With its diverse clientele of regulars from the surrounding communities and travelers passing through northern Colorado on the interstate, the station was often a backdrop for human drama.
“There’s just story after story that I was involved with,” he said. “There’s been extremely tragic things, funny things, just eye-opening, shocking things that have happened there.”
There was the time that Bearly, his brothers and some friends had a fireworks mishap and had to scramble to put out several small fires around the property and across the county road, a memory that even now makes Bearly laugh. As a teenager, he and his friends were also behind several pranks, often targeting local girls they were interested in.
Working at Johnson’s Corner as a teenager earned Bearly enough money to purchase his first car, a brand new Plymouth Barracuda.
“It was a beautiful turquoise,” he said wistfully. “I wish I had it now.”
Later, Bearly would meet the woman who would become his wife of more than 50 years, Lu Wuana.
But for every comic or happy scene that Bearly recalls, there is another one with a not-so-happy ending.
“People think that leaving a baby in a hot car is something new – oh, no,” Bearly said. “In the 50s, there were several. I remember when the motel went in there and there’s tragic stories about that.”
Friday and Saturday nights drew a rowdier crowd to the diner, especially after local bars closed, Bearly said. Eventually, Johnson’s Corner had to employ an off-duty deputy to provide overnight security.
On one memorable night, a 16-year-old Bearly was helping the deputy subdue an intoxicated man, and got a face full of mace for the effort.
“That guy kicked the mace out of that deputy’s hand and it blew up,” Bearly said. “We eventually got him into the car, but we could hardly see.”
The incident that stands out the most didn’t take place at Johnson’s Corner, but a few miles north on I-25 at Colo. 402.
On July 4, 1965, Phil Bearly was sitting in his fireworks stand outside the diner when he saw a plume of smoke erupt from that direction. A few seconds later, a car “came flying up” into the parking lot, the driver seeking assistance to put the fire out.
Clayton Bearly directed the driver and some of his employees to load up the station’s large fire extinguisher on a truck and rush to the scene.
Phil Bearly did not go with the makeshift crew, but heard their first hand accounts when they and some of the first responders returned to Johnson’s Corner afterward.
According to Bearly, a car carrying seven passengers, including three children, was traveling north when it ran off an overpass and crashed “head on” into an abutment, catching fire. None of the passengers survived the crash.
Phil Bearly said that those who witnessed the events of that day carried the sad images for a long time afterward.
“Two of our waitresses were coming to work and drove by the scene,” he said. “For months, if a family would come in and sit down in a booth, they would have to go into the back and compose themselves.”
Bearly and an LCSO deputy were later asked to recount details of the 1965 crash when a similar one occurred south of Johnson’s Corner on Thanksgiving Day of 2008.
‘The Lord has blessed me with a good memory’
Phil Bearly finally moved out of the family home at age 20, after he and LuWuana married. He spent much of his subsequent career working for utility company Public Service, including a stint at the Fort Saint Vrain nuclear power plant. Though no longer connected to the day-to-day operations at Johnson’s Corner, he remained a frequent visitor until his parents’ retirement in 1977 and even beyond that.
Since then, Johnson’s Corner has undergone two major renovations, most recently in 2014 by current owner TravelCenters of America.
Though Bearly has fond memories of his childhood growing up there, he understands that the diner is ready for its next chapter. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, population growth in northern Colorado has made it difficult for independent restaurants to compete, he explained.
“I think the Black Bear thing is really the thing they need to do,” Bearly said, listing several reasons, from increased buying power to logistics.
Still, Bearly wants to make sure that the early chapters of Johnson’s Corner are preserved before they’re lost to time. Over the years, Bearly said that he saw ordinary people from Northern Colorado do extraordinary things and he wants to make sure that their place in local history is recognized.
“I think the Lord has blessed me with a good memory,” Bearly said. “And he wants me to honor the hundreds of people who worked here. And I’m the only one — no one else still knows the history like I do.”
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