Childhood friendship creates restaurant

AUSTIN (KXAN) - They were babies really, just 3 years old.

They lived a block apart on Olive Street in Smithville, Texas , just East of Austin. Love Nance and Sherry Jameson each had not one, but two homes.

"I could run into Love's home, grab a lemonade out of the refrigerator if I wanted to, as if it was my own," said Jameson.

"We had to invent whatever we did," said Nance, "and we were all over the town on our bicycles until dark. When you saw the lightning bugs come out, that meant it's time."

You have heard it 1,000 times, the stories about how cars and homes went unlocked, about how no one would even think of locking them. That is how it was in Smithville in the latter half of the 20th century.

"It was a very safe time and everyone looked out for everyone else," said Love. "The mothers all looked out for the other kids. We were in the library all the time and just all over town. We owned the place, we thought. And so it gave us a lot of confidence."

But what was really responsible for that confidence was the manner in which the girls were raised.

"Our parents, they gave us the opportunities and the belief that we could do anything and have anything that we wanted to," said Jameson. "They never held us back and that just gave us the confidence and the hunger to go out and see the world."

"They even encouraged it," added Nance. "Any kind of social thing that happened, from the circus to the opera, they would always haul us over [to Austin] in what was then called the 'carry all,' but now it's known as what, the Suburban. They'd piled us all in and, you know, any kind of art exhibit. They were just always keen on, you know, letting us know that there are other things out there."

When Nance and Jameson headed for college, they parted company for the first time in their lives. Nance went to SMU in Dallas, Jameson to Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. In time, though, they joined up again as partners in a deli and catering operation called Apple Annie's in a Downtown Austin bank building. The business thrived for 26 years until a new building owner yanked Apple Annie’s lease.

"We were devastated," Nance confided. "It was not at all what we expected and we had a very soul-searching moment."

In desperation, the women reached out to Sue Edwards at the City of Austin's Business Retention and Enhancement program.

"I just broke down and Sue Edwards on the other end of the line said, 'Now wait a minute; you need to believe in miracles.' I hung up and I went in Sherry's office and I said, 'Oh, Sherry, I just cried on the phone to a city official.' And she said, 'Oh, don't worry, she's a woman.'"

Edwards, now an assistant city manager, and her team went to work.

"They gave us so much encouragement, so much hope all along the way," said Nance. "They believed in us when we really didn't see, you know, how we were going to get there. They just stuck with us."

"She gave us hope," Jameson agreed.

Funny that word should come up. Remember Olive Street in Smithville? A few houses down from Jameson’s home, at the end of the block, stands a grand old mansion that everyone in town now calls, the Hope Floats House. It served as the physical and spiritual anchor for a child, her mother and her grandmother, in the 1998 Sandra Bullock movie, Hope Floats .

When they hit the wall in Austin, the theme of the film infused the two friends from Smithville with a determination reminiscent of those early years back home.

"Very quickly, we decided that we weren't going to let this stop us," said Nance. "So we decided to adopt the phrase, 'Get better, not bitter.' And so we did."

Find out a few personal stories from Nance and Jameson below:

Despite the current severe recession, a combination of city, private and federal loans paved the way for the purchase of a huge and expensive building on Congress Avenue in Downtown Austin. It was once the home of Davis Hardware, long before such things as big box stores were created.

During those trips to the circus and the art shows and the opera in the old days, Nance and her father, who owned a log cabin company, would sometimes stop at Davis while they were in town.

"He brought me here; we bought nails and all kinds of hardware supplies in this building," she said.

The hardware store is now a restaurant called Annie's Cafe and Bar and it draws customers by from daybreak to late at night.

Not long ago, with things going so well, Nance moved her mother from Smithville to Austin. One day, she got a phone call from her mom, who had been unpacking an old copy of the Joy of Cooking cookbook. There were a variety of bookmarks inside and one of them fell out and fluttered to the floor.

On the phone, a startled mother told her daughter, "You're not going to believe what flew out of this book. It just fluttered onto the floor and it could have been fourteen other things that were in this book that could have fluttered to the floor.'"

"Love," she said, "you're doing what you're supposed to be doing."

That