Danny Evins, Restaurant Founder and Focus of Controversy, Dies at 76

Danny Evins, who created Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, a restaurant heavy on grits and nostalgia, expanded it into a $2 billion chain and then fought a losing battle to discriminate against gay employees, died on Saturday in Lebanon, Tenn. He was 76. The cause was bladder cancer, his former wife Donna S. Evins said.In 1969, Mr. Evins was an oil jobber, as the middlemen between gasoline refiners and retailers are known, when he was hit by an idea that was to change his life and the American highway: a down-home restaurant with rocking chairs on the front porch, a potbellied stove and fireplace inside, and a checkerboard on every table. The food — including catfish, biscuits and gravy and pineapple upside-down cake — would be ample, reasonably priced and swiftly delivered.The concept was carried out by more than 600 company-owned restaurants in 42 states, with annual sales of more than $2.4 billion. Cracker Barrel year after year won polls for excellence as a family restaurant in magazines like Nation’s Restaurant News and Destinations. After going public in 1981 so it could expand beyond the Southeast, it was a stock market darling. The idea of staking out real estate at exits on Interstate highways to establish a distinctive alternative to fast food — one that included gift shops featuring homemade jellies in old-fashioned glass jars — elicited raves from financial analysts, truck drivers and children just glad to be out of the car.“You know what you’re going to get when you go in there,” Melvin Franklin, who bought Cracker Barrel stock before he tried its food, said in an interview with The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 1999. “The only problem is, sometimes they’re so busy it’s hard to get in there.”Mr. Evins’s answer was, essentially, “Ah, shucks.” He attributed everything to luck and said he had a bridge in Brooklyn to sell anybody who presumed otherwise. His tone was considerably harsher when it came to defending a January 1991 directive to all the company’s restaurants to fire employees “whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values.” Mr. Evins’s explanation for the edict was that gay people made customers in rural areas uncomfortable. As many as 16 openly or suspected gay employees were promptly fired. Protests erupted at restaurants in dozens of cities and towns; boycotts were organized; and shareholders complained. At a time when discrimination against gay people was not prohibited under the laws of most states or the federal government, and many companies practiced it, Cracker Barrel’s action stood out for its sheer blatancy. “They actually put a policy like this in writing, which was, and still is, shocking,” David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization based in Washington, told The Herald-Tribune. UGG Ultra Short The New York City Employees Retirement System, which owned more than $6 million of Cracker Barrel shares, led other stock owners in using their votes and other legal means to organize resistance. In March 1991, Mr. Evins apologized and said the policy had been rescinded. But New York and its allies fought until 58 percent of the shareholders in 2002 persuaded Cracker Barrel’s board to vote unanimously to explicitly forbid antigay discrimination in its equal employment policy. Dannie Wood Evins, who would later change his first name to reflect the conventional spelling, was born on Oct. 11, 1935, in Smithville, Tenn., and grew up in nearby Lebanon. He attended military school and served three years in the Marines, then worked for two years as an aide to Representative Joseph L. Evins, a 15-term congressman from Tennessee who was his uncle. In the late 1950s, he returned to Lebanon and worked as a teller in his brother’s bank. He then worked as a jobber for Consolidated Oil, a company founded by his grandfather. He distributed gasoline to a small chain of Shell stations, but they were on back roads when the Interstate highway system was pulling most travelers off local roads. He decided to build a gas station off Interstate 40 with a restaurant and gift shop attached to it. He borrowed $40,000 to build that first Cracker Barrel. It turned a profit the first month. Mr. Evins next raised $100,000 by selling half the new enterprise to 10 local investors. By 1978, he was running 15 Cracker Barrels; by 1992 he was running 124. He enabled managers to double their base pay by meeting profitability goals. Hourly employees were periodically given written tests on things like company policy and sanitation; if they scored high enough, their wages and medical benefits were increased. Mr. Evins’s first two marriages ended in divorce. His third wife, Margarita, died last year. He is survived by his daughters, Daina Warren, Kate Page and Betsy Jennings; his sons, Meacham and Joseph; and 13 grandchildren.