There may not be a restaurant heaven, but Snooky’s has an afterlife.
The landmark Statesboro restaurant founded by the late Vivian D. “Snooky” Yawn and carried on by his son Bruce and family closed its doors one year ago after a 41-year run. But around the corner on U.S. 301, R.J.’s Seafood & Steaks, which previously did not serve breakfast for the public, ordained “Snooky’s Breakfast at R.J’s” two days later.
During breakfast Saturday, R.J.’s hosted a one-year reunion for the Snooky’s faithful.
Many elements of the Snooky’s liturgy – or shtick – live on.
Searching his wallet, Bill Coen was able to prove that he’s still a card-carrying member of SnookPac, the tongue-in-cheek, but undeniably influential, political action committee that met at Snooky’s for many years.
It was Coen who, upon the restaurant’s closing, penned an epistle suggesting that churches would do well to emulate Snooky’s.
“You look forward to going, stranger or friend,” Coen wrote. “You are not fed fancy, but you are fed well. You can laugh as loud as you like or you can quietly pray. You can tease a friend and he won’t get mad.”
If, by chance, that friend did get mad, all was settled over a cup of coffee, and jeans and T-shirts were as welcome as ties, he added in “The Snooky’s Factor.”
Like actual religions, Snooky’s breakfast denominations differ over when services should be held. First at Snooky’s, and now at R.J.’s, groups of regulars show up in “shifts.”
Coen and Jimmie DeLoach were traditionally members of the 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. shift, but stayed after the 9 a.m. group showed up for the ecumenical homecoming. DeLoach, told stories of how he and wife Kathy  virtually raised their sons – Matt, now 34, and Adam, 29 – on  Snooky’s meals from infancy. On closing day last year, DeLoach made sure he was photographed at the register as the restaurant’s last paying customer.
In keeping with their practice, the Rollers – whose creed holds that a roll of the dice shall determine who picks up the check – were expected later in the morning. At other tables, paying the bill sometimes requires taking up an offering.
But Wayne Johnson, Statesboro’s water and wastewater director, spread his quarters upon the table Saturday to offer alms to the little children, who then put them in the gumball machine. “Mr. Wayne,” as they know him, had been a Snooky’s regular since 1979, going almost every day, and started giving quarters to children as a reward for eating a good meal. So the tradition was honored Saturday, the big Snooky’s gumball machine having been brought to R.J.’s.
As believers would expect of any rebirth, not everything about the Snooky’s at RJ’s experience is the same as with the restaurant’s former self.
Johnson observed that families with children do not turn out for breakfast the way they did at Snooky’s. Some members of the old congregation lament the lack of round tables in their new sanctuary. R.J.’s owner, Randy Nessmith, has some “semi-round” tables that can be pulled together, but admits it isn’t quite the same. Until some very recent changes, the breakfast menu was identical, he said.
The adoption of Snooky’s breakfast created  job opportunities for some former Snooky’s staff members. Six initially made the transition, and four remain full-time, including two cooks and two servers.
Jackie Dickey, who had worked seven years at Snooky’s, was waiting tables at R.J.’s Saturday. However, Cindy Tory, a server at Snooky’s for 13 years, did not go to work at R.J.’s. Instead, she has been taking care of her grandsons, Jayden Symank, 6, and Jacob Tory, 3, and is hoping for a food service job with the school system. But she brought the grandchildren to R.J.’s for Saturday’s reunion.
Being out of work, she can’t afford to eat there often, Tory said, but she came to see familiar faces.
 “There were really good people that came in there, and I miss it,” she said.
In retirement, Bruce Yawn carries on his good works through two actual churches. He teaches an adult Sunday school class, as he has done for years, at First United Methodist Church, where he and wife Carol are members.  He also helps at Connection Church, where their son-in-law Brandon Williams is pastor. Yawn chairs the boards of both Sea Island Bank and the Development Authority of Bulloch County.
Bruce and Carol, their three children and nine grandchildren shared part of their family life with Snooky’s customers over the years.
“My wife is extremely unhappy with me,” Bruce Yawn said. “She claims that I took her social life away from her, and the children now are having to pay for food wherever they go, so they’re pretty unhappy about me closing, but I’m happy.”
Indeed, his wife confessed to as much in a separate interview.
“I miss it. I miss seeing everybody,” said Carol Yawn. “The cooking – we can survive. We come down to R.J.’s a lot and we go some other places, but I miss the people more than anything. I tell him he’s killed my social life.”
But this supposed lack of spousal forgiveness – and their grown children’s despair at having to pay for food – is  best understood with the same note as many things in the Snooky’s tradition: They smiled when they said it.
While they reminisced at R.J.’s, the former Snooky’s building stood forlorn, a sepulcher emptied of its relics, near the intersection of Tillman Street and Fair Road. There it served, for a portion of 2012, as a temporary home for Snooky’s former neighbor, Andrews Klean Korner, while the old cleaners was leveled during the construction of the CVS pharmacy. Andrews then moved into a new home in the CVS building, but the old Snooky’s remains.
On a little sticker in a window, one can still read the Health Department’s last judgment, a lonely, cerulean letter, “A.”