When Kathi and Jerry Lapp took over 33 Mile Roadhouse in 1977, the place was lit with propane lights, the gasoline pump out front was operated by a hand crank and customers were served water from a spring on the property.

“It was pretty self-sufficient,” Jerry, 62, said this week.

The owner of a bar and restaurant in Juneau’s Mendenhall Mall has bought the picturesque, log-cabin café and associated properties. He took over operation Tuesday.

Jerry Lapp looked back this week, casting his family’s ownership as only the most recent chapter in the history of the way- stop.

The roadhouse building that the Lapps acquired from Jerry’s parents dated to 1936 and by the 1940s was “Binks’ Roadhouse,” selling sandwiches to soldiers building the Haines Highway. Ownership changed hands several times before Jerry and Kathi moved here from Fairbanks after Jerry’s mom fell ill.

For their first few years, the roadhouse was a tiny diner, open only in summer. A fire in January 1984 gutted the place, but by October the Lapps built a new, bigger dining room, with a basement below. Around the same time, they expanded to year-round operation.

“People were starting to move around a little more,” Jerry said. “There were more people coming up the road to ride snowmachines or just get out of town.”

The Lapps raised three children who were sometimes cared for by customers while Kathi cooked. Her youngest child came in the middle of an order. “Kathi said, ‘We need to go to the doctor.’ She had the baby after she cooked dinner,” Jerry said. He adjusted to a lifestyle that has included driving to town four times in a single day.

They added a deep fryer so customers could have a side dish besides potato salad, and as the neighborhood grew, so did business. “They’re always building stuff at customs. There’s mining exploration and the movie-star miners. The heli-skiing thing helps out and we get a lot of snowmachiners up from Juneau. But mostly the change is there’s more people living out here.”

Grid power came in 1996, and around the same time, the widening of the Haines Highway. The restaurant now serves as many as 12,000 burgers a year and employs up to eight people in the summer.

“Still you get a lot of folks from town who like to drive out the highway. There’s not a whole lot else to do. They like the food and the service,” Jerry said.

Juneau snowmachiner Robby Harris, 47, owner of Henry’s Food and Spirits, was a long-time customer who chatted up Kathi about buying the place over lunch one day.

“We got to the point where we said, ‘We’ve done this long enough,’” Jerry said. “It’s a good living and a great way of life, and now we can pass that along to a good businessperson who can make a go of it. That’s the best we could hope for.”

The restaurant and gas station will remain open through the transition and offerings will stay largely the same, Harris said. “We want to keep it as much the roadhouse as we can for people. We’ve been eating there for years, too.”

Jerry said the place has always been a neighborhood hub. “We’ll miss the camaraderie and getting to meet different people, and watching things unfold.”

Harris said his plans include expanding dinner hours, opening seven days a week, adding specialty sandwiches that are popular in Juneau to the menu, and building additional cabins to accommodate overnight stays. “We’re hoping to make it more of a destination than a stop,” he said.

Harris said he would continue use of the site by helicopters for helicopter skiers but said he was unaware of the specific nature of those arrangements.

He’s buying eight acres including the roadhouse, a home behind it, and four cabins. Harris owns a house and 30 acres opposite across the highway from the roadhouse.

He’s been coming to Haines for years and said he’d like to see the return of events like snowmachine oval races. “I come up here a lot and I have a lot of friends from Haines.”

“I’ve been riding snowmachines up here for 25 years, and four-wheelers, getting out and playing. Once I bought a home here seven years ago, I started spending more time here… I’m stoked to have the opportunity to build onto what Jerry and Kathi have built out there.”

Harris said the roadhouse is his fourth restaurant. Besides Henry’s, he owned ones in Maui, Hawaii and Chandler, Ariz. He grew up in the restaurant business. His family owned and operated the Viking bar and restaurant in Juneau for 24 years. Some of the six Juneau eating spots they owned included Lillian’s, the Brass Bell and the Little Viking.