Lee Garlitz is a Wee Bit O' Heather's regular customer, often arriving around 4:45 in the morning, a full 15 minutes before the doors "officially" open. The coffee is ready at that time and so is Garlitz, seen here Dec. 24, 2023.

MILTON-FREEWATER — What this world needs at 5 a.m. is a cup of coffee.

And we already have it.

Wee Bit O’ Heather’s in Milton-Freewater opens its doors at that time every day, and the family that runs the place has an extensive menu for breakfast and lunch up to 2 p.m. almost every day of the year. Open seven days a week, the door is locked and lights are turned off only on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“I’ve had this for 34 years and my daughters took it over three years ago and they’ve been running it really well,” said the founder, Heather Humbert.

Humbert claims to be retired, but occasionally you will find her opening up and running the place solo until help comes in an hour or two later.

She did so on Christmas Eve. She knows her way around the kitchen, of course, waits on her frequent-flier customers, runs the cash register and cleans as she goes. A pedometer would be revealing as she racks up the miles.

While her daughters, Tara Miller and Tawni Woolcutt, do the lioness’ share of the work throughout the year, Heather frequently comes in, enjoys a cup of lifetime coffee at the counter and writes checks.

“Sometimes those bills keep coming to my P.O. box so I just help them out a little bit,” Humbert said. “I come in when they need me, but they don’t need me very much.”

In fact, Humbert adopted a sink or swim demeanor when her daughters started running the place.

“My mom did a lot for us that went unnoticed, so when she decided she was done, she pretty much walked away and made us figure it out,” Woolcutt said. “We would call and she let it ring and ring and ring. We would just have to call the accountant and ask them questions and she kind of forced us into figuring it out on our own.”

A Scottish heritageVisitors will see the dining room walls festooned with artful evidence of Scot culture, from which Humbert is descended.

The menu lists no haggis, however. Heather’s serves all-American comfort food.

The breakfast specialty is various kinds of hash — eggs mixed with vegetables or meat. Plus the popular favorites of eggs cooked any style, the usual meats to include steak, either straight up or chicken-fried, many kinds of omelets, biscuits and gravy, and some of the best-selling oatmeal around.

The restaurant also offers homemade soup, from scratch, and perennial favorites such as a hot turkey sandwich. They roast their own whole birds to make those.

Miller makes the pies from scratch. If you pick the right weekday morning you can walk in and find a lineup of eight or nine pies cooling on the counter.

All these continue the traditional menu created by their mother, and the daughters want to keep everything at the same scale.

“With expansion would come a bigger grill and more cooks and then more servers, and it would just be more and more and more,” Woolcutt said, “I think we’re pretty blessed with the crew we have right now. All our employees are so invested in this place. Everybody here has rapport with our customers. They love the customers and the customers love them. They care about the business, not just people who own it, but the people who work here. So to find people like that it’s hard. Even our dishwasher, Georgia Willis, has been with us for over 10 years, since she was 18. She’ll work seven days a week if we need her.”

The daughters have been around the restaurant long enough that Humbert can blow the whistle on them.

Referring to the very little Tawni, her mom said, “She liked to crawl up by one of the regulars in a booth, sit down next to him and steal his French fries.”

“I did,” Woolcutt said. “I did go around and try to steal a few French fries. Yeah, she hated that. I really would not make her very happy.”

Woolcutt said she distinctly remembers the holidays.

“I remember dressing up in a Santa costume and trying to get people to sit on my lap,” Woolcutt said. “And I remember when my mom got breaks, she would swing dance with me in the back. I remember her being very busy trying to be a mom and trying to run this place and we were here a lot. I remember doing dishes when I was little, small enough to where I had to stand on a stool to reach the sink.”

Tawni’s sister Tara also has early memories about the restaurant.

“There used to be phones outside because it was a drive-up,” Tara Miller said. “My older sister and I used to talk to each other and pretend to take orders from each other.”

A few remnants of those telephones can still be seen on poles that hold up the outside awning.

A family business

Miller said as she grew she had no interest in working at her mother’s restaurant.

“Absolutely not,” Miller said. “I couldn’t wait to move out of this small town my whole life. I was going to be a big city girl. I moved to Portland when I was 17, and I decided I actually kind of liked my small town. Then I ended up in Helix, Oregon. So that’s even smaller.”

Miller no longer lives in Helix, but her son, Ashton Miller, lives there in the same house. He is 19 and is one of the family’s third generation working at the restaurant.

“He’s done dishes here since he was 12, and he still does dishes on Saturdays,” Miller said. “He wanted more hours and we started slowly on the cooking thing and he decided he didn’t like it and he wanted to work for somebody else when he got a license. So he worked for Dairy Queen for a while and then he decided he was ready to give it a shot, and he really powered down and he even does the opening days. We’re pretty proud of him for being 19.”

“One thing about Ashton is he’s a natural cook, and I think that’s why he does so well back there for me,” Miller said.

Between Tara and Tawni there are about a half-dozen third generation restaurateurs who support the family business.

Wee Bit O’ Heather’s has quite a few regular customers — several tables have the same faces practically every day of the week.

“You would be amazed how many people are out there,” Humbert said. “A lot are businessmen, they’re workers, they have to get up and go out early. And a lot of our retired guys are people that have been workers, and so this has just been part of their day forever. To be able to have somewhere to go and sit down and get something warm in their stomach to get their day started is very beneficial to everybody.”

If You Go

Wee Bit O’ Heather’s is at 1141 N. Columbia St. in Milton-Freewater, shortly before the two overpasses coming into town from Walla Walla. It is to the left of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on Highway 11.

Their telephone number is 541 938-5486 for take-out orders.