It's not just the banana splits, or the cheese steaks, or the fries, or the soft ice cream, that draws folks here. There's something else going on at Dottie's, a compact walk-up snack bar that sits along Route 222 after it becomes West Fourth Street, on the outskirts of Quarryville.
It is Carol and Daryl, the sisters with the rhyming names who run the place, and took it over from their parents. Carol Martin is the chattier one who works the grill; Daryl Funk is the quieter one who keeps the taxes and the teenage employees shipshape. Both serve food, wash dishes and do whatever it takes to keep the orders coming out of the windows from 11 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. seven days a week in the summertime. It is Dottie Tomlinson herself, now 78, who still shows up every day around 6 a.m. to help prep the subs for the snack bar she opened and that still bears her name. This lady with the gentle smile has been behind a snack bar counter of one sort or another since she was a young woman. It just feels natural, that's all.
It is Dottie's husband, Bill, also known as "Mr. Dottie" around these parts, who, at 82, still fries up the steak and onions every morning, setting the mechanics' mouths to watering at the neighboring garage. And he still cleans the ice cream machines. (Once, when he was on a fishing trip to Canada, his daughters did the cleaning and wound up with an extra hose and a screw after they had put the machines back together, a dilemma their dad had to talk them through over the phone.) It is the Little League teams that come for ice cream, the borough maintenance guys who know the exact day Dottie's opens every season, and the guy who comes for his daily sub (extra mayo, lettuce and cheese, but hold the rest of the extra stuff, please).
It is Judy, who used to live across the street, who is married to Leonard, who lives in Hawaii, who brings a cooler for two cheese steaks, which they lug back onto the airplane to the Aloha State after their visits back home. If you live somewhere else, you might have a summer snack bar in your own town, the opening of which signals warm weather, cool drinks and grilled food around outside picnic tables. Here, in the southern end, for the past 42 years, that place has been Dottie's.