OGDEN -- At 11:20 a.m. Wednesday, Sandy's Fine Foods had been open for 20 minutes and had 545 pies to sell to hit a million.
Would they do it? "We've got the camera ready, we've got the certificates," said Suzy Sackrell, one of the owners.
"We're ready."
But who would buy the one millionth pie in the restaurant's 35-year career and win free pie for a year? A regular? A first-timer?
And what pie would it be -- apple, triple berry or banana cream? Maybe pecan or cherry or lemon cream cheese?
Odds were it would be pumpkin.
That was the Thanksgiving eve favorite by far, followed by chocolate. But nobody would know until that final chit was marked on the pad.
A little past 4 p.m., the one millionth pie was, indeed, pumpkin, and it went out the door as one of an assortment of pies ordered by lucky winner Linda McKenzie.
"My sister, Chris Grant, and I used to bring my late father Tom Bishop here," McKenzie said. "He loved the home cooking. I have been coming to Sandy's forever and ever."
Throughout the day, Sandy herself stood in the back, wedged between heaps of pies stacked head high and jamming every spare foot of floor space, watching pie after pie be sold.
Sandy Evertsen was wearing a lemon-smeared apron and enjoying the chaos because, for the first time in three and a half decades, she wasn't the one knocking herself out.
Sandy and her husband, Lyle, sold the business at 3233 Washington Blvd. to three of their daughters earlier this year. Technically, Sandy and Lyle have no business being there.
But they can't stay away, Sandy said.
"We're so excited. Our son ran it the last 10 years, and now our daughters are taking it over. They're young, they're energetic and they've got ideas."
The "we sold a million pies" promotion on the day before Thanksgiving, they swear, is not one of those ideas. The expected sale of pie 1 million just happened to fall on Wednesday.
Sackrell said they can't swear the number is absolutely accurate, because her parents weren't keeping strict count for many of the years they ran the place.
About a decade ago, her brother, who was managing the restaurant, came up with an estimated number, and they've kept a strict tally ever since. When they sold six slices of pie in the restaurant, that counted as a pie.
Sackrell said Thanksgiving is one of the restaurant's biggest pie days, with nearly 1,000 expected to go out the door.
All pies are made from scratch, she said, so they had triple shifts of workers coming in all night to make crusts, filling and toppings and get everything assembled and baked.
Sandy said it's quite a jump from when she and Lyle bought the place.
"My husband was unemployed, I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, we had a chance to buy out Dixon Pies, and we operated under that name for a while," simply because they didn't have money for a new sign, she said.
The place became Sandy's when wind blew down the old sign and it had to be replaced.
Truth be told, it wasn't even the sort of restaurant she wanted to run. She was hoping for something a bit more upscale, but this was what they bought, and "you do what you have to do, and this has been nice for the family."
Those first years were hard, she said. They couldn't afford industrial ovens, "so Lyle would go to the DI (Deseret Industries) and buy ovens and fix them, and we'd use them until they burned out."
She rolled out pie crusts by hand until they finally bought a used pie-crust press that, 34 years later, they're still using.
"We worked our tails off. These kids grew up in back. We had nine children between us, and every one of them worked here at one point."
They gradually expanded, adding catering and enlarging the dining area, but pies are a staple. Sales have risen every year.
They used to sell the holiday pies over the counter in the restaurant, but volume is so high now they have a separate tent outside the back door. Wednesday afternoon a steady stream of customers came, paid and hauled off their pies.
What's Sandy's favorite?
"I love pecan, I love coconut, I really love them all," she said. "That's why I'm in the business. My really favorite is our fresh peach pie in the fall."
Lyle Evertsen was there too, putting up Christmas lights, hauling boxes of supplies around and trying to stay out of the way of bustling employees carrying pies this way and that.
He, too, is having a hard time letting go, even to his own kith and kin.
"Why they'd want to be restaurant owners, I have no idea," he said.
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