Mother's Day extra special for Osborne eatery
By DIANE GASPER-O'BRIEN
OSBORNE -- Mother's Day a year ago was a tough one for Brian Befort.
A week earlier, his restaurant in Osborne had been ravaged by a tornado, his family business destroyed for the second time in three years.
Today, a little more than six months after reopening the Circle Inn, Befort is back in business once again, looking forward to a big day on Mother's Day 2008.
"It took a while to decide (to rebuild), but this is what we came here to do," said Befort, who moved to Osborne from Denver with his wife, Angie, in 2003. The couple has three children, and both sets of grandparents live in the vicinity.
But the Beforts have had more than their share of challenges.
In 2004, also in the month of May and just a year after they moved to Osborne, the original 50-plus-year-old Circle Inn building was totally destroyed by an electrical fire, and the community of Osborne had helped Befort rebuild.
On the first Saturday of May 2007, the fifth, Befort was feeling for the people of Greensburg, who the night before had seen more than 90 percent of their town destroyed by a tornado that tore through town.
In the afternoon, he had taken lunch across town to his wife's grandmother, Clyta William, and was watching news on the television about all the destruction in the town of 1,600 in Kiowa County.
"I told her, 'In about 15 minutes, your life can sure change in a hurry,' " Befort said. "Then three and a half hours later, there went mine."
"But," he admitted, "we got lucky."
There were no deaths and just a couple of minor injuries from the Osborne tornado, that also destroyed the home of one of Befort's employees, Breck Grabast.
Nonetheless, the aftermath played with Befort's psyche.
The questions were always there. Are you going to rebuild? Are you going to move? What can we do to help?
Befort wasn't sure he had it in him to start over again, although he said he and his family would have remained in Osborne no matter where he worked.
"We never thought about moving," he said. "That was never in our minds."
Finally, Befort decided that while Osborne was where he wanted to live, owning and operating a restaurant was also what he still wanted to do.
So along about August, new plans were drawn up. And although the new building is smaller than the last one, the restaurant was ready to open a couple of weeks before the opening of pheasant season.
Winter came and went, and now the Beforts are looking forward to Mother's Day and graduation and Memorial Day celebrations, a banner time for restaurant owners.
Befort says he still finds himself looking at the sky these days.
"I think I understand now better what we went through then than when it actually happened," Befort said. "We had high winds just the other night ... yeah, I think about it."
"But," he said, "we're happy to be back, and we're out there fighting again."
