MEDFORD—Margie Stocksen Cink has been cooking all her life.
The Medford native lost her mom when she was 5 years old.
“It was just me and my dad. I had to cook,” she said. “I grew up that way, fixing meals the old German way.”
Her family had farmed east of Medford since the Land Run of 1893 and the family of her late husband, Marvin, had farmed in the Wakita area, so Cink used to take meals to the fields. Plus, she was raising and feeding their seven children.
She opened her own beauty shop in 1970 in downtown Medford.
“The only thing I knew was hair and having kids,” she joked.
A creative person, she had wanted to take a stained-glass class in Enid but didn’t have the money because it cost $75. Instead, she found there was a cake decorating class for $20.
Like a beautician practices at home on hair techniques, Cink explained, she practiced decorating cakes at home, too.
“It grew from there,” she said. Friends began asking her to create cakes for their children’s parties, weddings, and such.
Then her friend who owned a restaurant in downtown Medford called The Lunch Box decided to sell and Cink bought it in 1980.
She expanded the homestyle restaurant when Medford’s old grocery store went up for sale as well, and she renamed it Margie’s Kitchen.
The eatery was known for its fried chicken, and her husband, who had retired from Medford’s Conoco plant but passed in March earlier this year, helped out in the kitchen. He was known as the “Chicken Cooker,” frying chicken every Wednesday and Sunday.
Cink’s “plain ‘ol white wedding cakes” were famous by then. She wouldn’t say what the secret ingredient was that make her cakes so delectable; however, she did reveal with a smile that “it was an accident.”
She had also purchased a little portable building in 1983, rented a spot on U.S. 81 across from Smrcka’s Dairy Snack, and sold snocones.
Around the same time, Cink launched Medford Floral as the only florist in Grant County.
She started the floral business simply because when she was making cakes, customers wanted corsages and/or silk floral arrangements too. At one time, she also did balloons, but the cost of helium became too pricey, she said.
Just as the 1990s were an era of downsizing, so did Cink.
In 2001, she bought the building her restaurant is in now—it had formerly been the retail chain OTASCO which folded in the late 1980s—and renamed it Margie’s Place. Her menu focused on breakfast, daily lunch specials, soups, and salads.
Cink and her husband gave up farming too.
A decade later, she bought the old dress shop across the street from Margie’s Place and relocated the snocone business called Snow Shak into the lot next to it. (That lot later became the 1893 Land Run Historical Center on the corner of 1st Street and U.S. 81.)
Cink also opened another café where the old dress shop had been that she called The Sugar Shak. The menu focused on hot and cold sandwiches and Hunt Brothers pizza for lunch and supper.
In 2017, Cink converted the space next door to Margie’s Place and opened the wall between the two, then relocated The Sugar Shak and Snow Shak all under one roof alongside Medford Floral.
One of her daughters, Misty Suitor, has worked nights and weekends at her mom’s businesses, driving back and forth from her family’s home in Enid. She remembers peeling potatoes when she was a kid growing up in Medford. Suitor manages the floral arrangements in the flower cooler as “head designer.”
“I’ve helped my whole life,” the married mother of two said, glancing at her mom, who is now 80 and an ovarian cancer survivor.
One of Cink’s granddaughters, Marlee, who is a junior at Medford High, is now the cake decorator and keeper of the secret cake recipe.
For over 40 years, Cink has been feeding her community. She still caters alumni banquets, church meals, and local businesses’ meetings or conventions, but she doesn’t do weddings anymore.
Other eateries have come and gone in this rural Northwest Oklahoma town of less than a thousand.
At present, Margie’s Place and The Sugar Shak are the only American restaurants in Medford. Smrcka’s sadly closed a year ago with the untimely death of owner Alice Smrcka, and Cherokee Street Grill closed this past September with the unexpected passing of its chef Curtis Bramlett.
The regulars at Margie’s and the Shak have their own chairs and expect to get them when they come in to eat, drink coffee, and shoot the bull; Suitor kidded it is much like people who have their “designated” pews at church. Local civic clubs and church groups also meet monthly at both cafés.
They don’t see many out-of-towners or travelers despite being down the block from U.S. 81 and the nearby intersection of Oklahoma 11.
But Cink doesn’t mind. Business is steady and she loves serving her hometown.
Margie’s Place, 103 E. Cherokee, Medford, is open Monday through Friday from 6:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and Sunday for buffet only from 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Call (580) 395-2711. Follow on Facebook @margies580.
The Sugar Shak next door is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sunday from 3-8 p.m. Call (580) 554-1012. Follow on Facebook @profile.php?id=100063465073265.