GARBER—For Toni Kroll, it’s all about community.
The hometown baker who grew up in Covington, lived in Billings, and now resides in Garber running the downtown café Wick’s, she wanted to give back to the people who have given so much to her.
“I liked to bake pies,” Kroll said, so even then, she’d load up 50 pounds of flour or sugar at a time to create baked goods like pies, cookies, and cakes in her kitchen.
She attributes perfecting her culinary skills to her ex-mother-in-law who raised four boys, including Kroll’s former husband, as “she could make something out of nothing,” Kroll commented.
Kroll, the mother of one son and three daughters, worked in a dental office for 20 years before deciding to branch out and start her own restaurant.
She originally launched Wick’s in 2013 in the rural Northwest Oklahoma town of Billings. The name of the café stems from the first horse they ever owned named Wick, Kroll said, adding “I asked my two (youngest) girls who were little at the time what they wanted to name it and they picked Wick’s.”
Kroll submitted the name and the idea behind it to Eskimo Joe’s Promotional Products Co. and their art department rep drew up the logo.
Unfortunately, the oil boom in Billings became a bust, and she was forced to shut down Wick’s two years later. All of the restaurant equipment was moved into storage.
After the coronavirus pandemic waned, Kroll began dreaming again of re-opening Wick’s. She considered the town she grew up in, but there are more businesses in Garber than Covington, so she figured she’d have more traffic in Garber.
Her family was enjoying Garber’s Christmas parade in 2021 and discovered one of the downtown buildings was available. However, she said, she couldn’t envision a café in it due to the concrete walls and current condition.
But the owners of the building could, and they remodeled it just for her. She moved her restaurant equipment out of storage and dusted off the logo.
The following December, Wick’s debuted in Garber.
“We moved to Garber and enrolled the girls in school,” Kroll said, referring to her two youngest Rudi and Mattie with husband Steve. Her son Rod Cline lives in Edmond and her eldest daughter Casey Stoll lived in Bartlesville at the time.
Life was busy for the next couple years. She was operating the restaurant, farming, and transporting the girls to and from school activities including showing cattle in FFA, competitive cheering with Enid’s Spirit Express, doing speech and debate, and barrel racing.
Then Kroll’s life came to a screeching halt on May 2 this year.
Getting the call no parent wants
In the early morning hours that fateful Friday, Kroll’s middle daughter Rudi was in the backseat of a car being driven by college student Katelyn Callahan, whose fiancé Tristen Cherry (in the front passenger seat) is the brother of Rudi’s best friend Jayli Diel (who was in the backseat with her). The four of them had been in Stillwater for the annual Calf Fry that evening enjoying the first night of the three-day outdoor red dirt country music festival at the Tumbleweed.
Only five minutes from Cherry’s house in Oklahoma City, they were hit by a drunk driver going the wrong way on the westbound lane of I-44.
Callahan, who was set to marry Cherry at the end of the month, was killed and the other three were critically injured. The drunk driver, Sergio Ibarra of Norman, with an expired driver’s license and his passenger, Alex Alvarado of Chicago, were barely affected with minor injuries.
Both Garber High School juniors had Life360—a safety tracker app that thousands of parents use to locate their children’s whereabouts—and Diel’s parents had enabled the crash alert texts on their smartphones whereas Kroll’s parents had not. The Diels immediately called and woke up Kroll around 2 a.m. to let her know the girls had been an accident.
Kroll frantically packed a bag and practically flew to Oklahoma City, arriving at the last known location of Rudi’s smartphone (which she never found) in about an hour. Meanwhile, Jayli’s parents had already stopped at Integris in search of their daughter.
“We knew one was dead, which just didn’t know who,” Kroll said. Sadly, she said, Oklahoma Highway Patrol identified Callahan by her engagement ring.
While the parents desperately waited at the hospital to see their daughters, Kroll said she spotted Rudi’s blonde hair. She was on a ventilator and “I needed to touch her,” Kroll described.
After a brief tussle with security, she was permitted to be by her daughter’s side, which she never left for 55 days.
Wick’s remained closed during that time.
“People took care of stuff for me,” Kroll said. The owners of the building didn’t charge her rent, and her employee Michelle Southwick along with others shut the café down and cleaned it up.
“I had a village,” Kroll said. In her heart, she knew she return to Wick’s one day, she just didn’t know when. “I told Rudi, even though she wasn’t awake, that ‘I won’t go home until we go home.’”
Taking time to recover
Rudi and Jayli had attended Garber High prom together that Saturday before the accident. They were getting ready for final exams and looking forward to their senior year when life seemingly took a turn for the worst.
Rudi’s pelvis was shattered into seven pieces, both of her lungs collapsed, had multiple broken ribs along with lacerations to her bladder, kidney, and spleen, and as it turned her jaw was broken too, but it wasn’t caught by her mother’s attentiveness to dental detail until later because she had been unconscious and on the ventilator. In addition, Rudi had a severe traumatic brain injury also known as a TBI and didn’t speak for three weeks.
For two months, Kroll survived in Oklahoma City while her husband and other teenage daughter stayed in Garber. Her oldest daughter decided to relocate her own clan to her hometown of Covington to be near her family too; today Stoll teaches at the grade school she attended.
At the end of June, after two weeks in ICU and then six weeks at Bethany Children’s Health Center for rehabilitation, Rudi finally got to go home to Garber. When she was released, she mentally tested between a second-grade to fifth-grade level, Kroll said.
It was an adjustment for everyone as she worked to regain her ability to walk and talk and do things she’d always done. Kroll took her to occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy, multiple doctor’s appointments, and more in the month of July.
Meanwhile, residents of Garber and surrounding communities rallied to raise money and support for the Kroll and Diel families, hosting events and selling items including Wick’s next door neighbor Jeri Fincher of Custom Creations by Jeri.
Kroll wasn’t used to being the recipient of all the small-town good will; she was usually the one being the giver. She is grateful for everyone who backed her business and her family.
“I missed my people,” Kroll said.
Returning back to normal
After everything with Rudi’s care leveled out, Kroll felt she could finally go back to work.
She wanted to be operational before school started because she delivers meals to Garber High School every day during the school year for students who don’t want to eat school meals.
On Aug. 11, the Monday before the 2025-26 school year began for Garber Public Schools, Wick’s re-opened.
“We made 50 pounds of meatloaf that day,” she said, “and sold out almost all of it.”
The doors opened at 11 a.m. and by 1 p.m. the line was out the door. Family and friends came in droves from across the region, happy to eat Kroll’s food again and to hug both mother and daughter.
“I was excited to be back. It was almost overwhelming,” Kroll said about that hectic first day back and the rush of customers. She prepped food while Southwick served plates to hungry patrons and Rudi manned the cash register and to-go orders.
“Our lives are getting back to normal,” Kroll said three weeks later during this interview as she closed up the café for the day.
Rudi is back to driving—“I track her every move,” Kroll said—and has settled into her senior year. “Her mind is coming back. It’s all coming back.”
In fact, Rudi scared her mother last week when she performed the splits in front of her, a move she used to do all the time when she was cheerleading, which she has now returned to doing with her best friend Jayli at Garber games. Rudi is on this year’s homecoming court too.
“Rudi has a purpose,” Kroll said, adding with a laugh that her middle daughter is pretty hard-headed like her and goes after what she wants even if mom tells her not to.
Recently, Rudi wrote an essay detailing her traumatic experience and was accepted into college at Oklahoma State University for next year. She posted herself reading the essay on a TikTok video, which caught the attention of a Mothers Against Drunk Driving chapter in Tulsa, so she’s set to speak at MADD’s fall gala later this month as MADD told her “They don’t get a lot of good stories,” Kroll said.
For Kroll, she’s getting back into the groove at Wick’s. She caters goodies for several businesses during the holidays and many locals order pies for Thanksgiving. She plans to keep baking in Garber until she can’t anymore because the community means everything to her.
“It’s my home. It’s where I want to raise my kids,” Kroll said.
Wick’s, 320 Main, Garber, is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Find out the special for the day at Facebook.com/wicksbakedgoods. To order lunch for pickup or to pre-order baked goods, call (580) 747-9327.