A Slice of tradition, a piece of real estate:.

Byline: Matt Cooper The Register-Guard

NIMROD - When you're winding your way along Highway 126 in the forested foothills of the Cascade Mountains, your stomach tells your eyes what to look for: the old red fire engine and, above it, the weathered sign reading "Mom's Pies."

It's a spot the fast-food chains forgot.

That's Mom in the back there - Bertha Nyseth, 76, who's been making the pies by hand for about 20 years. Two high school boys serve up cheeseburgers with an extra helping of manners. Feel free to pin a business card to the ceiling, everybody else does.

Or perhaps you'd like to make them an offer: Mom's Pies, a roadside institution dating to the 1940s, is for sale.

That's the part that has customers dropping their jaws, and not just to pop in another piece of the berry medley. About 10 times a day, owner Lysa Sangermano says, somebody anxiously asks, "You're selling the place? What's going to happen?"

Folks tend to get nervous when you mess with tradition, and Sangermano is acutely aware that - never mind all the fruit, flour, water and sugar - tradition is the key ingredient in Mom's Pies.

"It hasn't changed at all," says the 34-year-old Sangermano, whose in-laws bought the restaurant 25 years ago. "The ceilings, the cards, the same stove. The same pie recipe, the same homemade hamburger bun.

"You could have come here 25 years ago, and then again today," Sangermano says, "and you would have the same slice of pie."

Made fresh daily, of course. That's the way customer Katherine Moynahan remembered it 15 years ago while on a camping trip with her youngest daughter, and that's what she found Thursday when she sliced into a piece of the berry medley.

"It's a real tradition," says Moynahan, in town from California to visit family. She's been coming to Eugene-Springfield since the 1960s, she says, and every time, it's "don't forget to stop at Mom's Pies."

"We hate to see everything traditional disappear," Moynahan adds. "That's the problem."

But what's a young family to do? Sangermano and her husband, Lou - the couple bought the restaurant from his parents in 1999 - have one baby and another on the way, and an itch to be closer to town, where she works. They put the place up for sale in June for $212,500, and that includes the four-bedroom house next door.

Sangermano is ready for city life, and that's the one thing they're fresh out of at Mom's Pies: Just across the highway from the sparkling McKenzie River, the restaurant is so low-key that you can hear water trickling over spatulas in a sink, so cozy that when the door opens it just about rubs the backs of folks seated at the counter.

Overhead, of course, are the cards - thousands and thousands of mostly business cards, so many that the ceiling appears to be shedding. It started years ago when visitors pinned their hometowns on a map posted on the ceiling and, well, you know how that goes.

Around 1 p.m. on a weekday, the restaurant fills quickly. A family lines up at the counter, a gaggle of girls and a mom fill a corner booth and a boater asks directions to the nearest put-in.

Mike Bigelow and Bob Hines, both surveyors with the Eugene Water & Electric Board, make Mom's Pies a regular stop when work takes them upriver. Hines finds the name almost as appealing as the product.

"You name it `Mom's Pies' - if Mom's not handy," he laughs, "what's the next best thing?"

Celebrities have also been through, including former NFL quarterback and "Monday Night Football" commentator Dan Fouts and Ernie Kent, the University of Oregon basketball coach, so tall he had to stoop under all those business cards.

Yet the day-to-day operation is often run by a couple of schoolboys: Kyle Jones is the cook, Jacob Egan, the server; they're both 17 and seniors-to-be at McKenzie High School, and so polite it makes you want to tell their folks about it.

Things are so laid back at Mom's Pies, Jones says, that they can run the show while the Sangermanos go to town.

Not that Mom isn't watching, of course.

That's Bertha Nyseth, the pie maker, happily rolling out the dough on more than 40 pies a day while turning a deaf ear to the brazen rap music emanating from one corner of the kitchen.

Nyseth seems the picture of humility, and she promises there's no magic in her pies, just dough that is first chilled to be pliant while she rolls it flat and drapes it over a fruit-filled creation.

"I don't eat pie anymore," Nyseth says, in an unguarded moment. Then she grasps the irony and, laughing, hurries to add, "there's a limited amount of pie you can eat and keep your health. It's not that I don't like 'em!"

Nyseth jokes about retiring, but her daughter, 38-year-old Lisa Stadler, thinks her mom would miss the work.

Bertha and her late husband, Kermit, managed the restaurant in the 1980s, back when there were so many family members behind the counter that you needed a flowchart to keep them straight.

Now, with the younger generation of Sangermanos hoping to sell, Bertha figures to be the sole link to the past. Stadler hopes that, whatever the future holds for Mom's Pies, that link will be preserved.

"I hope whoever gets it will not change it too much," Stadler says. "And keep the pie maker."

CAPTION(S):

Bertha Nyseth is the mom behind Mom's Pies. She turns out 40 a day, though she doesn't eat them.