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Beverly Holley misses a lot of things about her husband of 59 years, but one is a specific little smile he'd crack.
It would happen on road trips through the South when the family would come across a Cracker Barrel sign. The couple's two daughters would cry out, "Oh, Dad, there's your logo!" Holley said her husband was humble, but he would let slip a small grin.
Bill Holley, who died in 2021, designed that Cracker Barrel logo - now the focal point of a culture war playing out among people on social media, members of Congress, a governor, one of Cracker Barrel's competitors and President Donald Trump.
It started when the Tennessee-based restaurant chain, which has about 660 locations nationwide, unveiled a minimalist new logo last week that bore little resemblance to Holley's original from 1977.
Other famous brands to which customers have strong emotional connections, such as Chuck E. Cheese, have faced backlash when they modernized to appeal to changing tastes. But this was something else. The redesign set off a firestorm, mainly from conservatives, who called the new design "woke," causing the company's stock to tumble.
Then Trump took up the cause of protecting the original logo.
"Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again," he wrote Tuesday on social media.
Hours later, the company reverted to Bill Holley's logo, telling customers "we could've done a better job" and promising to "never change" its values.
Bill Holley would have been "thrilled" with the decision to keep his original logo, Beverly Holley told The Washington Post on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the reversal.
"He would not have liked the plain Jane logo," she said. "Because it really says nothing about the restaurant."
Beverly Holley, 80, said her husband would have been pleased to see people - including those at the highest levels of government - rallying around his design.
"I think Bill's holding his hand up and saying, 'I made Cracker Barrel great again!'" she said.
Debbie Holley, one of the couple's daughters, said her family "thought the sun rose and set in my dad," so she was overjoyed to see his design restored.
"I was really happy that bit of highway culture was being saved," she said.
Bill Holley's version of the logo was born on a napkin during a meeting with Cracker Barrel founder Dan Evins, Beverly Holley said. The sketch depicted Evins's Uncle Herschel sitting on a wooden chair and leaning on a barrel, and the words "Old Country Store" - all of which were eliminated in the briefly proposed redesign.
"I kept it for many, many years, and then [one day] I thought, we probably don't need this," Beverly Holley said of the napkin sketch. "I should have kept it - would be worth a lot today."
She bemoaned incorrect memes spreading in recent days, including one asserting that Bill Holley's work alluded to a slaveholder's whip. The swooping line in the logo is actually a calligraphy flourish, according to PolitiFact. And the name refers to barrels of soda crackers that country stores used to sell.
Holley said her late husband designed for other large brands - including Red Lobster, Shoney's and Lowe's - but was most proud of the Cracker Barrel logo because it represented where he came from. He was born to a sharecropping family on a farm outside Petersburg, Tennessee, she said. He later moved to Nashville, his wife's hometown, to attend design school.
She said she still remembers the two-tone, green 1955 Pontiac that he drove when they met. He looked like a "young Robert Redford," Beverly Holley said, and she wanted him to notice her.
He did. After he moved into the community where his future wife had grown up, he asked a young boy if he knew her name and offered the kid a quarter. The boy said it would cost him 50 cents.
"Best investment he ever made," Beverly Holley said with a laugh.
Although Bill Holley worked as an ad designer at the Nashville-based Buntin Group for nearly a half-century, Cracker Barrel was one of his first freelance clients.
Whenever the couple ate at a Cracker Barrel, she would tell the server: "Excuse me, do you know who this gentleman is? He designed your logo."
Usually, she said, the server's eyes would grow big and her husband would wave her off with an "Oh, Bev!" (He loved the restaurant's white sausage gravy.)
The Buntin Group now offers a design scholarship in Bill Holley's name. And a plaque bolted to the door of his former office there reads: "May all who take this office continue the legacy of selflessness, good cheer, talent and unending optimism represented by William 'Bill' Holley."
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