It was all barbecue and goodbyes at Leonard’s on Sunday, Sept. 12, Dan Brown’s last day.

“Just get out of here,” he said to more than one loyal customer who stopped to say goodbye. “You’re going to make me start crying again.”

He teared up anyway.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m not even going to try.”

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When Brown left Leonard’s Sept. 12, he did something he’d never done.

“I’m leaving my keys when I leave here today,” he said. “It’s just hard.

“But it could be worse. Eight months ago I thought I was headed for Chapter 7. I’m the luckiest guy in the whole world; I just can’t even believe how lucky I am.”

The pandemic was hard on Leonard’s, at 99 the oldest barbecue restaurant in Memphis. Wendy McCrory, who owns Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, came in and saved the day.

Brown gets right to the point when he talks about her.

“She’s an angel,” he said. “She worked it out so I’ll have a little ownership in anything they open in Shelby County. I have some potential for profits but none for loss, so if another nuclear bomb comes along I’ll be OK.”

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He’s talking about COVID-19, which all but shut down his mostly buffet lunch business and left him owing money on the building that was increasingly expensive to maintain.

But those days are over. The sale was final in June and on Monday, he and his wife Janet are hitting the road for their new life in State College, Pennsylvania, where their son is a professor at Penn State.

He’ll be back. One of McCrory’s parting gifts to him was a pre-paid credit card to use for travel.

“I miss him already,” she said. “He’s one of the finest people I’ve ever met. His staff loves him so much and they’re really going to miss him, and I want him to be able to come back whenever he wants, just to come in to visit and sit down and eat.”

Loretta Hopper, who has worked at Leonard’s for 50 years, has a travel card of her own, also provided by McCrory, so she can go visit the Browns whenever she wants.

“I can’t even believe how hard this will be,” she said. “But I’m going to do the best job I can for Wendy and for Leonard’s, like I’ve always done, and I hope that each day it gets a little easier.”

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Jack Sammons, a former Memphis city councilman, was in on Sunday to have lunch and bid him farewell.

“He gave me a key to the city,” Brown said, displaying it. “Look at that. He said he has a trunk full of them.”

That’s typical Brown, making a joke at every opportunity. He pointed out a note he wrote on the special board because so many friends wanted to take a selfie with him:

“Pictures with Dan $25 and up.”

Robert and Eva Jones came to say goodbye and have been eating at Leonard’s longer than he can recall or she will say: “If I say that, it’ll give away my age,” she explained, but they started eating at Leonard’s when it was on Bellevue and owned by founder Leonard Heuberger.

“We’re going to miss him,” Robert Jones said of Brown. “He’s one of a kind, a people person who’s always jokin’ and jivin’ with everyone. He makes you feel at home.”

Eva Jones wanted to know if he’d tell her how to make honey cinnamon apples, which made Brown laugh.

“I took two days off work and drove up to St. Louis for a ball game,” he said. “I stopped at Lambert’s, where they throw the rolls, and those apples were so good I asked the waitress to go in the back and get me the recipe. I told her I’d give her $100 and she did it. I have no idea if it’s the real recipe or she made it up, but they’re good.”

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Leonard’s is the only place Brown, 74, has ever worked. He started there in 1962 and left when he was drafted into military service in 1967. He went back to work there in 1970, by which time Heuberger had sold to an investment group. In 1993, Brown purchased it from them.

He’s had many employees along the way, and they were in and out on Sunday to say goodbye.

“I came just to make sure that he was really going, that he gets out of town,” said Rick McIlvain, who worked at Leonard’s through college.

“I can’t believe all the old employees who have come today,” Brown said. “I thought they all hated me. I’m pretty sure I fired them, but here they were anyway.”

He’s going to miss the people, his staff and his customers.

“That’s all,” he said. “Nothing else. But I’m definitely going to miss them. And I guess Krystals. My son keeps telling me there’s no Krystals up there so I know what I’ll want to eat when I come back.”