Lorain Diner Part 3

Aerial view of Pueblo Drive businesses

The Pueblo (and later, the Gypsy Fiddle Inn) had been located at the very end of Pueblo Drive – right where Charles Akers Construction is now located at 4205 Pueblo Drive. And Lorain Diner had been just to the east of it according to the 1954 city directory listing. Could one of the buildings in the above photo be Lorain Diner?

I drove out there to try and find out.

I immediately eliminated from contention the large warehouse building (at the far left of the above photo) of West Side Tractor and Marine. It was simply too new and too big; it also appeared to have a newer poured concrete construction, with those telltale seams.

But what about the company's white headquarters building (at left)? It looked about the right size, and structurally resembled the diner in the photo.

A phone call to Drew Kreger, the owner of West Side Tractor and Marine, confirmed it: the white building was indeed the former diner.

He explained that his father had purchased the building in 1961 from Mr. Carnik, who also owned the Vanishing Beach Motel property across the highway. Drew also remembered that the outside of the building had originally been "a corrugated material of either tin or aluminum."

Drew's father – "Lee" Wesley H. Kreger – operated West Side Tractor and Marine for 49 years.

Drew also said that originally there had been a small house or shack to the east of the former diner building. It was located where the current warehouse for West Side Tractor and Marine now stands.

I'm guessing that the shack might have been the Peanut Stand mentioned as being to the east of Lorain Diner in that 1954 Lorain County Farm & Rural Directory listing (at right).

(By the way, the former "vacant house" in the directory is still there, just to the west of West Side Tractor and Marine. According to the Lorain County Auditors website, its current address is 4147 Pueblo Drive and was built in 1940. The listing for F. R. Kebberly apparently was for a trailer, as he is listed as a trailer owner elsewhere in that same directory. So that ties up all the loose ends.)

I thanked Drew for sharing his information and reminisces with me. It's always nice to get the story from someone who knows!

Lorain Diner Part 2

Since I knew that Lorain Diner's one year anniversary was in March 1953, it was easy to find its rather humble Grand Opening ad (above) on microfilm. It ran in The Lorain Journal on February 29, 1952.

Within a week, ads for the diner began to appear regularly in the paper, like this one (below) – with an actual photo of the diner. It appeared in The Lorain Journal on March 6, 1952.

Although the photo was rather poor (it looked even worse before I Photoshop'd it), at least it showed me that Lorain Diner looked like a prefabricated diner, especially because of its classic neon sign. But was it a prebuilt?

I decided to bring in an authority on the subject.

I contacted a diner expert – Mike Engle – the author of Diners of the Capital District as well as Diners of New York (and the man behind NYdiners.com) to get his opinion. (Mike had helped me identify another diner in Lorain back here.)

Mike responded, "The building seems to look too large to be a factory built diner. Because they had to be shipped, they couldn't be too tall, with all the height restrictions out there." He added, "I imagine it was just a regular building built by the owner. At the time, probably cheaper and quicker to build something that somewhat looked like a diner."

So if it was unlikely that Lorain Diner was a prebuilt, that meant it might still be out there by the undercut.

It was time to head out there and find out.

Lorain Diner Part 1

Sometimes, an item that I was going to post as filler ends up leading me on the proverbial wild goose chase.

On the same page of the March 16, 1953 Lorain Journal that included the Hollywood Lounge ad (which I posted yesterday), there was an ad for Lorain Diner (above).

Lorain Diner? I'd never heard of it.

But the ad said it was at "Stop 109 West Lake Road – near the underpass." According to this list of Lake Shore Electric Railway stops (on the Lake Shore Rail Maps website), Stop 109 was the Lorain Country Club, which was located just east of the railroad undercut on the north side of U.S. Route 6.

Intrigued that a classic diner might have been located out there at one time, I did a little digging in the city directories. Unfortunately, that area was part of Black River Township until it was later annexed to Lorain in the 1960s – so the diner wasn't listed in the 1950s books. The diner wasn't to be found in any of the mid-1960s books either.

However, it was in the 1954 Lorain County Farm & Rural Directory. The listing for U.S. 6 started at the Vermilion border and worked its way eastward, numbering the properties as they appeared and designating whether they were on the north or south side of the highway. (Most of the properties didn't have numerical addresses yet.)

Here's the listing for Lorain Diner (below).

So now I knew it was on the south side of the street, just east of the Pueblo Tavern (which I've been promising to blog about for almost 5 years) and a few residences. The diner was also roughly opposite the Vanishing Beach Motel.

The name associated with Lorain Diner – Richard Head – made sense, since he owned and operated the various outlets of The Hoop restaurants.

But what became of Lorain Diner? It sure wasn't there now. Was it trucked away at some point?

It was time to head back to the library.

Vintage St. Patrick's Day Ads

It's St. Patrick's Day, so along with my bowl of Lucky Charms for breakfast, corned beef for dinner, and annual viewing of The Quiet Man, I thought I'd post a few vintage ads to celebrate the holiday.

First up is a Bob Beck Chevrolet newspaper ad that ran in The Journal on March 16, 1964 (above). Rather than feature the traditional cartoon of Bob Beck (like last Friday's blog post), the ad includes clip art of what I assume are two traditional leprechauns, as well as another one wearing a strange hat with a dollar sign on it.

The ad is interesting to me because the largest leprechaun is a visual leftover of the era in which the Irish in America were depicted as monkeys in editorial cartoons. (Think I'm making this up? Click here to visit a scholarly website with lots of examples!) But that's okay – we Irish have a sense of humor about it.

My other St. Paddy ad (below) – for the Hollywood Lounge – also has the usual Irish icons.

This ad ran on March 16, 1953 in The Lorain Journal and announced the appearance of The Jolly Boys. You might remember I've mentioned that particular group here on the blog before, such as here when they appeared on the bill at the 1956 Mary Lee Tucker benefit show.

I don't know all the members of The Jolly Boys over the years, but they included Edward Carl Domazet on accordion and George Higgins on drums.

Chevy Dealer Mascots: Bob Beck and Commander Ray

Bob Beck Chevrolet circa 1955

Chevrolet dealers seemed to like to feature themselves as advertising mascots back in the 50s and 60s.

Remember the Bob Beck Chevrolet ads with the distinctive caricature of Mr. Beck? I remember seeing that cartoon for years. This full-page ad (above) ran on Monday, March 11, 1957 in The Lorain Journal.

I always liked it when a company depicted its owner as a cartoon mascot in its ad. It puts a friendly face on the whole operation and instills trust – which is critical if you're selling cars, as in this case.

The Bob Beck dealership was located at 2147 Broadway in Lorain.

In Cleveland, there was "Commander Ray" of West Park Chevrolet. Here's a portion of an ad (below) from late July 1969 that appeared in The Plain Dealer.

Commander Ray was Ray Herzberger Jr. He was a former Navy Commander who starred in a series of commercials for his dealership, which had been in his family since 1927. I'm sure all of you remember the catchy jingle used on his TV commercials, performed to the tune of "Sailing, Sailing."

"Chevy, Chevy – see Commander Ray at West Park Chevrolet!"

Mr. Herzberger passed away in March 1998.

I wonder if he knew Admiral King?

Willow Hardware Anniversary Ad – March 14, 1957

Yesterday's post showed Willow Hardware at the time of its opening in March 1953. Well, here's a full-page ad for the fourth anniversary of the iconic Lorain store. The ad ran in The Lorain Journal on March 14, 1957 – 57 years ago tomorrow.

I guess the store's customers back then were primarily men, judging from the clip-art head in the ad.

Times eventually changed. In our house, although the spouse didn't even know where Oberlin Avenue was shortly after we got married (she was a Sheffield Laker), she eventually found her way to Willow Hardware. She was in there as much as me, since she is the painter in the family. She sure misses that place and the helpful staff.

Aside from the nostalgic factor, the ad is interesting because of the mundane sale items that it includes: garbage cans, waste baskets, brooms, clothes pins, coffee mugs and laundry carts. Not exactly big-ticket items!

Aunt Jemima Visits Jay's I.G.A. – March 1953

Here's an interesting full-page ad for Jay's I.G.A. Food Liner, which was located at Oberlin Avenue and Meister Road. It opened on March 6, 1952 and the ad at left – which appeared in The Lorain Journal on March 4, 1953 – apparently was celebrating both the grocery store's one year anniversary as well as the expansion of the shopping center strip to include Willow Hardware, which opened at that time in 1953.

The point of interest of the ad is the appearance of Aunt Jemima in person at Jay's, cooking up her famous ready-mix pancakes.

Aunt Jemima Pancakes had been around since 1889. That's when Chris Rutt, one of the owners of the Pearl Milling Company of St. Joseph Missouri, appropriated the Aunt Jemima southern "mammy" character from a performer in a minstrel show to be the name and advertising mascot of his self-rising pancake flour.

The brand later passed to the R.T. Davis Milling Company, which successfully employed an ex-slave – Nancy Green – to bring the Aunt Jemima character to life at wildly popular pancake demonstrations at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. As described in the book Brands, Trademarks and Good Will – The Quaker Oats Story by Arthur Marquette, Nancy Green as Aunt Jemima "presided at her griddle, cooking pancakes for the crowd, trading greetings, singing songs and telling stories of the Old South. Her routine was a lively combination of folklore, wisdom and fun."

The current package

Later, when Quaker Oats had acquired the brand, the idea of using of a real-life Aunt Jemima was revived in the 1930s to great success by having Anna Robinson make personal appearances as the character. She was so well-received and beloved by the public as Aunt Jemima that Haddon Sundblom – now known for his renderings of the Quaker Oats man trademark as well as Coca-Cola's Santa Claus – was hired to create an illustration of her for the package. (That's Anna Robinson in the 1953 ad for Jay's, and a modified and updated version of the illustration of her still appears on the package today.)

Understandably, by the early 1960s, the NAACP strenuously objected to the Aunt Jemima name and trademark – specifically because the character as originally conceived was a slave. The organization called for a boycott of Aunt Jemima products and many local chapters protested the personal appearances that were still taking place at grocery stores and trade shows.

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.

In preparation for this post, I read the book Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima by M. M. Manring, and the author makes a very convincing argument that the Aunt Jemima brand is utterly offensive and demeaning to African Americans. He points to the long-running Aunt Jemima advertising campaign during the 1920s and 30s which created a whole backstory for the character as a slave well-known in the Old South for her pancakes, who later (after she was freed) sold her recipe to Yankee businessmen. Later advertisements in the 40s and 50s featured Aunt Jemima butchering the English language in a cartoonish, stereotypical dialect that's pretty racist.

On the other hand, an argument is made in the book Brands, Trademarks and Good Will – The Quaker Oats Story that the character of Aunt Jemima as originally conceived was an affectionate tribute to the extraordinary culinary talents of African-American cooks.

In our house while I was growing up, Mom made Aunt Jemima pancakes a lot. So when I see Aunt Jemima's smiling face on the package today, my only thought is of those family pancake dinners in the 60s and 70s.

Anyway, since I started preparing this post last week, I've made Aunt Jemima's famous pancakes twice! They were as good as I remembered.