The Story of Roadside Fan #5501
Part three: The online roadside community
I first came upon the Roadside Magazine web site in 1996. The quantity and quality of information was like nothing I had seen up to that time.
Lou Roc’s Diner (Worcester, MA), Roadside Magazine’s poster child for bad diner renovation. There’s a Silk City diner in there… somewhere.
There was a section called “Diner to Diner” featuring especially well written diner reviews, and another one called “Napkin Notes” featuring diner news from all over the Northeast. I liked how all the diners were identified by manufacturer, using a system of abbreviations such as Rosie’s Diner(P) or Wilson’s Diner(W). There was also something called the “Lou-Roc Award,” a dubious achievement award for bad diner renovation.
Visit, of all places, Cleveland. Roadside, the magazine that invited us to explore the back roads and Main Streets of America.
The Roadside web site made me want to subscribe to the magazine. Late in 1996, I received Roadside Issue 22, and proceeded to dive in and read every word. The cover story on Cleveland, Ohio, the much-maligned Rust Belt city, uncovered plenty of fascinating places to see for a person willing to “explore the back roads and Main Streets of America” as Roadside aptly put it. In future issues, Roadside would feature similar profiles of Syracuse and Pittsburgh, daring to suggest that there were things worth seeing in aging industrial cities that everybody else seems to have forgotten.
Roadside was not a perfect publication. The black and white inside pages were quite a comedown from the beautiful glossy color pictures in my roadside books. Also, Roadside was a “quarterly” magazine that seemed never to make it out on time. I became accustomed to the fact that I might have to wait a while for the new issue, but I could check the Roadside web site and find something new. At its peak, Roadside Online was updated frequently with news from all the back roads and Main Streets I would never have time to drive myself.
Roadside Magazine also provided a connection to other organizations and people interested in diners. One of these was the American Diner Museum, which at the time was holding annual “Diner-Rama” conferences for diner lovers. In autumn 1997, Diner-Rama came to my area (Albany, NY) but the registration fee seemed kind of pricey to take a bus tour of nearby diners I could easily visit on my own. In June 1999, though, I decided to make the trip to Parsippany, New Jersey for the third Diner-Rama and meet some of the people that I only knew online.
Mike Engle with Cliff Brown at the Miss Albany Diner in 2002. Cliff passed away in 2010, and his diner was sold in 2012. Today, it’s Sciortino’s, an Italian place.
I would meet other diner enthusiasts that year as well, notably Mike Engle. After exchanging e-mails, we realized that we lived only about 15 minutes apart, so it was easy to get together for diner hunting road trips. Also in 1999, I joined the American Diner Museum e-mail group moderated by Gregg Anderson.
In the coming years I would continue to meet roadside enthusiasts, including some of the “founding fathers” of the diner appreciation movement. In November 2000, Mike Engle and I traveled to the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, Massachusetts to attend a talk by Richard J. S. Gutman, author of the landmark diner book American Diner Then and Now. That same day I met Larry Cultrera, a diner expert who has written the “Diner Hotline” column for the Society for Commercial Archeology’s SCA Journal since 1989. I would have a couple of memorable road trips with Larry: when I attended the Merrimack Valley diner tour in June 2002, the next day Larry took me to several diners that the tour missed. Then, in 2003, I met up with Larry and his friend Steve Repucci in New York City, where I would meet the legendary diner artist John Baeder, who was having an exhibition of his paintings at O. K. Harris Works of Art.
One beautiful Roadside and then it was all gone.
As my interest in the American roadside grew, Roadside Magazine, and especially the Roadside Online web site, became my primary source of news and information as to what was happening in the enthusiast community. So it was big news in 2000 when Roadside Magazine sold out to a new owner, Ball Publishing, with the promise of big changes. Roadside readers were told to look for better paper, more color, and more frequent publication. The prototype for the “new” Roadside was Issue 31, with glossy color pages and thoughtful articles in the best tradition of Roadside. Not long after this magazine appeared in early 2001, however, there were signs of trouble. Ball Publishing shut down the magazine, and ultimately the company went bankrupt. Just like that, the online roadside community had lost its magazine and its primary source of roadside news updates.
Following Roadside’s demise, a Roadside Magazine Yahoo e-mail group continued to receive mail. Reading the postings, you could tell that there was a small group of individuals who liked diners and other roadside attractions, and who missed the fact that Roadside Magazine was not around any more. I suggested that we should stay in contact, and not lose the online roadside community that had built up around the magazine.
Given the problems associated with continuing to use Roadside’s abandoned mailing list, I suggested that we start a new e-mail group.
“Great idea, Glenn! Can you run it?” was a typical reply.
And so, with a few clicks of the mouse, RoadsideFans was born.
A scaled-back version of Roadside Magazine would appear late in 2001 under the name By the Way. But by this time the RoadsideFans Yahoo Group already had a separate life of its own.
In the years to follow, RoadsideFans would extend its reach beyond the e-mail group. First was the roadsidefans.com web site, a birthday gift from my wife, Susan, and stepson Ray. “Just decide what you want and Ray will get it up and running.” The web site became a good place for photos and articles beyond the scope of what an e-mail group can easily handle, and later Christmas gifts of a scanner and then a digital camera made it easier for me to put more material online.
The group at the first RoadsideFans Get-Together at Stella’s Diner in Syracuse. (Photo by Susan Levinson)
The next move for RoadsideFans was to sponsor events of its own, the RoadsideFans Get-Togethers. Early on, the group attracted strong support from the Syracuse and Rochester areas, so a central New York location held the best promise of a decent turn-out. The first RoadsideFans Get-Together was held at Stella’s Diner in Syracuse on May 18, 2002. A highlight of this event was a car pool “mini-tour” of Syracuse area diners and roadside attractions, assembled literally on the spot by Syracuse residents Susan Germain, Bob Schultz, and Kathy Stribley. If you want to know where all the good places are, ask the people who live there. I was able to return the favor for the second Get-Together, held March 22, 2003 in my original home town of Troy, New York. I put together a tour that visited several diners from different eras, a vintage Howard Johnson’s, and Nipper, the RCA Dog.
The third Get-Together was held November 15, 2003 at Rochester’s Highland Park Diner, to help a special friend of the RoadsideFans Group. I first met Linda Gottwald on the Diner-Rama tour bus in Pittsburgh in 2001- she was the “Photogirl” rapidly shooting pictures through the tour bus window of whatever fascinated her: diners, pink flamingoes, “Scoops” (ice cream cone signs), and “bathtub Marys” (backyard shrines.) Her lively personality, however, masked a very difficult struggle with cancer. Linda attended the first RoadsideFans Get-Together in Syracuse, where she met several other RoadsideFans from central New York who became friends, occasionally meeting at the Penn Yan Diner.
Linda waves goodbye. (West Taghkanic Diner, Taconic Parkway, Ancram, NY, June 30, 2004.)
In late 2003, with Linda unable to work and the bills piling up, Susan Levinson approached me with the idea of a fund-raiser to help Linda. The result was “Linda Gottwald Day” at the Highland Park Diner, where the diner donated a portion of the day’s proceeds to help Linda (and many individuals donated money as well.) Sadly, Linda lost her long battle with cancer on October 26, 2004. But I am thankful for the good times we had with her and for all the RoadsideFans who reached out to her in her time of need.
In the coming years I would meet other like-minded roadside enthusiasts. One of these was Beth Lennon, who I first met at the Doo-Wop visitor’s center in
Our group at the Glider Diner in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “Mod Betty” is third from the right, Kyle Weaver of Stackpole Books second from the right.
Wildwood, New Jersey in July 2010. Beth, a k a “Mod Betty,” had launched the Retro Roadmap web site a year earlier, and soon we began talking about another meet-up of roadside enthusiasts, jointly sponsored by RoadsideFans and Retro Roadmap. This was held in Scranton, Pennsylvania on November 14, 2010 and featured a tour of the Scranton Lackawanna Train Station (restored and repurposed as a hotel) followed by lunch at the Glider Diner.
On May 26, 2011, the RoadsideFans e-mail group turned 10 years old. We celebrated with another day-long event on June 4, 2011, retracing the diner history of New York’s
The RoadsideFans 10th Anniversary luncheon at the Elizaville Diner.
Taconic Parkway. After breakfast at the West Taghkanic Diner, we had great visits with Otto Maier of O’s Eatery and Dan Rundell, who invested a decade of painstaking work restoring a 1925 O’Mahony diner, now Dan’s Diner of Spencertown. We then visited Bijan’s Circle Museum sculpture park and the studio of roadside artist Jeffrey L. Neumann before lunch at the Elizaville Diner.
The story continues today, as long as there are open roads to explore and interesting places to visit. If you love the great American roadside, I invite you along for the ride.
