This is a highly readable book. Although it is pure history, it’s so beautifully written, so lyrical it feels like a novel. Rarely has any book about this remarkable family given me the sense of destiny and the full impact of their influence and the romance of England’s premier ruling family. To a large extent, the Plantagenets defined England — perhaps even created it. This view of the Plantagenets was unique concept for me. As soon as I read it, it made complete sense. That the more than 200 year reign of this remarkable family, with its peaks and its depths continues to define British identity was something I’d never considered. Now it seems obvious, but like so many obvious things, I never noticed it until the author pointed it out.
It was wonderful to read history where the author appreciates not just the facts, but the drama, romance, story and myth. The imprint left by this ruling family on Great Britain is deep, pervasive and affects every aspect of England’s identity, even in the 21st century long after the family has — technically — disappeared. On many levels, this family can never disappear. They are part of the soil, the air, the heart of the island kingdom they ruled.
From its opening words, the book grabbed me and pulled me in. It “had” me before I had finished the preface, much less the first chapter.
Although I was predisposed to enjoy it, I had no idea how much I would enjoy it. This is a book that greatly and delightfully exceeded my expectations. I have read many books about the Plantagenets, both straight history and as literary “docudrama.” I am very familiar with the stories of each of the monarchs, the wars, the scandals, the affairs, the treachery. It could have been old news for me, but instead, it was like reading it for the first time. What a wonderful fresh voice the author brings to material that has been written about — one might think — to the point where you could reasonably question whether or not yet another tome on the subject serves any purpose.
Was anything new uncovered? Not really new information, but in many cases, a new way of looking at stuff I had read in many other forms, other books. Whether or not the information is new to you will depend on how much else you’ve read. There was no news in it for me, but I’ve been fascinated by the Plantagenets and the British Crown since I was a kid.
The debunking of characters like Simon de Montfort that seem to have surprised some readers wasn’t news to me. I have read sufficient French history of the period to thoroughly detest the man and didn’t need any more help. The same goes for most of these characters. It wasn’t new information that made the book so much fun for me, but the presentation and the obvious relish the author took in the stories and characters. His enthusiasm is infectious.
As you might expect, the book includes maps, lineage charts, all the family connections of the Plantagenets. The story covers that period from Empress Mathilda through Richard II’s loss to Bolingbroke. It stops in 1399, rather before the ascent of the Tudors. The author chose to end his narrative before the War of the Roses, leaving that long and ugly battle for England’s throne for the next volume. I look forward to reading that too.
At 560 pages, it is a long book. I had no trouble with its length other than finding enough time to read the entire thing. It wasn’t hard to become engrossed in each of its sections. Nor does it require any prior knowledge of the period, although prior knowledge certainly doesn’t hurt. You could hardly grow up an English-speaker and not have heard of most of the prominent people that strut, gallop or crawl across the pages. If you’ve read any English history at all, you have surely encountered these Kings, Queens, counselors, courtiers, ministers and more.
If you’ve read Shakespeare, you may feel you know this material well, but anything written by Shakespeare is strongly prejudiced in favor the usurping Tudors. It is untrustworthy as fact. Shakespeare is literature, not history and should be enjoyed as such.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a pleasure to read, whether you are a scholar, history buff, Anglophone or Anglophile, lover of historical novels … or innocently searching for a great read.
It’s available in hard cover, paperback, Kindle and audio. I don’t believe you could go wrong no matter what version you choose.
King Arthur is by far the most popular and most written-about king of England. Legends of Arthur have multiplied not only in the British Isles, but in France, in other European countries and more recently, in North America. Tales of Arthur began appearing in the early ninth century and continued to appear through Victorian times to the present day. In fable and books, around medieval campfires and flickering on the silver screen and TV sets of the 21st century, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round table are ever with us. On the literary scene, recent years have produced a virtually continuous flow of books about Arthur, each “scholarly tome” claiming to have unlocked the truth about the “once and future king.” We apparently have an insatiable appetite for these stories.
The author of Worlds of Arthur is Professor Guy Halsall. Halsall joined the History Department at the University of York (UK) in January 2003. His doctoral research — carried out at York — was on the archaeology and history of the Merovingian region of Metz (north-eastern France and southern Germany), c.350-c.750. It was perhaps inevitable that his researches and the putative world of King Arthur would collide. And so they have, and Worlds of Arthur is the result.
Guy Halsall makes a valiant and largely successful attempt to sort through the evidence — reality and myth — as it pertains to the Arthurian legends. Halsall bravely takes on both the “historical” Arthur — the man waging a glorious but doomed struggle to save civilization from the incoming Anglo-Saxon tide — and the mythical King accompanied by his legendary retinue: Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad and Gawain, Merlin, Excalibur, the Lady in the Lake, the Sword in the Stone, Camelot, and the Round Table.
Knowing in advance that no one wants their favorite stories debunked, he starts with a cold splash of reality. In all likelihood, ”King Arthur” never existed. In the unlikely event he did exist on some level somewhere, we know zilch about him and thus no one, including the author, is going to reveal any exciting new evidence of Arthur’s existence because there is no evidence to reveal. This position is driven home repeatedly, so if you are waiting for an Arthurian revelation, you are bound for disappointment.
Arthur is a literary and mythological figure, not a real one nor even loosely based on any historical person(s). Halsall states up front that any book claiming to know the real Arthur is bunk. Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Arthur and all his knights did not exist. Guy Halsall makes it absolutely clear and repeats his position over and over: There is no evidence supporting an historical Arthur.
Having put up front, Dr. Halsall sets himself a rather difficult literary task. How can you keep a reader’s interest for the remainder of the book? Before you have gotten a quarter of the way through, he has declared his position, debunked what is currently the only “evidence” on the “proof” side of the Arthurian equation. What is left?
Halsall writes with humor and wit. Academic though this book is, he tries hard to be understandable by those who are not Ph.D. levels in archeology. In this, he is modestly successful. I’m fascinated by archeology and have read a great deal of archeological stuff over the years. I understood most (not all) of the technical terminology. I’ve explored ruins and attended lectures, but this is dense material. No matter how light-hearted and humorously approached, there is no avoiding the essentially academic nature of the book. It’s not for everyone. You need a background in archeology to understand the author and a significant personal interest in the subject to stay with the book to the end.
If you have the interest, then there is much to learn. Worlds of Arthur is a thorough examination of the evidence and more to the point, a thorough dismemberment of what has been called evidence by other authors. Ironically, one of the unintended results of reading this book was that it piqued my interest in reading the material the author is disproving, not because I think it contains “real evidence” but because it sounds intriguing as fiction.
If you are passionate about Camelot, Arthur and the gang, this is a thoroughly researched, well-written book that picks apart all previous writings on the subject with minute care. It belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who claims to be a fancier of medieval British archeology. It’s not a riveting tale with lot of surprises. There is no question about where the author is heading since he lays out what he is going to do in the introduction. The author is a better writer than the majority of academics and makes the going easier with a light touch and a sense of humor. But in the end, this is an academic treatise.
I enjoyed it. Having read many books of this type over the years, I knew what to expect and was prepared to do some mental calisthenics and give my brain a bit of exercise. There are no revelations in the book. From a broad perspective, I knew at the end of the book what I knew at the start — that there never was a real King Arthur or Round Table or any other of the well-loved mythical characters. Since I never believed the characters were real in the first place, it was no shock. There is nothing shocking in Worlds of Arthur.
It allows no wiggle room to find a real Arthur somewhere in archeological or historical data. But if you are genuinely interested in the early medieval period in England, there’s a lot of well-presented information to digest about a time about which little is known and less has been written. The Dark Ages are dark. Worlds of Arthur: Facts & Fictions of the Dark Ages lights a candle in that darkness.
The book is available on Kindle and hardcover. There are illustrations that might benefit from viewing on paper rather than the smaller format of a Kindle, but the Kindle version does include them so the choice is yours. If you’re an armchair archeologist or medievalist … or just fascinated with the world of Arthur, give this a read. It’s worth your effort.
If you are somewhere around my age, you remember the Jonestown Massacre. Even if you were a lot younger, if you were old enough to read a newspaper or watch TV, you could hardly forget it. With fundamentalism enjoying a rebirth, with well-known people urging others to murder or mayhem, it is a good time to remember where this kind of thing leads. These days, disagreements that ought to result in nothing more serious than an argument result in the ugliest kind of hate-spewing rhetoric.
Lest we forget, there was nothing even remotely amusing about this story. There isn’t a word that begins to sum up the sickening reality.
It isn’t rare for fanaticism and hatred to end in death. It frequently leads to a lot of death and almost always, it is the most innocent who pay the butcher’s bill.
The Road to Jonestown
The phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” has become common parlance in American business and politics. Roughly translated, it means “to blindly follow.” It usually carries a negative connotation. The “Kool Aid” references go all the back to the 1950s when it was the typical drink for children on suburban summer afternoons. But the origin of the saying is something else, darker, and different. It has become the kind of bland rhetoric about which we don’t give a thought, but its roots lie in horror.
Before we talk about Kool-Aid, let’s take a brief trip down memory lane to a particularly horrible episode of American history.
Jim Jones, cult leader and mass murderer, was a complex madman. A communist, occasional Methodist minister, he founded his own pseudo-church in the late 1950s. He called it the “Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church,” known in short as the “Peoples Temple.”
The lack of a possessive apostrophe was intentional. The name was supposed to be a reference to “the people of the world.” While Jones called it a church, it was closer to a warped version of a Marxist commune. Initially, it was combined with a hodgepodge of Christian references that he used in his diatribes … supposedly sermons.
Regardless, it was never any kind of church. The Peoples Temple was a straight-up cult. It made serious demands in the way of personal committment and financial support from its members and a level of obedience that is the defining quality of a cult.
Jones was the cult’s leader — and a homicidal maniac — but he had positive attributes. Jones and his wife Marceline were strongly in favor of racial integration. They adopted a bunch of kids from varying racial backgrounds. They were the first white family in Indiana to adopt an African-American boy. Other adopted children included 3 Korean Americans, a Native American, and a handful of white kids. They also had one child of their own.
Jones called his adopted kids the “Rainbow Family,” and he made a name for himself desegregating various institutions in Indiana. Before you get all dewy-eyed about this, note this ultimately climaxed in the murder of these children by their adoptive parents.
The Peoples Temple continued to expand through the 1960s. Jones gradually abandoned his Marxism. His preaching began to increasingly focus on impending nuclear apocalypse. He even specified a date — July 15, 1967 — and suggested after the apocalypse, a socialist paradise would exist on Earth. Where would the new Eden be?
Jones decided on the town of Redwood Valley, California and before the expected Big Bang, he moved the Temple and its peoples there.
When the end-of-the-world deadline came and went without nuclear holocaust, Jones abandoned even the pretenses of Christianity. The cloak came off and he revealed himself as an atheist using religion to give legitimacy to his views. Jones announced that “Those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion must be brought to enlightenment — socialism.” Prophetic words in view of the fact that Jones himself was a drug addict who preferred literal to metaphorical opiates.
As media attention increased, Jones started to worry the Peoples Temple’s tax-exempt religious status was in danger of revocation. He was paranoid about the U.S. intelligence community — probably with justification.
Jim Jones, cult leader
In 1977, Jones moved the Temple and its people again. This was a major relocation, leaving the United States completely and settling on a site that Jones had been working on since 1974. Located in Guyana, a poor South American nation, he modestly named it “Jonestown.”
It was a bleak, inhospitable place on 4000 acres of poor soil with limited access to fresh water. It was much to small encampment, dramatically overcrowded Temple members were forced to work long hours merely to survive.
Jones figured his people could farm the land in this new utopia. He had put together several million dollars before getting to Jonestown, but his wealth was not shared amongst his followers. He barely used any of the money for himself and lived in a small, bare-bones shared house.
All Hell Breaks Loose
U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown in November of 1978. Rumors of peculiar goings-on were leaking out of Jonestown. Ryan decided to investigate the allegations of human rights abuses in Jonestown.
Ryan didn’t go alone. He took a contingent of media representatives including NBC News correspondent Don Harris and other reporters, plus relatives of Jonestown resident. During his visit to Jonestown, Congressman Ryan talked to more than a dozen Temple members, all of whom said they wanted to leave. Several of them passed a note saying: “Please help us get out of Jonestown” to news anchor Harris.
If the number of defectors seems low proportionate to the more than 900 residents of Jonestown, keep in mind the congressional party had not been able to talk to most of the “fellowship.” The number of those who might have wanted to leave could conceivably been much more but we will never know.
Ryan began processing the paperwork to repatriate Temple members who wanted to go back to the States. In the middle of this, Ryan was attacked by Don Sly, a knife-wielding Temple member. This would-be assassin was stopped before injuring Ryan.
Eventually the entire Ryan party plus the group of Jonestown defectors drove to a nearby airstrip and boarded planes, intending to leave. Jim Jones had other plans. He sent armed Temple members — his “Red Brigade” after the Congressional party These creepy ‘soldiers of the Temple” opened fire on them, killing Ryan, one Temple defector, three members of the media, and wounding eleven others. The survivors fled into the jungle.
When the murderers returned to Jonestown and reported their actions, Jones promptly started what he called a “White Night” meeting. He invited all Temple members. This wasn’t the first White Night. Jones had hosted previous White Night meetings in which he suggested U.S. intelligence agencies would soon attack Jonestown.
He had even staged fake attacks to add a realism, though it’s hard to believe that anyone was fooled by the play-acting. Faced with this hypothetical invasion scenario, Jones offered Temple members a set of choices. They could stay and fight imaginary invaders. They could take off for the USSR. Another tempting alternative would be to run off into the jungles of Guyana. Or they could commit mass suicide as an act of political protest.
On previous occasions Temple members had opted for suicide. Not satisfied, Jones had tested their committment and gave them cups of liquid that they were told contained poison. They were asked to drink it. Which they did. After a while, Jones told them the liquid wasn’t poisonous — but one day it would be.
Indeed Jim Jones had been stockpiling cyanide and other drugs for years. On this final White Night, Jones was no longer testing his followers. It was time to kill them all.
Don’t Drink the Poisonous Fruit-Flavored Beverage
After the airstrip murders outside Jonestown, Jim Jones ordered Temple members to create a fruity mix containing a cocktail of chemicals that included cyanide, diazepam (Valium), promethazine (Phenergan — a sedative), chloral hydrate (a sedative/hypnotic sometimes called “knockout drops”), and Flavor Aid — a grape-flavored beverage similar to Kool-Aid.
Jones urged his followers to commit suicide to make a political point. What that point was supposed to be is still a matter of considerable conjecture. After some discussion, Temple member Christine Miller suggested flying Temple members to the USSR.
Jones was never interested in escape. There was only one answer that he would accept. Death and lots of it. He repeatedly pointed out to his followers that Congressman Ryan was dead (and whose fault was that?) which would surely bring down the weight of American retribution in short order. An audiotape of this meeting exists. It is just as creepy as you’d expect.
Then it was time for the detailed instructions which — still baffling to me at least — the followers did as they were told. I will never understand why. Probably that’s a positive sign indicating I’m not insane.
Jones insisted mothers must squirt poison into the mouths of their children using syringes. As their children died, the mothers were dosed as well, though they were allowed to drink from cups. Temple members wandered out onto the ground, where eventually just over 900 lay dead, including more than 300 children. Only a handful of survivors escaped Jonestown — primarily residents who happened to be away on errands or playing basketball when the mass suicide/massacre took place.
Jones, his wife, and various other members of the Temple left wills stating that their assets should go to the Communist Party of the USSR.
Jones did not drink poison. He died from a gunshot to the head, though it’s not clear if it was self-inflicted. Jones likely died last or nearly so and may have preferred the gun to cyanide, having just seen the horrendous effects of death by cyanide.
What’s With the Kool-Aid?
In the wake of the tragedy at Jonestown, the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” became a popular term for blind obedience, as the Temple members had apparently accepted their cups of poison without objection. According to various accounts, the primary beverage used at Jonestown was actually Flavor Aid (sometimes “Flav-R-Aid”) — although there is evidence both Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid were used.
Kool-Aid was better known than Flavor Aid . Kool-Aid was introduced in 1927 in powdered form. When Americans thought about a powdered fruity drink mix (other than “Tang”), “Kool-Aid” came immediately to mind.
So, although Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid were both present at Jonestown, the phrase “(don’t) drink the Kool-Aid” has become entrenched in popular lingo.
Before you decide this means we are or were “rich,” Garry had been sharing a house with a bunch of other people from Channel 7 and other Boston TV stations for years before I moved to New England. This was not their first house. There had been others, but this was the most recent and favorite because of its location. The group knew each other well and had been sharing this house or another for years before Garry and I officially became a couple, though we’d known each other and been involved off and on since college.
After I came on the scene, we continued to share the house, though it grew more awkward as many “housemates” paired off and moved on with their lives. Eventually, the problem solved itself when the owners of the house decided to cash in and sell it.
It had originally been a boat house for the New York Yacht Club. At some point, it was converted to a summer residence. Right on the water, halfway between Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs, it had a great dock and was just across Ocean Avenue from the hospital.
Drawing of he original boathouse, 1894. Artist unknown.
The house was currently owned by a pair of orthopedic doctors who worked at the hospital on the Vineyard and maintained offices across Nantucket Sound in Falmouth. A dock for the docs was useful and tax-deductible. Our rent paid their property taxes and perhaps left a bit of money over, though not much. Waterfront real estate on Martha’s Vineyard is expensive.
Mostly, I think they kept the place because of the dock and because we were amusing, all television folks, photographers, reporters, directors, producers … plus their insignificant others. We didn’t trash the place and were always up for a ride in their insanely over-powered Boston Whaler.The ferry ride from Falmouth to Oak Bluffs took 45 minutes. Either of the doctors could do it in just over 7 minutes. I don’t think they actually touched the water once they left the channel. They more or less flew.
It was an interesting and wet ride, exhilarating and terrifying and a heck of a lot faster and easier than the ferry. Cheaper, too as long as you didn’t need to take your car across.
After the doctors sold the house, the group split up. Several of the couples, including Garry and I, had married by then. Garry and I found a charming place in Oak Bluffs with a long staircase down the bluff to a small, private, sandy beach. We could bring our dogs. The house had two bedrooms, so we could invite friends to join us … a big bonus.
We rented during the off-season to make it more affordable and to avoid the mid-summer crush. We rented two weeks in June and two more in September. With both of us working, it was affordable … for a while.
Some years before the doctors sold the house, Garry had covered a story about Alfred Eisenstadt and Lois Maillou Jones, both of whom had been given Presidential Medals of Honor for their work. After the story, we became friends with both artists. Eisenstadt was in his early 90s and Lois Maillou Jones was in her mid 80s, Eisie told Lois she was “just a kid.” We laughed, but time has changed our perspective considerably.
I had been an admirer of Eisenstadt’s work as long as I’d been taking pictures. I took my first roll of film on Martha’s Vineyard in 1966 when I had stayed at the Menemsha Inn where Eisenstadt resided from late spring till just after Labor Day. Books of Eisie’s work — that was what everyone called him and he preferred it — were all over the inn, in bookcases and on tables. Most featured landscapes of Martha’s Vineyard that Eisenstadt had taken over the decades.
I was using my first camera, a Practika with an excellent Zeiss 50mm lens but no light meter. It had a crank film advance. This was a barebones camera perfect for a beginner. I had to really learn how to take pictures. I had to get a light reading using a handheld meter. I had to focus. No zoom lens, just that 50 mm prime, so my feet did the zooming. I learned the basics of photography that many people of the digital generation never learn.Many erstwhile photographers have never encountered a non-automatic camera. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But then again, maybe it does.
Portrait of Robert Frost. It hangs still in our home, reminding me of some of the very best of the old days
My camera had been a gift from a photographer friend who had moved on to more expensive gear, but with that Zeiss lens and a good eye, I followed Eisenstadt’s path. I discovered where he’d taken each picture, then figured out how he’d gotten the perspective, framed it, and not only duplicated his shots down to the clump of grass he’d crouched behind to create the impression of a foreground, I even added a few original ideas of my own that worked out surprisingly well. It was most surprising to me since I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just winging it.
My first roll of film was declared brilliant. It was, except that the photographs were Alfred Eisenstadt‘s pictures reproduced by me on my camera. I learned photography by following his footsteps and seeing what he saw. By the time I was done, I’d learned more than any school would have taught me about perspective, angles, and what makes a landscape something better than ordinary.
When I actually met the man himself, it was like meeting your favorite movie star. I was dumbstruck, not something that often happens to me.
As we got to know Eisie better, I asked him to autograph his books for me and he did, but he didn’t just autograph them. He went through each book, photograph by photograph. He was in his early 90s and forgot many things, but he remembered every picture he’d taken, including what film and camera he was using, what lens was on it, the F-stop and most important, what he was thinking as he shot it. He could remember exactly what it was about the image that grabbed his attention. It was a wonderful education that money could never buy.
For example, the picture of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on VJ Day, he said he was walking around Times Square with his Nikon and he saw them, the dark of the sailor’s uniform against the white of the nurse’s dress and he shot. He knew it was what he wanted. The light, the contrast, perfect. Great street journalism looks accidental … but it isn’t. It’s, in my opinion, the most difficult of all the various types of photography because you have to see your shot and grab it, get it right the first time with no framing, no planning and if you miss it, it’s gone forever.
Were we close friends? Close enough, considering the late date at which we entered his life. At that point, he spent most of his time in the company of Lulu, his former sister-in-law who took care of him. She was a lovely, warm, sweet lady who sometimes needed an afternoon off. We were happy to Eisie-sit and let her go to town for an afternoon. Eisie was interesting and funny, but high maintenance. He did not suffer from a lack of ego strength.
We spent time with him every summer for about five years until he died, and we were honored to be among those invited to the funeral.
The funeral was closed to the public and although it was sad because Eisie was gone, we also found things to laugh about. Knowing him was special and some memories are worthy of laughter.
Revenge, or at least the quest for justice, is a theme frequently featured in westerns. Relentless duplicity, on the other hand, is more often to be found in crime movies. Ride Clear of Diablo (1953) is a pretty good example of a conventional western that blends both of the aforementioned elements into its brief running time. By using the revenge motif mainly as a device to drive the narrative, rather than indulging in any especially deep analysis, and thus keeping the focus firmly on the various double-crosses, the film manages to provide plenty of exciting, pacy entertainment.
A fine review of a movie and genre that is rarely given its due. I hope this will also serve as an introduction to a website that presents exceptionally high quality reviews. Superb work!
Days of our lives drifting through my mind...life is forever...right? Our lives were running out of time with only seconds left...run...run from what? Wait...what? RUN NOW!
Looking back now, the images seem almost surreal. Everything that happened to us, happened in a matter of seconds. We were all players, fulfilling our roles in this real life and death drama...only it was our life and death drama and it was very real.
In her current incarnation, she is Miss Mendon, having begun as Miss Newport. She has been repainted, re-tiled, given an expanded dining area and a new kitchen. She’s had a long life and seen hard times, but despite everything, she has survived with grace and character.
She was assigned number 823 although she was actually the 623rd dining car built after Worcester Dining Cars began numbering dining cars using 200 as the base number.
She debuted on May 16, 1950. She is very much the same as she has always been. Her layout is unchanged from its original design. Her new owners modernized her a bit and added dining space along the side. She sports a professional kitchen.
The seats have been re-chromed, cleaned and restored. Miss Mendon looks as if she was built just yesterday She’s open for business serving good food to the people of the Valley.
You can visit her at 16 Uxbridge Rd, Mendon, Massachusetts, She is open for your dining pleasure every day from 6 AM to 10 PM.
A classic of classics, like baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet…that’s the all-American diner! Often epitomized with an exterior of stainless steel, the diner is unique in its architecture. Then, of course, there is the interior: a casual atmosphere, a counter, stools and service area along a back wall.
The Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, is an example of Art Deco style and neon signage.
But, how did it all get started and by whom?
Walter Scott, a part-time pressman and type compositor in Providence, Rhode Island,founded the first diner. It all started around 1858 with Scott supplementing his income by selling sandwiches and coffee from a basket.
Newspaper night workers welcomed the services and by 1872, he had developed a very lucrative business. So much so, he quit his printing work and sold food at night from a horse-drawn covered express wagon parked outside the Providence Journal newspaper office. Walter Scott unknowingly inspired the birth of what would become one of America’s most recognized icons – the diner.
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Empower the Present. Are diners still around today?
The interest in the American Diner continues today. Just ask Guy Fieri of Drive-ins, Diners and Dives! A significant number of vintage diners have been rescued from demolition and relocated to new sites in the United States and Europe. Manufacturers of diner structures are experiencing new orders or remodeling projects in a retro style.
Photo credit: Marilyn Armstrong, author of The 12-Foot Teepee. You can visit Marilyn at her blog, Serendipity, where you will be enlightened by her writing, nature, photography, history, arts, nostalgia, humor and so much more!
Marilyn Armstrong‘s insight:
Diners are uniquely American, our culture incarnate.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
Newspaper night workers welcomed the services and by 1872, he had developed a very lucrative business. So much so, he quit his printing work and sold food at night from a horse-drawn covered express wagon parked outside the 
