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For this man, diner is movable feast

Bainbridge eatery once occupied corner in Willow Grove, Pa.

Tuesday, September 7, 1999

By GORDY HOLT Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND -- If there's no such thing as a time machine, you'll have to convince Bruce Muchnick, at least from the look on his face.

"It's rather eerie to think of it," he said the other day. "But here I am."

At another time in another place, Muchnick claimed a seat on a like-colored cushion in this very same corner of this very same stainless-steel diner.

Now it's called the Blue Water Diner and it's located in downtown Bainbridge Island.

But more than 40 years ago, the diner sat on a street corner in a suburb north of Philadelphia called Willow Grove. The sign out front read, simply, "Willow Grove Diner."

Muchnick was 11 years old at the time.

And that was before the diner was transported across the country to the West Coast.

Muchnick, now 56, practically grew up in the diner, wearing a white busboy's apron and wiping "slop" off tables.

The Willow Grove Diner was where Muchnick's father, Harry, died at age of 53, and where his mom, Marge, struggled on to make a go of it through the early 1960s.

"I was always just expected to help," he said.

"It was what you did. I don't remember ever getting paid."

  Photo
  Dr. Bruce Muchnick, left, tells Al Packard about his boyhood days working in the diner that Packard moved to Bainbridge and now operates as the Blue Water Diner. Paul Joseph Brown/P-I
What's going on for Muchnick in this week's transcontinental reconnection, therefore, is both an effort and a joy, the fulfillment of a dream he never knew he had until just a few years ago.

Muchnick wasn't sure he even wanted to fulfill it after a relative called to say she'd seen an article in a magazine about an old stainless-steel diner carted west in pieces for restoration on an island in Puget Sound.

Could it be the diner your folks had?

It could.

Thanks to a Longview, Wash., transplant, retired cargo pilot Al Packard, 50, another small piece of Americana had been saved from the scrap heap.

"My first restaurant," Packard said, grinning.

After a struggle with Bainbridge city planners, Packard and a partner, United Parcel Service pilot Neil Morrison, 38, eventually received permits to locate the diner at 305 Madison Ave.

It is just up the street and across from the site Bainbridge Island selected for its new City Hall, now under construction.

The Blue Water Diner squats edgewise at an address that includes whimsy from another Packard enterprise -- Packard's Quality Service, Express Lube, Detail and Carwash.

They match, bookends from a time when the automobile was first reshaping the country's habits.

Packard's Quality Service is done up in a 1930s Sinclair Oil Co. "castle" motif that recalls the old roadhouses and gas stops that graced state Route 99 years ago.

Through the Society for Commercial Archaeology, Packard found the diner stored in New Jersey. In 1993, he took it apart and loaded it into a self-haul truck pointed west. And for a while it occupied his back yard.

The "building" itself is a 1948 Fodora, a type manufactured by a half-dozen companies and usually built to the proportions of a double-wide railroad car.

They were scattered around the county, mostly in the east, and were run mostly by families, such as the Muchnicks.

The diners fell from favor as the interstate freeway system began walling the nation off into corporate spheres.

But more than a few still remain, linked loosely together in a variety of retrospective ways, not the least of which is Roadside magazine, whose motto is "Eat in diners; Ride trains; Shop on Main Street; Put a porch on your house; and, Live in a walkable community."

Plans are being made in Providence, R.I., for an American Diner Museum. And something called Diner-Rama 1999 recently concluded in Parsippany, N.J.

Reservations are already being taken for Diner-Rama 2000.

This week, there was an odd looking grin on Muchnick's face as he sat in what he said was his familiar corner seat, curved at the wall to conform to the dining-car shape.

Now a psychologist with a doctoral degree in education, Muchnick said everything is as it was four decades ago.

Almost.

"Here they've got their cooks out in front along the counter. My dad had them in a kitchen out back," he said.

The stainless-steel shine, inside and out, still is bright, though. The seat and stool coverings are still as indigo blue as they were back then. And even the doors, which swing out as they did in Philadelphia, swing open to the sounds of that bygone era -- Bing Crosby, the Andrew Sisters, Artie Shaw, Louis Armstrong.

What's different is the music-delivery system. The old tune selectors are still at each table, but "Out of Service" strips are taped over the coin slots, and the music comes instead from speakers leading to a rack of compact discs.

As the twist of Muchnick's reconnection was sinking in this week, one more link was added to his Bainbridge Island visit when he was introduced to Jeff Laveson, a Seattle lawyer who lives on Bainbridge Island.

When Laveson was a boy, his father owned a shoe store just down the street in Willow Grove.

"My one big memory is sitting there waiting for the rain to stop so I could go home or back to the store, or somewhere," he said. "The food? Diner food. About 800 things on the menu."

In 1963, Marge Muchnick closed the Willow Grove Diner after the land owner refused to extend her lease.

Muchnick and his wife, Sandy, remain residents of the north Philadelphia region they cruised as youths. They live now in Glenside, a 20-minute drive from Willow Grove and the intersection of Old York and Easton roads.

For the record, they say, hamburgers and black coffee are still served where the two highways intersect, and youths, if slightly older, still mop slop from the tables.

But the aprons they wear now read Burger King.

P-I reporter Gordy Holt can be reached at 206-448-8156 or gordyholt@seattle-pi.com

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