Serving up 2d chances, for diners, teens

Serving up 2d chances, for diners, teens

An unlikely collaboration gives troubled youths fresh hope

By Jenna Russell, Boston Globe Staff January 6, 2008

CRANSTON, R.I. - The American Diner Museum had a problem: a growing storehouse of decrepit vintage diners, and no money, space, or labor to restore them.

The Rhode Island Training School had troubles of its own. A state correctional facility for juvenile offenders, under pressure to push young prisoners toward productive futures, it was facing the elimination of its carpentry classes.

Then museum and prison found each other, and forged an unexpected partnership.

Now, students at the Training School are restoring three of the museum's run-down diners, once beloved landmarks in Worcester and Taunton, and Concord, N.H. The troubled young men have learned dozens of marketable construction skills in the course of the painstaking renovation, said school leaders. The project will also give the Training School a groundbreaking new way to prepare its students for the workforce, when one of the rehabilitated diners is reopened and run as a restaurant by the young offenders.

"It's providing new life for the diners, and also new hope for the kids," said Daniel Zilka, the acting director of the American Diner Museum, which buys old diners and tries to find new owners to preserve them. "Their next stop, if they continue on the path of bad behavior, is adult corrections. This could be a chance for them to turn their lives around."

To oversee its move into the restaurant business, the prison has recruited another unlikely partner - a group of business majors at Bryant University in Smithfield. Members of a campus club, Students in Free Enterprise, they have broken into teams to draft a business plan for the prison-run diner, raise money for its restoration, and teach basic business classes for the teenage offenders.

During a recent class at the Training School, the uniformed teenagers slumped over their desks. Undaunted by their glazed looks, Bryant University junior Mike Howe launched into a mock job interview, playing the part of an ill-mannered applicant. He asked for "a lot of money," described being fired from his last job, and cut off his interviewer, telling him, "Hold on, my phone is ringing."

Behind the desks, faces brightened with appreciation for his performance. When Howe stopped and asked, "What was bad about that?" the young men were ready.

"Everything," they chorused, as their teacher beamed.

Tucked behind an upscale mall and surrounded by high wire fences, the Training School began in the 1800s as a workhouse where wayward youths learned blacksmithing and farming, said John Scott, the school's community liaison and a leader of the diner project. The Cranston facility, which is scheduled to relocate to a brand-new campus this year, houses 150 offenders, mostly males between 13 and 20, who serve an average sentence of six to nine months for crimes ranging from theft and drug possession to arson and murder.

The school's focus has shifted over time from vocational training to more traditional classroom education, said Scott. Concerned that the change has left students without the practical skills they need most, he said he was looking for a way to bolster vocational programs when he stumbled on the dilapidated diners.

"A lot of kids want to work with their hands, and we got away from that," Scott said. "I hope to see the pendulum move back."

The diner museum saw a rare opportunity in the project, not only to burnish some of its faded jewels, but to excite a younger generation about a disappearing slice of Americana. The Providence-based museum, founded in 1996, has no permanent exhibition space, but it collects old diners and helps find buyers.

To cover the costs of the restoration, project leaders persuaded a Rhode Island company, New Harvest Coffee Roasters of Pawtucket, to create a special brand, called New Hope, to help raise funds for the students' work. All sales of the coffee directly benefit the restoration. Bryant students are marketing the brand, creating a website for the coffee, recruiting retail outlets to sell it, and promoting it at events, netting more than $5,000 in sales since October.

"What we're really selling is the story behind the coffee," said Julie Wentzell, a senior marketing major from Lynnfield, Mass.

Working indoors for the winter, Training School students are stripping wooden window frames taken from some of the diners, which sit parked outside under shrink-wrapped plastic. In the course of the restoration, they will have learned woodworking, roofing, welding, and wiring, among other trades, said their carpentry teacher, Norm Lambert. This winter they will learn how to make stained glass so they can replace missing window panes.

The young men said they hope the finished diners will change attitudes about them in the community.

"I hope it tells them not to give up on people," said Jermaine, 18, whose last name was withheld by officials under school rules. "People made mistakes, but mistakes are part of life. That's why they put the eraser on the pencil."

The three diners now being fixed up at the Training School were built in the 1930s and 1940s by the Worcester Lunch Car Co. Made before the age of the classic stainless-steel diner, their bodies are galvanized metal and porcelain enamel. Sherwood's Diner was run by the Ryan family in Worcester, and beloved by the city's police, before it closed in 1969. Hickey's Diner was a fixture in Taunton into the 1990s. Louis' Diner stood in Newburyport, and later, in Concord.

Mike's Diner, a former Providence landmark, is on its way from its last home in Kentucky to Cranston, where Training School students will replace the roof. When finished, Mike's will be reopened and run as a restaurant by Training School students. Other diners may also reopen. Scott said a Providence restaurant may run one of the diners and employ students from the Training School there.

The success of the project has prompted the museum to place more diners in the hands of vocational students. Students at high schools in Cranston and Lincoln, and participants in a federally funded Job Corps program in Exeter, will restore three other diners, said Zilka.

The diners now at the Training School are among some 2,400 that survive nationwide, Zilka said, half as many as 50 years ago. The school's efforts to reopen the diners are essential, he said, to preserve the diner experience as well as its architecture.

"The diners get restored, the kids get something cool to work on, and the Bryant students learn more about business," said Scott. "There's something in it for everyone."

Students In Free Enterprise E-Board members promote New Hope Coffee at the Holiday Sales Event held at Bryant University.

Above left: Bryant University SIFE members hand out free cups of coffee to other students to taste test at the organizations two-day event in November to support the New Hope Diner Project."
In this photo: Jeff Shew and Emily Coutu (SIFE volunteers)

Above Right: Bryant University SIFE members volunteer their efforts to sell bags of coffee, as well as give out free cups, to spread the word about New Hope Coffee and the New Hope Diner Project."(From left to right) Katherine Wilkinson, Lauren Rafferty, Robert Taylor, and Lauren Johnston (Sitting)

"SIFE E-Board members promote New Hope Coffee at the Holiday Sales Event held at Bryant University in early December."(From left to right) Katie Rzasa, Steve Balkam, Amanda Dunne, and Julie Wentzell (Sitting)

Comments: HickeysDiner@americandinermuseum.org

All the fixings

Sunday, December 9, 2007

All the fixings

Diner project serves up helpings of self-respect

By Thomas Caywood
TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
WORCESTER, Ma. — The Sherwood’s Diner served a lot of coffee and eggs for nearly two decades on Foster Street before it was closed in 1969, put in storage, moved to Auburn to become an ice cream parlor, closed again, vandalized, picked over for souvenirs, left to rot for a decade, and eventually mothballed by the American Diner Museum in Providence.

An ambitious plan concocted three years ago by a correction officer at a Rhode Island juvenile detention center aims to get the rusted and rotted former Worcester landmark back in hash-slinging condition — while also teaching at-risk teens about carpentry and self-respect.

Next spring, young people locked up at the Rhode Island Training School in Cranston will begin a roughly $80,000 ground-up restoration of the diner and two others in partnership with the diner museum. The youths are part of a vocational program of the Juvenile Correction Division of the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families

The juvenile detention center has long had a vocational program in carpentry, but the program amounted to little more than a high school wood shop class, said John Scott, the training school’s community liaison. Restoring a vintage diner will teach students real-world job skills they can’t learn building birdhouses, he said.

Mr. Scott was at the Knights of Columbus hall on Circuit Avenue last week along with Daniel A. Zilka, director of the diner museum, to meet with the daughter of the former Sherwood’s owner and with retired city police officers and firefighters who used to eat at the diner in its glory days on Foster Street in the 1940s and 1950s.

Three years ago, when he was a juvenile correction officer, Mr. Scott pitched the idea of restoring and operating a diner, which would combine the school’s carpentry and culinary arts programs. But the idea never went anywhere, he said. When the training school’s administration changed last year and he was promoted to community liaison, Mr. Scott tried again.

“I dusted off the idea and pitched it to the new administration, and they liked it. They said, ‘Go find a diner,’ ” Mr. Scott said.

That led him to Mr. Zilka and the diner museum, which Mr. Scott was shocked to learn was in Providence, just a few miles away from the school in Cranston. With guidance and expertise from the museum, which owns several run-down diners in need of restoration, including Sherwood’s, the plan was dubbed the New Hope Diner Project and grew to include plans to fix up three diners.

Sherwood’s was built by the Worcester Lunch Car Co. in 1940 and was operated in Medford for about 10 years before moving to Worcester. The diner museum has had Sherwood’s in storage since 1999. One of the other diners in line to be restored at the school is the former Mugsy’s, which was served up chow on Chandler Street in Worcester under different names until the early 1990s, Mr. Zilka said.

His vision calls for the three restored diners eventually to be operated in spots along the historic Blackstone Valley corridor between Providence and Worcester. Exactly where and when hasn’t been decided, he said.

Virginia W. Ryan of Worcester, the daughter of the former Sherwood’s owner, Ernest J. Ryan, said she was ecstatic to hear her father’s beloved diner might get a second life.

“I don’t care where it is. I’d like to see it in Worcester, of course, but I just want to see it functional again anywhere,” Ms. Ryan said.

She said her father, who died in 1966, would be especially pleased to know troubled teens will have a hand in the restoration.

“My father was a juvenile delinquent to the day he died. I think if you ask some of these cops around here,” she quipped, referring to the elderly retired police officers gathered at the Knights of Columbus Hall, “they can attest that my brothers were, too.”

Most of teenagers locked up at the Rhode Island Training School have been sentenced to six to nine months for “waywardness” or “delinquency,” Mr. Scott said.

Sherwood’s today sits protected behind the school’s high security fences. It’s swaddled in shrink wrap for now to prevent further decay. Some materials and expertise that will be necessary for the restoration have been donated to the school, which also is selling its own brand of organic coffee to help raise money for the project, he said.

Although some preliminary work has been done, Mr. Scott said, construction should begin in earnest in the spring. Mr. Zilka expects the work to take more than a year to complete, with the student labor force turning over during that time as new teens arrive at the school and others are released.

“It will become a working diner again,” Mr. Zilka said.

To keep Sherwood’s as authentic as possible, project organizers had to track down stools, booths and other fixtures taken from the defunct diner as souvenirs. Amazingly, they got most of the diner’s pieces back, he said.

“It’ll be about 95 percent original,” he said. “There might be a booth here or there we don’t have, but it will be largely original.”

Mr. Scott said he hopes that some of the young people who help restore the three diners, or who learn to cook at the school, will ultimately be involved in operating the vintage eateries.

“We see this as a project to develop a work ethic on a project they can say is their own,” Mr. Scott said.

During its heyday, Sherwood’s stood on the corner of Foster and Commercial streets. The Fire Department headquarters was across the street at the time.

Kenneth C. Henderson of Worcester, who was a rookie firefighter in the mid-1950s, recalled that a fire alarm bell was wired to ring in the diner.

“Whenever the bell hit in the station, all those in the diner came running across the street to get on the trucks and answer the alarm,” Mr. Henderson recalled.

He also recalled Mr. Ryan whipping up batches of bologna sandwiches for the prisoners locked up in the holding cells at police headquarters. Retired Police Officer James W. Richardson of Worcester said the prisoners weren’t the only ones at the police station noshing on Sherwood’s Diner sandwiches in those days.

“It was a good place to eat,” he said of Sherwood’s. “If you liked bologna sandwiches, it was a great place to eat.”

The bartender on duty at the Knights of Columbus Hall last week, when the New Hope Diner Project organizers met with the retired police officers and firefighters, was 78-year-old Worcester native Francis J. Callery. He remembered eating at Sherwood’s between his stints as a Navy corpsman in World War II and the Korean War.

“You went out for a few beers, you always went to a diner after,” Mr. Callery said. “You never went home without stopping in at a diner.”

For Additional information on this project click here.
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