The term "luncheonette" came into existence, it seems to me, around the time I first noticed girls. Well, maybe not, because I was just in first grade when I noticed Marie with her dark curls and snappy Buster Browns, and at that time we referred to those corner hangouts as "the candy store."
The luncheonette was so much more grownup. Why, the word itself sounds French, which in itself was a synonym for sex for many of us adolescents of the 1950s.
Corner hanging at the neighborhood luncheonette has been glamorized by Happy Days and other simple-minded retro fare. But there was nothing glamorous about hanging on the corner in the ’50s. The luncheonette was more about the loneliness of being a teen.
Even in a crowd we were ravaged by loneliness. This begot boredom, and hanging on the corner was all about being bored while pretending you weren’t bored at all.
Ninth and Wolf was our corner. Unlike today, the corner in the ’50s was exclusively male. We wouldn’t have known how to act if females had started hanging on the corner with us. All our pretensions of being suave men of the world would have been blown away by just one girl wearing the right perfume.
But we brought our dreams to Ninth and Wolf, to Johnny Williams’ luncheonette. John was an amiable proprietor with a Jimmy Durante nose and a Durante smile that made us feel welcome in a world that didn’t often seem especially welcoming.
That’s not to say that John didn’t have his quirks. He used to save the waxed paper from the wafer-thin frozen steaks he used to make sandwiches. If you wanted a milkshake, more often than not John would be out of ice cream. It wasn’t unusual, if you wanted a milkshake badly enough, to have to run to the nearby Acme to buy a half-gallon of ice cream so John could make it for you.
But there was no one with a bigger heart than this small, unassuming man. John had his own dreams, just like we did, and maybe that’s why we liked him so much.
Once he had dreamed of getting his musician sons into show business. Somehow, as the story went, John got mixed up with two well-known local television personalities of the day, guys who went on to become network stars. Allegedly, for the right sum of money, they were supposed to have guaranteed that John’s sons would get their chance at a big recording contract.
So John poured all of his finances into the music project. But supposedly the big shots never held up their end of the deal. John saw his dreams of fame and glory for his sons fade and die, but somehow he never lost that wry grin.
John never chased us out of his store, even if we didn’t spend much money there. Teenagers lose any real connection they have to home, and we couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, doing our homework at breakneck speed, even on the coldest nights.
In the movies about the ’50s, it’s always summer, as if there was only one season back then. But it was in the depth of winter that you were grateful for that little luncheonette. It saved you from having to stay home where, even if a kid had the kindest parents, he knew he no longer belonged. Teenagers are the rootless nomads of the world.
It was fun to discuss your personal philosophy of life with John. We’d all developed a philosophy of life even though we had spent but a grand total of 16 years on this earth. You could play pinball, grab a soda and easily kill two or three hours before you had to head back home.
The people who came around John’s were a cross-section of local life, from the neighborhood gangster to the kid who was going into the seminary to the kid who would win a four-year scholarship to Princeton to study nuclear physics to the kids whose lives would remain gray and anonymous.
On a typical night, we would step out of the store 20 or 25 times, look around as if there were some purpose in our young lives, then go back in again. John was unaffected by our restlessness.
Sometimes a couple of us would take a big FM radio outside on the step and listen to Sid Mark play jazz to all hours of the night. "The sounds," we called them — let’s listen to the sounds. Man, we were hip.
Rarely would we really go anywhere or do anything. Once, one of the guys claimed he was shopping for a car, and an older guy drove us all the way to Reedman’s. It turned out the kid only had $5 and no job as collateral for the car, and the sales guy threw us all out while we busted a gut laughing.
We crashed hall weddings on Saturday nights. Some told stories about their sexual exploits that we knew were fibs but, hell, they were entertaining and, for the virgins among us, very informative. We each told our favorite stories time and again and never got tired of telling them.
Eventually, a night came when none of us went to the luncheonette anymore. We were either too old or too married. John had died and the old place just wasn’t the same anymore. He had never stopped smiling even when he became ill. None of us ever forgot that.
