Brian Butka and Kevin Patrick, Diners of Pennsylvania. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1999. 250pp. Paperback, $19.95. ISBN 0-8117-2878-1
Perhaps the appeal of roadside diners is that they lack pretension. They make no claim to elegance or exotica; they are reliable and durable, nothing more. Moreover, unlike the national purveyors of fast food, diners offer individualism and local color. One may find McDonalds the world over, bur The Sycamore in Bethel, Connecticut, is one of a kind.
When Brian Burko was researching his book about the Lincoln Highway, he met Kevin Patrick, a young Ph.D. candidate researching the same topic. With the forbearance of their wives and families, they have teamed up to write a superb book on the diners of Pennsylvania. Like Burko's book on the Lincoln Highway (published by Stackpole in 1996), it is erudite and readable, generously illustrated and mercifully free of weepy nostalgia.
To keep their subject under control, Butko and Patrick define a diner as "a factorybuilt restaurant transported to its site of operation." They confess omissions: "As when choosing wedding guests, we had to cut somewhere." Still, the book is reasonably-no, remarkably-thorough, discussing the rise, decline, and renaissance of diners throughout Pennsylvania. The authors explain how styles and locations of diners changed over this century; diners are by and large a phenomenon of the twentieth century, the age of the automobile.
On April 6, 1784, in the county courthouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees of the fledgling Dickinson College met and asked two of its members, John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush, to devise a seal for the college.