Really big lunch boxes

So I"m watching an episode of Feasting on Asphalt on The Food Network about a week ago. The show documents chef/scientist Alton Brown and his motorcycle crew"s cruise up the Mississippi River in search of authentic roadside grub.



After feasting on all sorts of fried food in south Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, Tenn., and southern Illinois, the team rolled into Muscatine, Iowa, for lunch at the Clamshell Diner. While the people and pie were a treat, Brown really was interested in the building itself. The diner, which had been salvaged from a scrapyard, was a Little Chef model, serial number 2,111, from the Valentine
Manufacturing Co..


Arthur Valentine and his wife, Ella, were proprietors of a chain of restaurants, known as the Valentine Lunch System, in several Kansas towns. By the 1930s, Valentine, a former car salesman, was hawking small, portable lunchrooms for the Ablah Hotel Supply Co., while also running his restaurant business. In fact, one of the Ablah buildings had been built for one of Valentine"s restaurants in Hutchinson, Kan.



Valentine Manufacturing Co. took off after World War II with steel readily available and GIs coming home looking to
be their own bosses. Each diner had a small metal plate mounted near the entrance to the steel box signifying that
it was a Valentine and proclaiming its serial number. A conservative estimate is that more than 2,000 of these
portable steel sandwich shops, as Valentine ads described the boxes, were shipped from the factory.



Because of the way the diners were designed, a flatbed truck literally dropped the building into place. Of course,
if business wasn"t so good, the same flatbed could be used to repossess the restaurant.



From a fabricator"s standpoint, the real interest is in how much steel was used in the manufacturing of these buildings. These shops consisted mostly of a kitchen, stainless steel appliances, a few stools, and a steel-paneled exterior. In fact, the Little Chef model had only 10 stools, which were configured around the counter.



This isn"t a simple case of longing for the good ol" days. The Valentine diners are symbolic of the American experience: Go-getter wants to be his own boss and buys a company that manufactures complete buildings for other go-getters who want to be their own bosses.



It also makes me shake my head about the way products are made now. The Clamshell Diner, which was actually located
in Danville, Iowa, before heading to the scrapyard, has lived as long as it has because it is a metallic work of art. In today"s world, where we can"t even mass-produce trailers for FEMA without the risk of overexposing the
residents to formaldehyde, that just doesn"t happen anymore.



I might just head out there to catch me a glimpse of fabricating history and enjoy a good burger. Food always seems to taste better in environments such as that.



P.S. If you are wondering about the name of the diner in Muscatine, Iowa, it comes from a long-gone industry. Many of the pearl buttons on shirts made in the U.S. in the early part of the century actually were pressed from clamshells taken from the Mississippi River near Muscatine.