Sepia Saturday: Dollar Steaks, Kilroy, and Love

Sepia Saturday challenges bloggers to share family history through old photographs.

This week’s Sepia Saturday prompt featuring a vintage menu from Milan & Dan’s Café in San Francisco brings to mind an old menu that was among my mother’s possessions. Dating from about the early to mid-1940s, the menu came from the Valley Diner. This menu has all the earmarks of a low-budget operation. Two plastic pockets allow the proprietor to swap out a list of offerings without having to order all new menus. The name of the restaurant is even handwritten on the cover. 

The day’s specials filled a page that was painstakingly handwritten and inserted over the regular menu page. It appears to be original, and since this menu predated quick copy services like Kinkos and Office Max, it is likely someone wrote a page for every menu at the Valley Diner. And now because someone in my family apparently took a menu as a souvenir, an employee had one less menu to fill.

With a common name like “Valley Diner,” one would expect to find a number of same-named restaurants throughout the valley of Virginia, but there was only one “Valley Diner.” It was located near Toms Brook, a very small town of about 250 people in Shenandoah County. Its location along route 11 made it a popular eatery for travelers heading north toward Washington DC and Maryland or south toward Harrisonburg and Roanoke. That is the same road my grandaunt Velma Davis Woodring would have taken from Martinsburg, West Virginia to visit her family in Harrisonburg and Shenandoah. Maybe she was the culprit who stole the menu!

 

1960s postcard of the Valley Diner, Toms Brook, VA
(from Shenandoah Co Library Archives)

Whatever was so special about the Valley Diner to make a person walk off with a menu has been lost to time. Maybe it was a special occasion to be celebrated with a $1.00 steak or oyster plate. Or maybe it was just a convenient lunch spot offering a hamburger for 15 cents and crab meat sandwich for 40. Most sandwiches were under 45 cents, so the $1.00 “Kilroy Was Here” sandwich must have come with everything on it.

 

What was on this sandwich to make it so expensive?

1960s postcard of the Valley Diner, Toms Brook, VA
(from Shenandoah Co Library Archives)

I was hoping to make THAT the story, but I could find no references to such a thing, only a song “Kilroy Was Here” by the Leather Sandwich band of Australia. So I went looking for the history of the diner. The National Park Service published a document in 1995 about diners in Virginia. According to the NPS, the Valley Diner was a wood-frame building with a barrel-vault roof built sometime between 1925 and 1930. The exterior walls have been covered with stucco. A glass block counter and knotty pine paneling were added in the 1940s and 1950s updates. The diner operated under the name “Bud & Yanks” throughout the 1930s.

An obituary – yes, an obituary, of all things – told more of the story. When Mary Sue Rakes graduated from high school in Franklin County, Virginia, she worked for Naomi and Eddie Wilkerson and then followed them to the Valley where they opened the Valley Diner in the mid-1940s. (I wonder if Naomi is the one who wrote the menu.) But that is not the end. The Valley Diner is where Mary Sue found love. Yes, love. Eugene Hottle Crabill worked at the Woodstock Locker Plant (a frozen food locker) and delivered meats to the Valley Diner. I suppose he was the one carrying those delicious dollar steaks and oysters. He and Mary Sue married in 1952 and together they opened a retail meat business, Crabill’s Meats, which is still going strong.

The Valley Diner today
(from Flickr)

In the late 1960s when I-81 was constructed bypassing small towns, Valley Diner took a hit, as did many businesses. Today the Valley Diner is just an empty shell, a decaying relic of days gone by when Mom ‘n’ Pops could make a good living along a main corridor. Nevertheless, the building is listed in the survey of historic resources of Shenandoah County.

The Valley Diner 2011
(used by permission of Diner Hunter Spencer Stewart)

The interior of the Valley Diner 2011
shot through a window
(used by permission of Diner Hunter Spencer Stewart)

It looks like this five-finger discounted menu holds some historic significance after all.

To see what others are serving up, check the Today’s Specials at Sepia Saturday. Tell them Kilroy sent you.

Wendy

© 2017, Wendy Mathias.  All rights reserved.