The Heritage Thieves

By Randy Garbin

Paul Coyne boasts his acquisition of a clock removed from the operating Windsor Diner, in Windsor, Vermont. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Yessiree, the Internet is one amazing thing. For trivia freaks such as myself, there could be no better invention. I remain dumbstruck by the true wonder of looking up information on, say, the company that makes Skee-Ball and a half-hour later finding myself on a website that describes the mysteries of Oak Island. Every surf becomes a learning adventure.

One such online excursion led me to page posted by Paul Coyne, a true roadside enthusiast, who also happens to have his own online diner directory. On this page, Paul boasts about his prized acquisition, an actual Worcester Lunch Car clock, that he bought from an unnamed individual back in 2000. Paul goes on to actually identify this clock as coming from the demolished Windsor Diner in Windsor, Vermont.

Sad, but not true. In fact, the Windsor's current owner, Fred Borcuk and his customers would probably be quite surprised to hear about its demise. He'd probably also like to know what happened to the clock that once hung from his hood.

Paul Coyne created a web page almost as rare as the clock itself. Over the past fifteen years I've followed the diner world, several such clocks and similar items have simply disappeared into the ether, or more accurately, into someone's rec room (or apartment in Lincoln, Rhode Island). So far, no one else has so boldly and proudly displayed their booty.

How the clock got all the way to Los Angeles tells yet another story of what I call Heritage theft, or the looting of property made valuable by an insatiable desire to collect memorabilia and Americana-related artifacts.

In 1999, antique dealer and diner shark Josiah Lupton finally got his opportunity to own and operate the real deal. Having secured a low-interest loan from the a Vermont development agency, Lupton took over the shuttered Windsor and promptly began an admittedly impressive restoration effort. I met up with Lupton just before he reopened the place, and what I saw impressed me a great deal -- and I told him so.

Lupton reopened the idled Windsor in late 2000 only to shut it down again two months later, claiming family-related health problems. Fortunately, Dan Kirby soon picked up where Lupton had left off, but when I visited with Kirby for the first time, I noticed the missing clock and builder tags. "They disappeared about the same time as Lupton," Kirby remarked with a cynical smirk. By the time of that visit, the clock had already appeared on Ebay.

Si Lupton dove head-first into the diner scene in 1990 when he purchased the Ross Diner and moved it from its original home in Holyoke, Massachusetts with the plan to set it up in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. At the time, I followed Lupton's progress with great interest, and his struggles seemed to start early. The rigger confiscated the diner because Lupton initially failed to pay his bill. In the end, Lupton had to give up on the project, citing the bank's cancelling its support of the project. He then sold the precious Worcester streamliner to Gary Neil, the wealthy Vermont antiques mogul, who added it to his Timber Village Antiques Mall complex in Quechee, Vermont.

The remains of the Peerless Diner in its last days in Florida. Soon after this photo was taken in 1990, vandals stripped it of its panels and other distinctive parts. Some of those parts appeared in Quechee, Vermont.

When I visited the Ross Diner in its new location for the first time in 1992, its first lessee John DeSimone took me on quite an eye-opening tour of the whole facility, where not only did I see a freshly restored Worcester, I also saw a lot of miscellaneous diner trim parts that "came with" the Ross lying in the restaurant's basement and at least three black marble slabs, not unlike those once seen on the counter in the Peerless Diner.

The Peerless, a one-time Lowell, Massachusetts landmark and another Worcester streamliner, had become the keystone of a plan to establish a diner in the Florida Keys in 1990. The project stalled when its new owner Ralph Moberly found it too wide for the narrow Route 1 bridges. To make it fit, they actually sawed the structure in half length-wise, but they left it by the side of the road unprotected. Moberly returned a couple of weeks later to find it stripped it clean of all its removable parts. Some of those parts ended up in Quechee. At least one of them, a corner stainless piece, now rests on the Rosebud Diner, put there by a certain diner museum director.

So now Paul Coyne proudly displays a piece of Americana in his living room in California and on the Internet, and he seems rather sanguine about it. After all, he said he paid "an inflated price" for it. "I had no interest in seeing it slip into the hands of someone who wouldn't respect it as much," he writes. Indeed, how lucky we are that the clock doesn't hang in someone else's living room! Those of us who truly care about diners all owe you one big thank you, Paul.

This sorry state of affairs reminds me of the tragedy of the carousel world. Hundreds of antique carousels ended up on the auction block because their hand-carved horses had become so insanely collectible. Instead of bringing joy to a small child, or allowing an elderly woman to blissfully recall her own childhood, these horses sit in living rooms of wealthy collectors. As Susan Germain so aptly put it: "A fiberglass horse collects dust just as well as the real thing."

Perhaps Lupton committed no crime. I can't say I know the details of his purchase and sale agreement with either his seller or his buyer. But if not, why didn't the looter walk off with the stools as well? Each one would easily fetch a good C-note. And why not take the hardwood booths? Those would command a couple thousand, at least. Why stop at the tags? Why not the doors under them? It's one thing to scavenge an obviously abandoned diner in the middle of a field somewhere and another to strip an operating viable diner of its distinctive ornamentation (though no less illegal).

Maybe in terms of actual cash value, this is small potatoes, but these deeds have ultimately devalued the experience of eating in the Windsor Diner. The Heritage thief rips pages out of our living historical narrative for profit, while often decrying the wholesale slate-wiping of our culture.

As the Chinese say, may these looters live in interesting times.

What do you think? Send us your opinions to roadsideonline.com or post them on our Forum.