This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Within ten miles of Rock Island, four hundred and ninety-three restaurants lie in wait, menus at attention. Four hundred and seventy-nine of these serve pizza, spaghetti, salmon in dill sauce, hot beef sandwiches, Iowa pork chops, pancakes, along with potatoes that are hashed, mashed, baked, creamed, or French, cottage, or home fried. Customers sit, order, eat, tip and leave.
The remaining fourteen are small town diners, seating an average of 34 customers apiece, except for Sunday noon, when they open the banquet room in back after church. These diners, with names like Vivian's, Deb's, or Adolph’s, are the small stages on which are enacted the daily scenes of small-town life.
As in church, food is only part of the liturgy. It is to these diners that the men come at 9:30 each morning from tractors in the field or from fixing cars or clerking hardware. They gather in a circle at the round center table for coffee and hot cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, but they are also here to debate last night's Cubs game, plan fishing trips, compare Dekalb with Northrop King.
Shortly after ten, the women arrive and slide into booths along the wall for coffee and cookies—first the young mothers with babies and infants, then the few working women who get a break. They share the community news of marriages and deaths and births. They exchange suggestions for treating colds and rashes in children.
The only men allowed to sit with the women are the town grocer and the occasional new groom who may come here with his wife for a month before returning to the circle of men. After that, he will nod at her as he leaves, and she arrives.
The women leave in time for the men to return at 11:30 for the $2.69 dinner: salad, meat, mashed potatoes, carrots, and rhubarb pie. Little talk here; dinner is serious.
The diners remain open until the kids coming home from school have stopped in for candy and a bottle of pop. By four, the curtains will have come down, the day's play over, actors and actresses scattered to their homes for supper and a night's sleep.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
