Download the Roadside premier issue

Published Date

Written by Randy Garbin

Here it is, folks. Yes, I get more requests for number one than anything, so tonight I spent a fair amount of time scanning, cleaning up, and uploading a pristine copy for your reading enjoyment.

Aside from its (obvious) historic value, this simple four-page tabloid contains little actual information about the topic we had pledged to cover. Our first map of Massachusetts barely contains 40 diners. In a couple of years, we'd track down another 100 and list them in our first Diner Finder map.

Issue one left the presses in October, 1990. Printed in Brookline, Massachusetts by a printer now long out of business, Marjorie Norman and I then distributed them to the countertops of about a dozen diners in Massachusetts, and one in Connecticut: O'Rourke's. We printed 5,000 copies, most of which I'm sure found their way into the trash bin with old napkins, newspapers, and greasy placemats.

I produced the issue mostly on my first Macintosh computer, a Mac Plus, but because I had yet to buy my first scanner, the photos were half-toned by a production shop in Needham, Mass. I then pasted them into the layout, which I constructed in Aldus Pagemaker. I still have the original boards. The next three issues were produced using Pagemaker and output on high resolution imagesetters.

The diners that appear in this issue are the Brunch Bar Restaurant (now the Windsor Diner), Windsor, Vermont, the Empire Diner, Herkimer, New York, the Main Street Diner (now Lanna Thai) in Woburn, Massachusetts, the Salem Diner in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Day & Night Diner in Palmer, Massachusetts.

Download here.

Denny

Written by Chuck Flood

With over 1500 restaurants in the US and a dozen other unfortunate counties, his signs are everywhere - towering over freeway off-ramps, lining downto...

Written on 05 February 2012
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Highway 99 - (A Window to the West's Recent History)

Written by Al Sollinger

Highway 99, was the main north–south highway of "The West" until 1964. Beginning in Calexico, California at the Baja California, Mexico and U.S. sou...

Written on 03 February 2012
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This Old Building

Written by Teri Dunn Chace

Here in Upstate New York, there are a lot of (potentially) beautiful old Main Streets, lined mostly or completely with handsome old brick buildings fr...

Written on 02 February 2012
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Draper Mountain Wayside, US 11 S of Pulaski VA

Written by Tom Hoffman

Here are two views of another of Virginia's "Waysides," which once served motorists the way "rest areas" do now on the interstates. Ho...

Written on 28 January 2012
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"The Artist" and "The Theatre"

Written by Sue Clarendon

“The Artist” is a charming movie, deserving of all the Golden Globes awards it received, and then some. (Watching that otherwise uninspired awar...

Written on 23 January 2012
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