Change is a constant. Nothing ever stays the same. That’s just how life works. That doesn’t mean we don’t miss “the way things used to be” even as we welcome and enjoy what exists now—in our lives, in our families, and in the places we live. Nostalgia is a hard habit to break.
Lanesboro, Minnesota, is a small town that has seen many changes in its 150+ year history. (Let’s quickly add, though, that its slower pace of change is one of the many reasons people love living and visiting here). Even in the brief 17 years I’ve been around we’ve lost some “treasures.” I wrote about one of them in my book, “Lanesboro, Minnesota.” Let’s enjoy it again for a few moments…
Breakfast at the Spud Boy Diner
The Spud Boy Diner is at 105 ¾ Parkway Ave. N. in Lanesboro, shoehorned into a cozy 27-foot lot between Crown Trout Jewelers and the Amish Experience Gift Shop. Four grey metal steps lead up to its front door, a short climb but quite a journey. Time travel, really, all the way back to 1926.
That’s the year this Diner was built by the Goodell Dining Car Company in Silver Creek, New York. Under various owners and names, it zig-zagged from the east coast to southeastern Minnesota over the next nine decades before finding what seems to be its perfect home.
Painted a creamy yellow with white trim, the Diner sits on four large wooden, lime-green wheels. Darker green lettering on its sides tells you what to do and expect—“Eat, Lunch, Good Food”—and promises “Booth Service for Ladies.” Walk in and you’ll find its owners, Gordie and Val Tindall squeezed in, too, hard at work behind the counter. Gordie and Val moved “Spud Boy” to Lanesboro from Val’s hometown of Decorah, Iowa, in 2012. They serve hungry customers every day from May 1st to Halloween. Not easy work; you can tell they love it.
Gordie, in his mid-60s, a tall, solid, Lincolnesque figure with a shock of grey hair is a retired railroad worker who loves old things: 1860s baseball, pool halls (he’s creating one of those in Lanesboro, too), and especially old diners. His renovation of “Spud Boy” was his third diner “rescue.” He is more than Spud Boy’s owner and grill cook. He is its Champion and Driving Force. Namesake, too. “Spud Boy” was Gordie’s boyhood nickname, pinned on him by friends watching him haul hundreds of pounds of potatoes each summer on his father’s farm near Dutch Neck, New Jersey.
Years ago Gordie was running the Rose Diner in Towanda, Pennsylvania, when he got a call about a dilapidated old diner destined for demolition. When he first saw it, it had boarded windows, a warped floor, and peeling paint. “I saw all that, but I saw potential, too,” Gordie says with a smile. Hundreds of hours of repair and renovation work brought it back to life.
Spud Boy is busy and filled with chatter as my wife, Susie, and I walk in on a coolish fall morning. We find a mix of Bluff Country leaf-peepers and Lanesboro locals. Not quite capacity (that would be 20), but happily full. “Go ahead, sit anywhere,” Anna the Waitress cheerfully calls to us. “All the seating is equally uncomfortable.” A few knees do get bumped as people squeeze into the two front booths. People were a bit smaller in 1926. No one seems to mind. “Cozy” is the unofficial theme of the Spud Boy Diner.
We choose two round stool seats at the counter, close to the action. Hot coffee is brewing. Gordie—sporting bushy mutton chop sideburns today for his current role in Lanesboro Community Theater’s production of “Mary Poppins”—is cooking. Val, wearing a vintage-flowered waitress apron and a nifty black beret, is busily scribbling orders on her palm-sized note pad.
Gordie arrives by 5:30 each morning to start the day’s food prep. When Val begins her shift they also initiate what can only be described as their diner dance (the “Spud Boy Shuffle?”), constantly squeezing by each other in tight quarters between counter and grill. If they weren’t already happily married, you think they’d want or need to be. It all seems to work.
We peruse the menu and find it encouraging. “Order with confidence,” it reads. “We take pride in what we serve. Everything’s pretty good here.” After giving our order (the basics: eggs over easy, hash browns and toast, cups of that hot coffee, of course) I lean forward to watch Gordie pull a large pie out of an antique Roper Stove, a hand-made-from-scratch heap of a pie, bubbling with apples and blueberries under a crumbly brown sugar topping. Gordie bakes one pie a day at the Spud Boy. It goes in at 7:15 a.m. It comes out at 9:30. This one now sits on the counter to cool. Gordie notices my lingering glance and firmly but politely informs me, “this won’t be ready until lunch today.” What makes a good pie? I ask him. “Lard,” he quickly answers. ”But sometimes that can have a barnyard smell, so I’ve been going to Crisco more often now.”
As we wait for our meal, I look around at a place that really has defied time. Maybe it’s better to say that Gordie’s hard work recaptured time. The varnished wood panel walls and ceiling have a reddish shine, it’s linoleum floors is worn but clean, and high rectangular windows coax in an autumn morning breeze.
The vintage wall clock advertising “Drink O-So-Grape Soda!”, that Roper Stove, the potato slicer and Frigidaire refrigerator—and original and all functioning—takes you back to places and times long ago.
You are smelling and tasting the same kind of good food that people were enjoying almost 90 years ago. Lucky them. Lucky us.
The Spud Boy is a great place to observe, and maybe a better place to listen. A local man on the counter stool next to Susie describes in some detail his recent hospital visit in the Twin Cities. Gordie is listening, too, even as he’s frying eggs. “You just need some good diner food is all,” prescribes Gordie, with another smile. He sets my plate in front of me. “I broke one of the eggs, you get an extra,” he says. The food is good, hot, fresh, local, straight-forward. When I ask him if customers today are more often requesting vegan and gluten-free diets, he gives a shrug. “We don’t think about that stuff here,” he says. “Doesn’t come up much.”
Suddenly, a scowl crosses his face. He looks over and has a word with his “staff.” Another egg problem.
“This order just says ‘scram,’” he calls to Val. “Doesn’t say how many.” “Just one,” she answers. The two have put out enough meals to where they talk and work in shorthand. These are friendly, hard-working people doing quality work. “Gordie doesn’t take days off during the season,” says Val. “Maybe an afternoon off for an occasional old-time baseball game. He really stays at it.” A pew-like bench outside Spud Boy and a coffee cup offer him a bit of respite after the morning rush.
“How’s business going?” I ask Val. “We judge that by how many maple syrup jugs we go through,” she explains. “So far this season we’re at about eight. Not great, not bad.” Each winter they talk Diner economics and plans for the future. “We take it year by year,” Gordie says.
Hopefully those maple jugs will keep flowing for everyone blessed enough to climb those four steps into the Spud Boy Diner. Lanesboro locals, Bluff Country tourists, all who enter, are in for a rare treat. Go back in time, rub shoulders with friends old and new, enjoy a fine breakfast at a fair price. All that and hot coffee, too. What a bargain. See you tomorrow, Gordie, for a piece of that pie.
(Those maple jugs stopped flowing for good during the covid pandemic. Today that diner has a new home in St. Louis, Missouri. Lanesboro lost a treasure. We have its memory forever.)
