I grew up on a diet of 1950s America. Following my father’s return from five years teaching in the US, he remained forever homesick for his adopted country. He would gladly have lived out his days in America where life, he said, was both more gracious and more fun than it was in England.
Occasionally, after a Saturday afternoon soccer game, Mr. O’Connell would take his students for a frappe, a float or an apple pie a la mode at Howard Johnson. This particular story fascinated and frustrated me in equal measure. We had a Wimpy in Folkestone that served Knickerbocker Glories in tall, fluted glasses. Dad never thought to take me there.
Eventually, when I was 12, we went on a family holiday to America. We stayed at a Howard Johnson motel in Pennsylvania where I tasted my first onion rings followed by ice cream which came in 28 different flavours.
One of my father’s students in 1952 was thirteen year-old Douglas Van Dyck Brown, who later returned to the school as a teacher and archivist. Doug retired in 2021, the longest serving member of staff in Groton School’s one hundred and thirty-seven-year history. In 2024, he and I collaborated on writing his memoir.
Doug has eaten breakfast at Tiny’s diner in Ayer, Massachusetts since 1979. He goes there six days a week. On Mondays, when Tiny’s is closed, he drives to the Airport Diner in Shirley for his bacon, egg and pancakes.
Tiny’s opened in 1958 as a donut shop. It has always been a family business, run initially by Anna and Alfred Mauro. Anna was very short, hence the name of the diner. Bill, the Mauros’ son, started working at Tiny’s after he graduated from college in 1972 and took over when his father died in 1982. Today, Bill’s children and grandchildren work in the restaurant.
The first time Doug and I went to Tiny’s together he explained that he never sits in a four-person booth. “I’m generally on my own and so I sit at the counter. I like to be opposite the kitchen where I can catch the waitress’s attention if I need more coffee or the check. There used to be a clock on the wall, so I could watch the time. Before I retired, going to Tiny’s for 45 minutes every day gave me the space and time I needed before school started.”
Doug introduced me to Norman, who, much to my astonishment, has been a Tiny’s customer for even longer than Doug. Norman remembered when the place was the Clam Shack and, before that, the Donut Treat.
During my visits to Groton that year, I quite often went to Tiny’s for supper as well as breakfast. The food is all home-cooked – from the tender and lightly-battered scallops served with coleslaw to the crispy onion rings. The portions are enormous and I would bag up the leftovers and take them back to my apartment for the following day. This also left room for an ice cream sundae at Johnson’s Dairy Bar on the way home.
You can’t find a proper American-style diner in England. Franchises like Five Guys replicate the space but they fail to capture the essence of the American diner experience.
When our nieces and nephews visit from Boston and Chicago, they ask to go to ‘a real English pub’, one with a fireplace, low beams and locally-brewed ale. In return, they will go out of their way to find me a Dairy Queen in America because, as everyone knows, DQ has been making the best root beer floats since 1940.
The Man in the Blue-Striped Shirt by Una Suseli O’Connell
published 2024 reprinted 2025