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By Root 1319 0

He had a penchant for collecting strays. He persuaded the local justice of the peace to let him take Clyde home and set him on a better path than he was on. Later, Loretta watched carefully when her father came through the farmhouse door with Clyde. “He was rough around the edges, with a mass of unkempt hair. Dad set him on a stool and took out the cow clippers and pretended that he was about to shave Stan,” she said, with the same laugh that must have echoed through that farmhouse sixty-five years earlier. Her father saw something essentially good and smart in the fourteen-year-old boy. Her father was a fair, thoughtful farmer, and he laid down the law in his quiet manner. He did not believe in raising his voice if he did not have to, and never did so with his children or anyone else, as far as Loretta recalls.

Loretta was excited about having a new surrogate brother close to her age. She had a sister, Lois, but she was younger and too girlish. But instead of the camaraderie she hoped for, a sibling rivalry developed with Clyde. He, it seemed to her, was forever trying to get her in trouble with her father, and that did nothing to endear him to her over the next couple of years. Then, as soon as he could, Clyde enlisted in the military and disappeared from Loretta’s world for decades. “Until, that is, my father, who had kept in touch with him, talked Clyde into buying the diner and building a gas station next to it,” she said. By then Clyde had a return-load trucking brokerage, which he ran for many years out of the gas station. Despite the family history, he was not now about to give the diner away to Loretta; she was not about to overpay.

Then one night a few weeks after her walk-through, Loretta went to dinner at the Circle Inn in Gouverneur. Clyde was eating at a table with his wife. Loretta had heard he still was not feeling well and went over to ask how he was doing. Before she could utter a word, he said, “If you still want the diner, you can have it for what you want to pay.”

Loretta was dumbfounded. She did not know what to say. She eventually stammered that she would have to go home and think about it.

The next morning, she called her son Mike, who then ran an organic dairy with forty-eight Holstein cows on property just north of her house on Route 11. (The low price of milk—at ten dollars for one hundred pounds, about what it was twenty-five years ago—forced him to put the farm up for auction in March 2009.)

“What do you think?” she asked.

He considered her question. “It’s a good idea.”

“I figured that Dad had done what he wanted to do when he was alive, and my mother ought be able to do the same,” he told me one morning, sitting with his family at a table at the Silver Leaf. Then he confessed. When he advised her to buy the diner, he was also thinking about how much he loved his mother’s pies. With his sweet tooth, it would suit him just fine if she opened a restaurant across the street where her pies would always be readily available to him. So he encouraged her shamelessly. “Mom, we should have done this a long time ago. If you want to do it, do it.”

She needed a mortgage and some start-up capital. The first banker she and Mike visited turned her down. He tried to discourage her from risking her time and money. Fast food was all anyone wanted, he warned. Undaunted, they drove over to the Savings and Loan of Gouverneur, where they met with bank vice-president Chuck Van Vleet. He had known Loretta for years and was glad to listen to her pitch. He considered what she said. Then he noted that the diner had been closed for a while and reviving it might be difficult. He paused and looked at Loretta. “But you’re so enthusiastic about this, it might just work,” he said.

Loretta closed on the diner in mid-April and started renovations. Her sons and daughter and their children all pitched in to help Loretta paint and spruce up the diner. She posted some hand-lettered food signs promoting specials such as chicken parmigiana and desserts such as strawberry shortcake. On the back wall, she mounted a two-handled