History
Socrates "Soky" Toton, an Albanian immigrant, purchased the original Maine Diner in the early 1950s. Toton did the cooking and his wife Margaret waited on tables along with another full-time waitress (Millie?) and two part-time waitresses. The Maine Diner became well known for their made-from-scratch food; they grew much of their own produce behind the diner.
During the mid-1950s, the old building was moved and a new building was built. The Totons lived next to the Diner, in the house that is now the diner's gift shop. The diner was open year-round until Margaret died in 1966. After she died, Toton closed the restaurant for a year. After that, Toton opened the diner from Labor Day to Memorial Day and closed it for the summer.
Toton ran the diner until he had a heart attack in January 1980; he died the following month.
Brothers Myles and Dick Henry purchased the Diner in 1983. Their first customer was a man who crashed into a pole near the parking lot. He had mistaken the diner for a bar he was looking for. Myles died in 2010. The diner is managed by Jim MacNeill.
Read more about this topic: Maine Diner
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)