History
Lew Beckwith Sr. opened the Doodle on the corner of Elm and York Streets on April 15, 1950, selling hamburgers for 20¢ each, cheeseburgers for 25¢, and "pigs in a blanket" (hot dogs stuffed with American cheese and wrapped in bacon) for 30¢. Breakfast of two eggs, toast, juice, and coffee cost just 50¢. As the shop had no space for a deep fryer, French fries were not on the menu. The restaurant was named after the tune Lew's father sung to him as a boy.
Other than the prices, the menu and the diner itself changed little in the intervening years. It closed with its original cash register still in use (which only could ring-up up to $2.00), and there was still a cigarette machine in the corner. It hadn't actually been stocked in years, but it was installed on November 22, 1963, the day of the Kennedy assassination, so the Doodle kept it around.
Ownership of the Doodle passed from Lew Beckwith to his son, Lew Beckwith Jr., and finally to grandson Rick Beckwith in 2000.
Read more about this topic: Yankee Doodle Coffee Shop
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)