THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411220581
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
Before Burger King, before Kentucky Fried Chicken and Hardee's and Wendy's, there was Doumar's.
The great thing is that Doumar's will go right on after them, too.
Amid the proliferation of latter-day franchises along Monticello Avenue in Norfolk stands the stalwart drive-in of Albert Doumar, still providing speedy curb service and canny carhops who recall their orders without even writing them down. It's 1955 forever at neon-Eden Doumar's, the one fixed point in a changing age. And don't you just love the root beer shakes and the wrapped sandwiches, each one impaled upon its own precise toothpick?
Now Doumar's has been properly recorded for posterity and placed between hard covers in The American Drive-In: History and Folklore of the Drive-In Restaurant in American Car Culture by Michael Karl Witzel (Motorbooks, 192 pp., $29.95).
That's Albert on page 146, standing tall in his trademark bow tie, and 20-year-plus employee Wanda Morris, bearing two burger-laden trays on the leaf following.
Included is crucial information on the famous waffle cone, created by Uncle Abe at the World's Fair Cornucopia in 1904.
Albert has been presiding on Monticello since 1933, when his father's ice cream concession at Ocean View Park was blown out of business by a hurricane.
So here it is certified for once and all that Doumar's remains, unchanged and indisputably, ``America's oldest drive-in restaurant.''
Long live the burgermeister!
There is also useful material on such energetic come-latelys as McDonald's. When, for example, Richard McDonald first pored over the plans for his franchise back in 1952, he impulsively sketched in a signature pair of golden arches. Stanley Meston, his California architect, took one look and inquired: ``Dick, did you have a bad dream last night?''
McDonald responded stolidly that if Meston didn't like the arches, he would jolly well engage someone else who did.
Suddenly, Meston liked them.
So would the world.
The American Drive-In is a beautifully presented, lavishly illustrated, lovingly researched account of a bygone national passion. When Prohibition made sodas the alternative beverage of choice and the automobile transported us to them, we as a nation institutionalized the chrome picnic. Teenagers took over the fast-food turf in the '50s, and families stopped coming in the '60s as an unruly hangout crowd plugged the spaces and loaded the lanes.
Then a White House Conference on Natural Beauty in 1965 pronounced these places ``eyesores.''
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Go ahead and offer me the Taj Mahal. I'll take Doumar's neon dream every time.
Another testimony to abiding if offbeat attractions is Magnificent Obsessions: Twenty Remarkable Collectors in Pursuit of Their Dreams by Mitch Tuchman, with lush photographs by Peter Brenner (Chronicle Books, 143 pp., $19.95). Here are explained and displayed exquisite accumulations of construction toys, swizzle sticks, puzzles, angling equipment and aquarium furniture. My favorite chapter is on Dorothy Twining Globus, who collects:
Everything.
``It's all serendipity, really,'' she confides. ``I was at the Pier (antique) show (along the Hudson River in Manhattan) three years ago with a very serious collecting friend, and we went past a booth that had all these watering cans. It was unusual to find that many at one time, and they just spoke to me. . . .
``So we walked out with 12 watering cans, and everybody thought we were absolutely out of our minds.''
They were.
Anyone must be, at least a little bit, who spends an inordinate amount of time seeking out and acquiring huge quantities of assorted old stuff.
With the singular exception, naturally, of books. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by Albert Doumar
Tommy Bland of Maury High School and Gloria Harper of Oscar Smith
High School dine at Doumar's in 1956.
by CNB