Jerry Berta had planned to sell Rosie's Diner at auction later this month, but when a good offer came along, he decided to go instead with the quicker picker-upper.

Randy and Jonelle Roest, a married couple from Whitehall, are the ones picking up the diner made famous more than three decades ago by a series of commercials for Bounty paper towels. Both have extensive experience in the restaurant business.

Randy Roest, 27, got his first food service job at age 14, holds a college degree in restaurant management and works as an assistant manager at a Chili's franchise in Wyoming. His 24-year-old wife is a licensed emergency medical technician and a nursing student who works part time as a server at a Logan's Roadhouse in Muskegon.

"We've been looking for restaurants for probably the past few years now," Jonelle Roest said Thursday while sitting with her husband and Berta in a booth at Rosie's. "We casually probably looked at 15 or 20 (but looked) seriously at just a few. It's been a dream of ours since we met that someday we would have one that's our own."

Berta, an artist whose colorful ceramic-and-neon sculptures of diners and other subjects will continue to be sold at the restaurant, said he is glad to be selling Rosie's.

During World War II, Lynn residents seeking a hot meal at a reasonable price flocked to Riley's Diner on Boston Street, one of 75 streamlined, prefabricated structures manufactured between 1936-1945 by the Sterling Diner Division of the J.B. Judkins Co. of Merrimac.

Like other diners of its era, Riley's was an icon of American life and culture, as ubiquitous as the corner store, the barbershop, the bakery and druggist.

Riley's is the latest piece of that era to fade from the local landscape, as a flatbed truck from M&M Rigging, hired by the Providence-R.I.-based American Diner Museum, was scheduled this morning to lift and whisk Riley's Diner away to its new home in New Hampshire, where it will be restored.

According to Daniel Zilka, spokesman for the American Diner Museum, Riley's Diner, and the historic streamliner Salem Diner in Salem, are among the few remaining Sterling-made models.

By Ron Dylewski | TheAmericanRoadside.com | Jan. 11, 2006

The fate of the famed Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was sealed last year. It would not be saved. It would not be re-purposed. After much legal wrangling, there was one final answer; it would be torn down. So the hotel that housed the Coconut Grove, with its famous fake palms shading the celebs below, and which bore the immensely sad history of Bobby Kennedy's assasination is, as we speak, tumbling to the wrecker's ball.

We have Michael Schneider and his excellent blogs to thank for these photos. Check out his sites for many more, as well as lots of wonderful information regarding the Ambassador. The Ambassdor's Last Stand is a hotel-specific site, while his Franklin Avenue blog is more general in terms of LA history, roadside and much more. Both are great.

Also, PreserveLA has some interesting notes on the issue as well...

In-N-Out Burger Inc., the Irvine company known for its Double-Double and its customers' intense devotion, is embroiled in a family feud, according to a lawsuit.

Richard Boyd, In-N-Out's vice president and a board member, has accused 23-year-old heir Lynsi Martinez and others of trying to accelerate her takeover of the popular family-owned burger chain.

Boyd contends that Martinez and allied corporate executives have attempted to force out Esther L. Snyder, the family matriarch, company president and a board member, who is 86 and in poor health, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Martinez is the only grandchild of Snyder, who opened the first drive-through In-N-Out stand in 1948 with husband Harry Snyder.

Fire swept through Bronzeville's historic Pilgrim Baptist Church on Friday, sending flaming walls and timbers crashing into the grand sanctuary where gospel music was born.

The building, a cornerstone of Chicago's African-American community and a landmark work by architect Louis H. Sullivan, was a total loss, fire officials said.

As the ruins steamed Friday evening, that loss had to be assessed from many angles.

A neighborhood had lost a church; worshipers, a church home.

Chicago had lost a precious Sullivan building.

And American culture had lost the soaring hall where Thomas A. Dorsey, a jazz and blues artist who turned to church music during a period of personal grief, had developed a new musical idiom called gospel.

"I can't imagine another space comparable to it anywhere in the country," Brian Goeken, deputy commissioner of the city's Department of Planning and Development. "It was a masterpiece and something like this can never be replaced."

Ruthie & Moe's Diner is serving up another order of heartache at East 40th Street and Prospect Avenue.

Owner Ruthie Helman has closed the doors on Cleveland's famed comfort-food mecca, citing the city's roughening economy, unfinished negotiations with the diner's landowner and the strain of going it alone for years without her late husband and the diner's co-founder, Moe Helman.

"It's a very sad fact that we have to close," said the provider of distinguished matzo ball soup, fresh-cut french fries and mile-high coconut cakes. "We've been open for a long time."

Employees were surprised to get their last paychecks in the mail this week with a thanks -- and a goodbye -- from her.

"I just loved the place," said singing waitress Laura Tripp, an 11-year employee. She will miss the mix of well-heeled and no-heeled customers.

The landmark Rosie's Diner and three other diner cars will be sold at auction Jan. 31 as owner and artist Jerry Berta again looks toward retirement.

Byron Township-based Miedema Auctioneering will oversee the auction of the diner, 4500 14 Mile Road NE, made famous by a paper towel commercial.

In the long-running ad campaign, actress Nancy Walker, who played Rosie the waitress used Bounty, "the quicker picker upper," to clean up spills on the diner's counter.

[NOTE: This is a horrible loss for Chicago and a crappy way to start the New Year! I think we roadsiders often overlook the inner city places, but I hope you had a chance, as I've had, to visit the Berghoff! Sigh. By the way, enjoy the early image of the Berghoff, which was shot in June 1911 and is courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society. RJD]

By Jodi Wilgoren | The New York Times | December 31, 2005

Murray Wolbach III is a third-generation commercial real estate developer who lunches several times a week at the Berghoff, the 107-year-old Loop landmark where little but the light bulbs have changed since his grandfather's day.

The fact that his own family career streak ended with Mr. Wolbach, however, hardly seems to have prepared him for the news this week that the storied restaurant would close Feb. 28 when its third-generation owner, Herman Berghoff, retires without passing it on to his children.

"The wonderful thing about places like this is you don't have to worry about them - it's been around 100 years, you think it'll be around 100 more," Mr. Wolbach, 60 and known as Trip, said as he forked the flaky crust of Herman's Chicken Pot Pie. "It's something you could always rely on. I'll probably die of starvation now."

It seemed all Chicagoland was lamenting the coming loss this week, as hungry hordes lined up outside the famed neon sign for up to an hour in hopes of one last Wiener schnitzel or sauerbraten (though regulars like Mr. Wolbach, as always, sneaked in through the back of the bar to get a table). The Berghoff is - was? - the city's oldest restaurant, at once a tourist's staple and native's standby, as much a Chicago symbol as the flagship Marshall Field's store just around the corner on State Street, that great street.

Of course, Marshall Field's will soon become Macy's, leaving lifelong Chicagoans reeling from what Tim Samuelson, the city's cultural historian, described as a "dizzying one-two punch."

Albert Iannone did something last weekend he hasn't done in five decades: he closed the Prairie Diner for more than a day.

Facing a dwindling number of customers and recovering from a heart attack, Iannone, 85, finally closed his family run restaurant Saturday, marking the end of what one historian calls Providence's oldest continuously operating diner.

"I'm going on 86. How many more years can I go?" Iannone asked.

After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Iannone and his brother used their military wages to buy the then-ramshackle diner in 1945 for about $5,500.

The diner had rolled into Providence in 1927, but was then closed and sorely in need of repair.

Iannone said he and his brother spent about a year renovating the interior, sometimes on their hands and knees scrubbing grease off the gritty floor.

When the renovated Prairie Diner finally opened, it attracted patrons with a cheap but filling menu.