By Herb Meeker | Herald & Review | January 18, 2007

Mattoon, IL
Tom Clark fell in love with the Bluebird Diner when he first laid eyes on it.

So, he and his stepbrother John Sebeck from Fayette County, Pa., bought it. Now they are preparing a new nest for the Mattoon diner along the National Road south of Pittsburgh.

"When we found out it was available, we drove to Illinois. It took 10 hours. It was exactly what we were looking for. It will go behind our drive-in theater, which is one of the last ones along the National Pike or U.S. 40. We had wanted to buy a diner for years," Clark said Thursday afternoon.

Clark and Sebeck are crazy about the days when people pulled up in wide cars to enjoy an outdoor movie as the sun was setting on the horizon or climbed into booths or swivel chairs in brightly colored diners.

Almost everyone has a fondness for diners.

Whether it's a convenient place for a meal on a long-distance roadtrip, the regular place you roll into at the end of a night on the town, your every-Tuesday-for-meatloaf lunch place or the excuse for an excursion, most people have eaten in these most American of restaurants.

If you want to spark a lively discussion, ask those same people to define what makes a diner.

The answers you get will be as numerous as the items on the menu and as diverse as the customers they serve.

When it comes to defining diners Brian Butko is a purist. "A diner is a factory-built restaurant transported to its site of operation," Butko says.

Butko ought to know.

He and Kevin Patrick wrote "Diners of Pennsylvania," published in 1999 by Stackpole Books, which serves as a statewide guide to the 260 diners that existed at the time.

Walk into Terry’s Diner and you know you are hearing something similar to what has probably been heard for the last 50 years: clanging plates, loud TV, the squeak of the swinging door and a steady murmur of conversation.

We found the owner and cook, Terry Holmes during a rare respite at the counter. Usually he can be found in the kitchen making all those all-American meals that can be found on every plate that goes out.

Cooking for 35 years, Holmes learned from the chefs working for his father, Terry Sr., who opened the diner in 1956. He admits he learned as a trial by fire that way, which is almost prophetic considering the original Terry’s burned down in 1999 after a horrific fire. Holmes and his wife decided to reopen and went to look at new diner cars being built in New Jersey, but found them to be too expensive.

“By chance, we came upon the Skyliner Diner, which had been in Dupont, and actually had been owned by my father’s sister,” Holmes said. After moving the diner, originally built in 1955, Terry’s reopened in 2000.