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.

"The whole idea is to concentrate on my art," he said. "That's what I'm good at. That's what I like to do."

The iconic eatery, built in 1946 by the Paramount Dining Car Co., originally was named the Silver Dollar Diner and sat in Little Ferry, N.J. It seats around 100 patrons.

In the TV spots for Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co.'s Bounty paper towels, the late character actress Nancy Walker played a waitress named Rosie who regularly used the "quicker picker-upper" towels to clean up the spills of clumsy customers. The owner at the time renamed the restaurant Rosie's Diner after it became well known.

Berta, who first saw the dining car while photographing it in 1979, bought it on a whim in 1990 and moved it to Kent County's Algoma Township, about 15 miles north of Grand Rapids. The new Rosie's location opened July 5, 1991, and serves breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week.

Berta sold the diner in February 2002 to a woman who lives in nearby Cedar Springs, but he retook possession of it last March, he said.

He had planned to sell Rosie's again at a Jan. 31 auction before accepting the Roests' offer, the terms of which were not disclosed.

The Roests said they had heard about the planned auction and decided to check out Rosie's one evening about three weeks ago. A week later, they returned and asked Berta if he would consider selling to them before the bidding started.

They worked out a deal this week.

An open house related to the canceled auction will be held Friday, as scheduled, because there wasn't enough time to call it off, Berta said. Any visitors will be told that the restaurant has been sold.

Besides the restaurant, there are other dining cars on the 4{-acre property, including one that originally operated in Flint as Uncle Bob's Diner. Now called The Diner Store, Berta will lease the structure from the Roests and continue using it as his art gallery and studio.

A two-car unit that once operated as the Garden of Eatin in Fulton, N.Y., will be converted into a sports bar, the new owners said.

Originally published online here: http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj--rosiesdiner-sale0119jan19,0,3103320.story?coll=ny-region-apnewjersey