By Eric Ruth | The News Journal (Wilmington, DE) | June 15, 2007

The sign is faded now, with no lights to beckon nighttime travelers, but its big letters still proclaim the two words that many thousands have seen:

"Smyrna Diner."

Here by the side of the road that once was the state's north-south backbone, the little building has endured for about a half-century, through high school hijinks and waves of beach-bound motorists, through Smyrna's sleepier times and straight into the bustling growth the town faces today.

Soon, the building will be gone. But its story will not end.

The landmark diner itself -- a 1960 Paramount model, by one account -- is leaving Delaware, maybe for a town in Nebraska, all gussied up for a new identity, new people, new memories. The Smyrna Diner's name, along with its pots and pans full of homestyle love, will live on, just down the street, in a new building, with a new future.

Whether newer is necessarily better is the kind of question philosophers might relish, but the regulars have better things to do here at their counter stools. They know they'll miss the old building when the new diner opens early next year. But they also know times change, and that the thoughts that linger will be as sweet as Chef Irene's pies.

"There's a lot of memories," said Sandy Margist, 60, who has owned the diner since 1972, and has hosted such celebrities as Joe Pesci, Robert Plant and Loretta Lynn. "Especially a lot of our older customers are like, 'It's just not gonna be the same.' "

In some ways, it surely won't. In others, it'll be just like it always was.

At the Smyrna Diner, the core of its being lies not in the old building, but in the people, in the food, in the chance to sit down and swap gossip over plates of sausage gravy. There was a time, before McDonald's and Wendy's came along, when the teenagers would rush there after homecoming, when the townspeople would gawk out the windows to see who was coming.

Some of those people still come today, just to be served the same meal by the same waitress at the same stool. There's Bruce Honaker, who as a 20-year veteran and twice-a-day patron knows he's still a mere rookie.

"There's guys who come in here three, four times a day, every day," said Honaker, 47.

"He comes here when things are going for free," joked fellow regular Gene Quiles, 60.

"I come at day so I can check out the day-shift girls, and I come at night to check out the young girls," Honaker said.

The day-shift veterans who pleasantly tolerate such quips are part of a well-seasoned cadre that extends through generations. There's waitress Joyce Morris, who served her first meatloaf 35 years ago -- "I had just gotten out of school and needed a job," she said. "I came to work here, and that was that." Back in the kitchen, chef Irene Bibbins has been toiling over these stoves for 32 years, watching as the crew came to include her children, then her children's children.

For Margist, family participation in the business runs even further out on the tree -- four offspring, nieces, a sister, two grandsons and a granddaughter. For Margist, the end -- and new beginning -- came when her lease expired, and negotiations on a new one broke down. Business had never recovered once through traffic shifted from Du Pont Highway to Del. 1, and Margist just happened to have a piece of property down by the south exit ramp, where highway travelers could be enticed by that old sign again.

For all the workers, the customers, even for the state itself, the move seems to have its pluses and minuses. Sure, a Smyrna Diner with 200-odd seats instead of 78 means the potential for more business -- but also maybe less room for forging the kind of small-town friendships that live here.

It's clear that Delaware is also losing another little piece of itself, another old classic -- but the state still boasts a handful of these old diners. In a way, the Smyrna Diner is lucky, said Randy Garbin, publisher of the diner magazine Roadside -- it's big enough to be attractive to diner rehabilitation specialists and gain a new life.

"The smaller, older diner, particularly the ones built before 1950, those are all but obsolete these days," he said.

While the cost of preserving the old Smyrna Diner discouraged Margist, the price tag on her new place is no pittance. She bought the old building with her then-husband for $186,000. The cost of the new Smyrna Diner is running close to $3 million.

That's going to bring a lot of amenities the old diner never had, but there are some things that simply won't change, she said. In a way, the food here is a lot like the people who work here -- there was no need to mess with things back then, and no need to contemplate it now.

"The people just kind of like the food like home," Margist said. "You change things, they really don't like it."

Originally published online here: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070615/BUSINESS/706150344/-1/NEWS01