They knew where to get a good meal, too, although most people in Darling ate breakfast, dinner (the main meal of the day, at noon), and supper at home with their families. If you had a reason for eating away from home, you had several choices, depending on who you were. If you were a traveling gentleman staying at the Old Alabama Hotel or a husband who wanted to give his wife a treat by taking her out for an expensive meal, you could go to the hotel dining room and sit down at a table with a bowl of flowers in the middle of a white damask tablecloth, and a waiter would pour water into a crystal goblet and offer you a menu that featured (depending on the time of year) tomato frappe, asparagus vinaigrette, green peas and carrots, your choice of a thick filet mignon wrapped in bacon or a cold plate with chicken, and a maple nut sundae for dessert-for which you would pay seventy-five cents. While you dined, you could listen to Mrs. LeVaughn playing soft, elegant dinner music-Chopin and Debussy and Liszt-on the beautiful rosewood square grand piano, which was surrounded by potted palms in the Old Alabama lobby.
If you were a single man and wanted a hearty meal that would stick to your ribs (beef stew and dumplings, say, or baked ham and mashed potatoes), you could walk over to the Meeks’ boardinghouse two blocks west of the rail yard where the railroad workers and some of the men from the sawmill boarded and see if Mrs. Meeks could make room at the table for one more, which she usually could, especially if you didn’t mind waiting until the second shift sat down. For the main dish, plus corn bread and green apple pie and all the coffee you could drink, you would expect to pay thirty-five cents, but you had to eat fast, because there was usually a third shift waiting to sit down. There was no time to talk, or anybody to talk to, either, since all the diners had their heads down, shoveling in their food. Definitely no dinner music.
Or you could go to the Darling Diner. You wouldn’t pay a fortune, you wouldn’t have to rush through your meal, and you could talk all you wanted with your friends, since all your friends were likely to be there, too. As for dinner music, there was the Philco radio on the shelf behind the counter. It played whatever the customers wanted to listen to-mostly farm information, daily crop and livestock and milk prices, weather reports, and stock market information, which often produced hisses and boos from those listeners who felt that Wall Street was another word for the devil.
For thirty years, the diner, located between Musgrove’s Hardware and the Dispatch building, was owned and operated by Mrs. Hepzibah Hooper, who lived in the apartment on the second floor. Mrs. Hooper had a large garden out in the back, where she grew some of the okra, green beans, Southern peas, collard greens, tomatoes, bell peppers, and sweet potatoes that she served to her customers. As time went on and her clientele expanded, she found she had to have help with the cooking and was lucky (or smart) enough to hire Euphoria Hoyt, a colored lady who specialized in fried chicken, meat loaf, and meringue pies. It wasn’t long before Euphoria was acknowledged as the best cook in that part of Alabama, and business got even better.
But Mrs. Hooper was a heavy woman, and when her legs began to swell, she had trouble standing behind the counter for more than a couple of hours, so she decided to sell. By that time, she had bought a half-interest in the Darling Telephone Exchange, and Mr. Whitworth (who owned the other half-interest) installed the switchboard in the storage room at the back of the diner. The Exchange started out with just one operator working part-time, but before long, almost everybody in town was on the telephone, except for a few holdouts like Miss Hamer, who was hard of hearing, and Mr. Norris, who objected because the ringing jangled his nerves. This meant that the Exchange had to have an operator on the switchboard every hour of the day and night, which was more than Mrs. Hooper had bargained for, especially after her legs started to swell. So she began looking around for a buyer-for both the Exchange and the diner.
And that’s where Myra May Mosswell and Violet Sims came into the picture.
Myra May had learned her kitchen savvy when she managed the kitchen and the dining room at the Old Alabama Hotel. Her daddy, a much-loved Darling physician, had died and left her a house, some cash money, and a 1920 Chevy touring car named Big Bertha. Myra May was still considering what to do with her inheritance when a young woman named Violet Sims got off the Greyhound and applied for a job at the hotel. Violet was brown-haired and petite and very pretty, in a feminine sort of way, although this didn’t mean that she was any pushover, because she definitely had her own ideas about the way things ought to be done. And the fact that she liked to wear pretty cuffs and collars and jabots made of lace and silk georgette and smiled a lot and laughed in a soft, sweet voice didn’t mean that she was soft on the inside, too. Inside and out and through and through, Violet was definitely her own woman.
Myra May, on the other hand, wasn’t anybody’s idea of feminine-or pretty, either, for that matter. She was the only woman in town who wore belted trousers every day of the week (including Sundays) and was trim enough to look good in them. She had a square jaw, a strong mouth, a long, horsey nose, and an intense, questioning look that made people wonder if their ties were crooked or they had spinach between their teeth. She was a serious, practical person with a reputation for saying exactly what she thought, regardless of how she thought you were going to feel about it, and for making up her mind without shilly-shallying around. She had a tendency to answer in short, brusque sentences, and any man who got up enough nerve to ask her out once usually didn’t repeat the request.
After Myra May graduated from the University of Alabama with a major in Domestic Science and a minor in Education, she decided that she really didn’t have the patience to be a teacher. She also decided that she probably didn’t have the patience to be somebody’s wife, either, and by the time she was thirty and had gone out with all the available men in Darling, she was sure of it. One of the charter members of the Darling Dahlias, she certainly had her share of friends and loyal supporters, but people who did not like strong, direct, no-nonsense women had a tendency to keep their distance.
So it came as something of a surprise to folks when Myra May and Violet became fast friends. Whether it was because Violet was looking for somebody who would steady her down, or Myra May was looking for somebody who would lighten her up, nobody could be sure. But it wasn’t long before they moved in together and began to talk about starting a business of their own. When they heard that Mrs. Hooper was thinking of selling out, they got excited about the possibilities and began investigating right away.
The diner’s location between the Dispatch building and Musgrove’s Hardware, right across from the courthouse, made it especially handy for people who had courthouse business around the noon hour and wanted to catch a quick bite. The building needed some painting and fix-up, but the kitchen appliances and equipment were in good shape and the counters, stools, and tables were all fair-to-middling. But best of all was the diner’s outstanding reputation for good food at reasonable prices.