Lunch Counter

It was at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960 that four black students sat at an off-limits lunch counter, a key moment in the movement that broke the back of segregationism. Last week, the chain announced that the store was one of 720 to close in the coming months. The store's historic status had won it a reprieve last year.

Like a ghost of commuter railroads past, the Reading Terminal Headhouse, at 12th and Market, has stood silent and virtually unchanged since closing, at age 91, in 1984. There exists no eerier witness to that lost era than the second-floor Gateway Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge. A jar of relish waits on its lunch counter, not far from a "Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin" train schedule. Soon, though, workers will renovate. The Hard Rock Cafe is bound for Center City.

Hibberd Moore Twaddell, 73, the former co-owner of a pink-trim, stainless steel diner in Paoli that featured apple dumplings and roasted Chester County turkeys, died Wednesday at Chester County Hospital in West Chester. For 30 years, Mr. Twaddell and his brother Hiram ran the Twaddell Diner on Lancaster Avenue, just east of Route 202. People called the Twaddell boys "Hi and Hib. " Both were "tall, dark and handsome," but they had different personalities, said Hib's wife of 40 years, the former Charlotte Bradford.

It's not the sights that entice. It's the sounds - the sizzle of hamburger on a hot grill and the mechanical purr of a Hamilton Beach blender as it transforms syrup and ice cream into a milkshake. And it's the smells - coffee, eggs, mustard, grease. Listen closely, and take a last whiff, because it's going away. At the close of business today, the Wynnewood Pharmacy shuts its doors forever, taking with it its L-shaped lunch counter, a piece of Americana that for 50 years has been a gathering place for those in search of a good hot dog and friendly conversation.

Ronald W. Walters, 72, a longtime political scholar and analyst at Howard University and the University of Maryland who was a leading expert on race and politics, has died. University of Maryland spokesman Lee Tune said that Dr. Walters died Friday night. He had been suffering from cancer. Dr. Walters spent 25 years at Howard before becoming director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. He wrote more than 100 articles and numerous books, including 1987's Black Presidential Politics in America: A Strategic Approach , in which he discussed the path a black presidential candidate would need to take.

It's not the sights that entice. It's the sounds - the sizzle of hamburger on a hot grill and the mechanical purr of a Hamilton Beach blender as it transforms syrup and ice cream into a milkshake. And it's the smells - coffee, eggs, mustard, grease. Listen closely, and take a last whiff, because it's going away. At the close of business today, the Wynnewood Pharmacy shuts its doors forever, taking with it its L-shaped lunch counter, a piece of Americana that for 50 years has been a gathering place for those in search of a good hot dog and friendly conversation.

What? No Woolworth's? Say it ain't so. How dare they vanquish one of my favorite places to hang out in with my grandmother during my childhood, having lunch, browsing and generally being spoiled rotten. For me, at least, the closing of more than 720 stores in the United States and Canada will surely signify the end of an era. All right. I confess that as an adult, I haven't exactly been a Woolworth preferred shopper (upward mobility and all that, don't cha know. And, besides, we got Kmart now)

McCrory's 5 & 10, a landmark in Bristol Borough's little-town business district, died yesterday. It was 63. Cause of death: the recession. Calling hours were 9 to 5. Many old friends came to pay their respects, their faces sad and wistful. Or to shop one more time at the dime store on Mill Street, in the heart of the Bucks County town's shopping area. "I'm here because it's the last day and I want to pay my respects to a place that has been here for so many years," said Margery Rose, 71. Rose lives in Grundy Tower, a 14-story public housing high-rise for senior citizens.

In the heyday of Main Street, a traffic cop directed the hundreds of pedestrians who moved in and out of the four supermarkets and clothing, music and hardware stores that drew shoppers to Darby. But over the decades, as the working-class borough's textile mills shut down and shopping malls popped up in surrounding communities, Darby's Main Street slowly died. The commercial street was dealt a near-fatal blow in 1994, when the downtown Woolworth's, one of the country's oldest, closed.

About 20 disabled people demonstrated yesterday at Woolworth's in Bala Cynwyd to protest the chain's lunch counters, which they say are inaccessible to the wheelchair-bound. The protesters, all from the Disabilities Rights Advocacy Group Inc. in Philadelphia, said they planned to stage more demonstrations at area Woolworth's stores. "In 1962, Woolworth's refused to serve blacks. This is 1990, and now they are discriminating against the handicapped," said Bruce E. McElrath, 33, chairman of the group's board of directors.

Patricia Stephens Due, 72, whose belief that, as she put it, "ordinary people can do extraordinary things" propelled her to leadership in the civil rights movement, died Tuesday in Smyrna, Ga. The cause was thyroid cancer, her daughter Johnita Due said. At 13, Patricia Stephens challenged Jim Crow orthodoxy by trying to use the "whites only" window at a Dairy Queen. As a college student, she led demonstrations to integrate lunch counters, theaters, and swimming pools and was repeatedly arrested.

Ronald W. Walters, 72, a longtime political scholar and analyst at Howard University and the University of Maryland who was a leading expert on race and politics, has died. University of Maryland spokesman Lee Tune said that Dr. Walters died Friday night. He had been suffering from cancer. Dr. Walters spent 25 years at Howard before becoming director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. He wrote more than 100 articles and numerous books, including 1987's Black Presidential Politics in America: A Strategic Approach , in which he discussed the path a black presidential candidate would need to take.

On 10th Street south of Christian, which is still old-school South Philly, a Plexiglas box of leaflets was affixed to the door at Shank's luncheonette last week, confirming rumors that had been swirling for months. "Shank's is Relocating," they said. "Since 1962. " Which is to say that the luncheonette - typically prefixed with the words "classic Italian" - has been there since then, though they round it off: "For 48 years," the all-woman (all in black) counter staff will tell you, following the lead of Evelyn Perri, the owner and matriarch.

It's not the sights that entice. It's the sounds - the sizzle of hamburger on a hot grill and the mechanical purr of a Hamilton Beach blender as it transforms syrup and ice cream into a milkshake. And it's the smells - coffee, eggs, mustard, grease. Listen closely, and take a last whiff, because it's going away. At the close of business today, the Wynnewood Pharmacy shuts its doors forever, taking with it its L-shaped lunch counter, a piece of Americana that for 50 years has been a gathering place for those in search of a good hot dog and friendly conversation.

It's not the sights that entice. It's the sounds - the sizzle of hamburger on a hot grill and the mechanical purr of a Hamilton Beach blender as it transforms syrup and ice cream into a milkshake. And it's the smells - coffee, eggs, mustard, grease. Listen closely, and take a last whiff, because it's going away. At the close of business today, the Wynnewood Pharmacy shuts its doors forever, taking with it its L-shaped lunch counter, a piece of Americana that for 50 years has been a gathering place for those in search of a good hot dog and friendly conversation.

Depending on how you feel about change, you could say that the owners of the Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant have done a lot for suburban renewal. The third Iron Hill establishment, which opened here in June 2000, is a warehouse-size building that had been an A&P supermarket and later Eckerd Drugs. Judging from the lunchtime crowd that jammed the restaurant recently, Iron Hill has helped to transform the borough's staid image, just as it has for West Chester, Chester County's seat.

After 38 years behind a luncheonette counter, Grace Ball thought her days of serving chow were over when her husband, Jim Ball, died. The Lord had other plans, Grace Ball Bean said, as she dished out meals with a smile recently at the St. John's Episcopal Church soup kitchen. She and her second husband, Cecil Bean, began volunteering at the soup kitchen in 1989 and became full-time nonpaid directors in 1992. "I love what I do. You cannot come in this kitchen if you don't love people the way our Lord loved people," Bean said.

Jessie Pincus was 18 and a freshman in college when she cut her organizing teeth at a dime store lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. It was 1960, and no one who sat at that lunch counter expected the protest against a racially segregated dining institution to help buoy a movement that ended with the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965. Forty years later, Pincus, now 58 and still an energetic advocate for change, has dusted off those organizing skills and is ready to tackle the world of politics in Chester County.

Like a ghost of commuter railroads past, the Reading Terminal Headhouse, at 12th and Market, has stood silent and virtually unchanged since closing, at age 91, in 1984. There exists no eerier witness to that lost era than the second-floor Gateway Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge. A jar of relish waits on its lunch counter, not far from a "Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin" train schedule. Soon, though, workers will renovate. The Hard Rock Cafe is bound for Center City.

In the heyday of Main Street, a traffic cop directed the hundreds of pedestrians who moved in and out of the four supermarkets and clothing, music and hardware stores that drew shoppers to Darby. But over the decades, as the working-class borough's textile mills shut down and shopping malls popped up in surrounding communities, Darby's Main Street slowly died. The commercial street was dealt a near-fatal blow in 1994, when the downtown Woolworth's, one of the country's oldest, closed.