"CURLY DOG REGULARS DON'T NEED A MENU"
Published in the Indianapolis Star (StarSouth), Aug. 19, 2003 ©
Jack Lewis sits where he usually does, along the lunch counter inside the Curly Dog Drive In, sipping coffee and flicking cigarette ashes into a plain metal ashtray.
Lewis, a white-haired, 66-year-old heating-and-air-conditioning man from Edinburgh, eats lunch here about twice a week, by his own estimate, but today has just stopped for a coffee and a smoke break.
A few stools down, Jim Thayer wraps his hands around a fish sandwich. Thayer, 71 and semi-retired, is, like Lewis, a twice-a-week regular at the Curly Dog, drawn more by what he is holding in his hands than the place's signature sandwich.
"I love their fish sandwiches," says Thayer, who lives north of Edinburgh.
Of the half-dozen customers scattered around the L-shaped counter, Brad Huddle is the only newcomer. A corporate pilot in the midst of moving from Greenwood to Columbus, with the paint splotches on his clothing to prove it, Huddle noticed the small drive-in with a growing state-wide reputation while traveling up and down U.S. 31 from Greenwood to Columbus, then saw a piece about it on the "Across Indiana" television program.
"I was always driving back and forth past this place," he says, after placing his order for a fish sandwich, "After I saw it on TV, I thought I'd stop by."
The cast of characters - ranging in age from 12 to 94 -- is a typical one for a weekday lunch hour at Edinburgh's Curly Dog, a half-century-old drive-in where more people come inside to eat than take advantage of curb service, where there are no menus posted on the wall or standing at the ready along the counter - only the raw rookie needs to ask for one from under the counter - and where as much conversation is served up as sandwiches and cups of coffee.
This day, the topics bantered about between customers on the 11 revolving stools and the two women working behind the counter have run the gamut of work, Barry Bonds, NASCAR, the weather (dark storm clouds have been gathering outside the south window of the diner), kids, grandkids, the new Johnny Depp movie and old "Andy Griffith Show" episodes, all accompanied by the steady clatter of china dishes and silverware.
The running conversations, it turns out, are what sustain the Curly Dog as much as the memorized menus and what draw most regular customers inside the cramped interior where they have to slide single-file behind the row of stools. "They just like to talk to these girls," Lewis explains, motioning toward manager Frances Johnson and her daughter, Laura Harding.
"We talk sports, baseball, races, you name it."
"If we didn't have sports to talk about, we wouldn't have anything," Johnson chimes in about the daily cross-counter banter.
The Curly Dog lunch hour, which can run anywhere from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays (or 4 on Saturdays), plays out against a backdrop that features countless IU logos and stickers on the walls and a bulletin board plastered with snapshots of customers, their kids, their grandkids and their most recent fishing catches.
Except for its size, the Edinburgh diner could pass for a hometown family restaurant. "I've seen little kids grow up here and come back as adults with their kids," says Johnson, who has been a fixture behind the counter for 35 years now.
"If it wasn't for people like this," adds Harding, looking around through her black-rimmed glasses at the lineup of mostly familiar faces, "the Curly Dog wouldn't exist. It's the people more than the food.
"They're more like our friends and family than customers."
The food does play its part, though, in creating the daily reunions, starting with the novel sandwich that gave the place its name. The curly dog created by founder Walt Fulford back in 1952 still has its legion of fans, like Vonda Squibb, who is having lunch out on one of the picnic tables under the curb service awnings.
"Today, I had a hamburger, but I usually get a curly dog," Squibb, 38, who works at the Johnson County Juvenile Detention Center, notes, as she, her daughter and her cousin finish up lunch at their usual table.
"We eat here all the time, and we always eat outside. We like to be out here and smoke and talk."
The namesake sandwich, for the uninitiated, is a foot-long hot dog, butterfly-cut then deep-fried so that it curls up on the bottom of a double-decker bun like a cat napping on a round pillow. Lettuce, a slice of cheese, coney sauce and tartar sauce also go into the sesame-seed bun to complete the sandwich that has drawn media attention in recent months from the PBS station in Indianapolis and a city magazine there.
But the steady stream of regulars and rookies seem to fancy other items of Curly Dog fare as well - hamburgers, fish sandwiches, tenderloins, french fries. And some, like Jim Critney, have come up with personal variations that they are famous for within the diner's family circle.
Critney, at one end of the counter with his wife and granddaughter, has ordered a double bacon cheeseburger with onion so often that, when Johnson delivers it today, she announces, "Here it is, a Jimbo-burger."
"You don't make those; you build 'em," Critney, 54, who works at nearby Sunoco Packaging, points out when the architectural masterpiece on a plate is set down in front of him, along with an order of potato wedges and the ranch dipping sauce he prefers over ketchup.
His wife, Cindi, on the other hand, comes for the french fries and takes them without the sauce. And they both find their visits informative as well as filling.
"I've been coming here since I was a little boy," Jim Critney advises, smiling beneath the bill of his tan baseball cap. "This is where we come to catch up on the gossip. In 30 minutes, I know everything that's going on in town."
For Johnson, that's 35 years of small-town gossip she's heard since moving to Edinburgh from Kentucky and going to work for owner Betty Heath at the drive-in. She became a partner with Heath nearly 10 years ago, and Harding became her co-worker behind the counter shortly after.
"She was working seven days a week by herself," Harding, 36, who lives in Franklin, recollects, of the time when she quit her job in the kitchen at Johnson Memorial Hospital to work at the Curly Dog.
The mother-daughter team has the routine down pat by now, moving back and forth between the grill-deep fryer area making sandwiches and conversations. Johnson usually handles the curb service business, which makes her "the world's oldest carhop," the 58-year-old Taylorsville woman with close-cropped gray hair and a dark-green apron figures.
And she sees nothing wrong with spending most of her adult life dishing up sandwiches and the like. "I think people kinda laugh because I've been here so long," she suggests, the southern Kentucky twang still running through her voice like a seam of soft coal.
"But I say I'm proud of it, being here so long."
That said, Johnson puts together a bag full of sandwiches and takes it out to a woman in black shorts and a canary-yellow blouse - who has pulled in under the red awning to check the oil in her black SUV while she waits for her order.
When Johnson comes back inside, her daughter has a good story that keeps the lighter side of another typical day inside the Curly Dog going. "Some guy called up and asked if we had Chicago-style hot dogs," Harding reports, a laugh uncurling inside her smile. "I said, 'No, we have Edinburgh-style hot dogs.'"
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