Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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In 1933, a man named Leo “Tony” Butler opened a business at 117-119 West 5th Street. He sold light lunches, ice cream and candies. I was only one year old at the time, so I didn’t frequent the place for quite some time. But over the years, Tony turned Butlers Restaurant into one of the most popular places in town.
There were two rooms in the restaurant. The “front room” contained a long row of booths and a soda fountain. The “back room” had booths on two walls with dining tables in the center. It was a lot like the other restaurants in town.
At some point, however, Tony realized he was overlooking a substantial source of revenue. He sold ice cream, milkshakes, sundaes, plus hamburgers and French fries … just the things that teenagers like to eat. So Tony decided to make a few changes that would draw more teenagers to his restaurant.
Tony installed a jukebox in the back room. Then he removed the tables between the two rows of booths to convert that area to a dance floor. It didn’t take long until high school teens started dancing up a storm. When school let out for the day, they headed for Butler’s, where they danced and also ate Tony’s ice cream sundaes and banana splits.
He also realized that when he dealt with teenagers, he would have to make some other changes. Let’s say, a boy wrote his initials on the wall of the backroom. That wasn’t allowed in most restaurants, but Tony didn’t say a word about it. He didn’t allow it in the front room, but that back room was for teenagers. It was their “hangout.”
Over time, the graffiti grew and a few kids began to carve their initials into the booths and the knotty pine paneling. Even that didn’t upset Tony, as those kids were creating the atmosphere they wanted.
Sometime in the mid ‘40s, I got a job working for Tony. I worked there every morning before he opened. Part of my job was to sweep the floors and clean the booths, so I knew where a lot of boys had carved their initials in the back room.
I knew, for example, that Bill Miefert’s initials were in the first booth inside the door. “Tobe” Conrad’s and “Fish” Diehl’s were in the next booth. And Jim Snider’s initials were carved in the knotty pine paneling on the west wall. I wish I could show them to you today, but that building was destroyed in a storm several years ago.
Sometime in the 1960s while working at Scotts, I was on a business trip to Florida. When I boarded the plane, I was surprised to see that Tony and his wife, Catherine, were on the same flight. In fact, the three of us sat together. Boy, did we have a good time talking about those days out of the past in the 1940s. I wish we could do it again today.