The letters have come every month since Mickey’s Diner closed its doors.
Notes from a loyal customer, signing up. Making sure his favorite restaurant knows how much he misses him and how happy he will be when Mickey’s doors open again.
On difficult days, Melissa Mattson rereads those letters. The days when contractors are struggling with the restaurant’s Depression-era gutter; when the supply chain is not supplying; when the closed sign in the window has been there for years.
“He writes once a month, ‘I just can’t wait.'” “I can’t wait,” said Mattson, president of the business her grandfather started. Her pen pal has been coming to Mickey’s for 60 of the 80 years “It’s so inspiring that when I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’ll decide [one of the letters] where everyone can see it. It’s like, ‘We can do this!'”
Bert Mattson and Mickey Crimmons opened Mickey’s in downtown St. Louis. Paul in 1939. Designed to look like a railroad dining car and dedicated to the proposition that anytime is a good time to come in and enjoy some pancakes or a big bowl of mulligan stew, Mickey’s remained open around hours for most of the next 80 years. Until the pandemic and everything that followed.
But Mickey’s will reopen, maybe by the end of the summer, probably by the end of the year.
Mickey’s will reopen, thanks to you.
When the restaurant closed its doors, customers opened their wallets, donating more than $70,000 to an online fundraiser to help keep Mickey’s neon glowing. Thousands of donors, each reminding staff why they were working so hard and who they were working for.
“It brought me to tears, it brought tears to my dad,” Mattson said.
Across the River is another beloved little business that we almost lost to 2020.
Uncle Hugo’s Sci-Fi Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore will be reopening soon, thanks to you.
Two years ago, Don Blyly’s bookstore burned to the ground during the riots that erupted in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd. Today, he has a new store in a new location, filled with tens of thousands of new and used volumes, many of them donated by grieving customers of his twin bookstores.
Ecko the store dog is back at work, snoozing among the stacks at the bookstore’s new home at 2716 E. 31st St., just down the block from Moon Palace Books.
“I had enough insurance money that I could have retired and never worked again,” Blyly said.
But the outpouring of support — including nearly $200,000 in online donations — made her realize how big a hole the uncles had left in the hearts of Twin Cities readers.
“With independent bookstores, each one reflects the personality of the owner and what the owner thinks is important,” he said. “None of them were doing anything close to what I was doing. I kept hearing from more and more people that, ‘We just can’t find, anywhere in the Twin Cities, anything to compare to the service you were providing.’ . So I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.”
Blyly set to work to regain what he had lost. The books, the shelves, the store, the computers, the staff. He toughed it out through months of transportation problems and red tape, and he’s almost ready to reopen — maybe as soon as next week.
Back at Mickey’s, the work continues. The restaurant is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, so work crews are treading carefully, preserving the ambiance customers love while upgrading the HVAC system they’ll appreciate when it’s 30 below.
While they work, Cheryl Ader works on her Mickey’s Diner scrapbook. Her father, Frank LaPlante, was one of the restaurant’s managers when it first opened, and the restaurant’s history has been part of her family’s history ever since.
She has filled 32 book pages with family photos, postcards, newspaper and magazine clippings. She kept track of every time Mickey appeared in a Hollywood movie and documented the time her grandson built a replica restaurant out of Legos.
“I really care about this business,” said Ader, 69. “It’s family.”
For decades, Mickey’s doors were open every hour, every day, every holiday. An empty Mickey’s has been a strange and distressing sight in recent years.
But new cabins are on the way. Once customers have a place to sit, opening day won’t be far behind. Ader is already dreaming about her first meal. Maybe a burger. Perhaps one of Mickey’s legendary breakfasts.
“I can’t wait,” she said. “The food is so good. The atmosphere is so fun. And there’s so much history.”
