by Dorothy Markulis, Reporter
From the "small world" department:
When Cuyahoga Falls resident Nancy (Mathews) Werner went to dinner recently with her husband, Jack, at the Reserve Inn in Hudson she got more than scrumptious food; she got a taste of history.
"I saw this man who looked like Leo Walter, my old boss in the 1950s at the Stow Tip Top drive-in restaurant, " she said.
The Tip Top is on Route 91 south of the Kent Road intersection in Stow. It's changed ownership and names many times over the past 50 years. The most recent owner has reclaimed the Tip Top name.
Nancy, 70, said she was puzzled because she hadn't seen her boss since more than 50 years ago, when she was a teenager.
"I'm sitting there, and this man looked so much like Leo, but I knew it couldn't be him -- since he would be so much older," she recalled. "I asked the waitress who he was."
The man turned out to be Dennis Wagner, her old boss' son and the owner of the Reserve Inn.
"Dennis came over and we talked about his father. I didn't know he died but I told Dennis what a wonderful man his father was and what a good boss he was," Nancy said.
Leo died in 1993 at the age of 81. His wife, Minnie, 89, still does the payroll for the Reserve Inn.
Wagner said his dad bought the Stow Tip Top restaurant in 1945 for $5,000.
"It was about the size of a garage then," Wagner said.
His dad sold the Tip Top in 1959, a short time after he opened the Reserve Inn in 1958.
As the Werners were preparing to leave the restaurant, Wagner came over and told Nancy he had something she should see.
"Dennis took me back through the kitchen to his office. On the wall was a full-page newspaper sheet from 1954," Nancy said.
The framed full-page was from the Aug. 4, 1954 Record-Courier. It was announcing the addition of Teletray ordering to the drive-in restaurant.
"My dad was the first to have Teletray -- electronic ordering -- in Ohio," Wagner said.
According to Wagner, Teletray offered speakers, like the ones at the old drive-in movies. Patrons would drive into a parking slot and order food items using the speakers. Waitresses like Nancy, called carhops, would then bring the food to the car.
"No, we didn't rollerskate to the cars," Nancy said, "but we had some neat uniforms."
Nancy said at the bottom of the newspaper article there was a picture of the carhops.
"And there I was, pictured in my uniform," she said.
It's a small world.
E-mail: dmarkulis@recordpub.com
Phone: 330-688-0088 ext. 3143