Medford Native Pens Book About Bay State Diners

Kelly’s Diner, located in Ball Square, Somerville, is featured in Cultrera’s book. The diner shows a lot of stainless steel and flex glass stripes under the windows as well as stainless steel trim above. The white band at the roofline was originally porcelain enamel in a crème color that has since been covered over. Jerry O’Mahony used this porcelain on the exterior of diners right after World War II when stainless steel was hard to obtain. The fact that this diner shows the use of both materials means it was probably built in late 1947 or 1948, says Cultrera.

Saugus resident Larry Cultrera has written a book entitled Classic Diners of Massachusetts. Cultrera, grew up in Medford and has been researching diners and their history for 31 years, although his interest can be traced to his childhood. He has been writing a popular blog called “Diner Hotline” (http://dinerhotline.wordpress.com) for 4 years, which he says evolved from a long-running column he wrote for the Society for Commercial Archeology’s Journal magazine.

He was contacted in January by Jeff Saraceno, a commissioning editor for The History Press who had seen his blog and inquired if Cultrera was interested in writing a book about New England diners. Cultrera was familiar with some previous books that The History Press had a hand in and did some more research on the publisher. He discovered that the usual size of the publisher’s offerings was not conducive to doing a book about diners for the entire New England region. Basically, there was more information than space allowed! So Saraceno asked “what if you just concentrated on the state of Massachusetts?” Cultrera replied, “that might be more workable!”

A contract was signed in February and Cultrera started writing in March. Some field research was necessary, mostly taking some newer photos of “featured diners” in Central and Western Massachusetts as well as Cape Cod and the south coast area. The publisher also wanted Cultrera to talk about the menu offerings, so he collected menus from the 30 featured diners for the needed info.

Cultrera says, “I approached the book systematically by breaking the chapters down by region. It seemed the way to go and made it easy to create a template for the book.”

Ironically, because it was set up that way, he wrote the book in sort of a piecemeal fashion, instead of linear.

“The first time I read the book from start to finish was when the publishers sent back the edited galley. That was a revelation to me!” Said Cultrera.

The completed manuscript was sent in to the publisher in mid-August and the book went to print a month later. About 98% of the photos in the book were shot by Cultrera and the rest were either postcards or other images from his collection. It will be in stores by October 20th but can actually be pre-ordered now at both book stores and online stores.

– InsideMedford.com