Penticton's drive-in streetcar diner was like a scene from 'Happy Days'
There used to be a drive-in diner in Penticton where a romanticized era from the 1950s was reality.
It was called the Red Racer and operated by Jack Lawrence out of an old streetcar. He purchased the trolley over 70 years ago after it was decommissioned by the City of Vancouver, rolled into Penticton via railroad, then converted it into a restaurant.
“Lots of people remember it fondly,” said Linda Lawrence, the widow of Jack, who passed away in 2011.
“You would drive up, flick your lights, and the car hop girls would come take your order.”
For uniforms, the car hop girls wore little red skirts and white blouses, Linda recalls, but the parking lot was too small for them to be on roller skates.
The menu was simple. The main options were hamburgers, fries, soups and sandwiches. Among burger joints operating today, Linda says theirs was most similar to those at Burger King. And they were only 25 cents each.
People didn't just gather there for the food though.
There was a pinball machine, a popcorn maker and a jukebox. Some Friday and Saturday nights around 1 a.m., Linda remembers nurses from the hospital phoning over, asking them to turn down the music because patients would be having trouble sleeping.
“It was a place to hang out, probably for teens,” said Penticton archivist Gary McDougall.
“Like in Happy Days, they would hangout at the malt shop, meet their friends.”
It was important to be able to serve people from their cars because the streetcar, which had a counter running down the middle of it, was only wide enough for one row of stools. The kitchen was a small room that was added on to the back of the trolley.
“I wonder if it would be popular if somebody tried that kind of thing again,” McDougall said.
McDougall is too young to have experienced the Red Racer, but he was told that nearby was a lover’s lane, a private spot where young couples liked to show affection.
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Penticton Mayor John Vassilaki remembers eating at the Red Racer as a youngster. But he would have only been 12 or 13 when it closed down – too young to know if there really was a lover’s lane in the area.
“I used to have burgers there with my family,” he said. “Dad look us there for burgers and then Dairy Queen for ice cream, which was a block-and-a-half away.”
Dairy Queen is still in business and still located on Main Street in Penticton.
Vassilaki, who calls himself a 1950s nut, remembers those days as the best era in North America.
“It was all fun, everybody had a super nice time. Society was a lot different then than it is today. Everybody behaved. People didn’t misbehave like they do today.”
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When the 1960s rolled around and Vassilaki was a little older, he became aware of many lover’s lanes in the Penticton area.
“The best one was up at Munson Mountain. The term we used was ‘to watch submarine races at Okanagan Lake.’ That was the term you used, when you parked for a few minutes before you took your sweetheart home.”
Vassilaki, who is also a businessman, opened a restaurant in the early 2000s that emulated a retro 1950s diner. It was called Loves Cafe and located on Main Street in downtown Penticton.
“We had staff on roller-skates, girls wore poodle skirts, and they had those white shoes that they used to wear back in the 1950s,” he said. “It was one of the best spots to go and eat.”
But the Red Racer wasn’t retro – it was a real 1950s diner, having operated from the start of the decade until the early 1960s. The property it was operating on got sold and the diner had to move but a new home could not be found.
It was operational during the summer months at the corner of Main Street and Huth Street. Those two streets no longer intersect but did at the time.
Today a Midas Muffler is located on the old site of the Red Racer – all that remains of the bygone restaurant is a white pole that still stands in the parking lot.
When its days as a restaurant came to an end, the trolley was salvaged for scrap metal.
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