Beachcombing

Last Saturday morning I was waiting to order breakfast at Dad’s Diner along with my son, Jeff, and nephew Joe Morissette and his wife, Dayle, of Massachusetts. On the walls there were about a thousand framed dad photos submitted over the years and I was in disbelief to see one of my father, Samuel Beeler, (1903-1956) looking down on our table.

“Where is Dad’s Diner,” many will ask. It’s in Anacortes, Washington, on Commercial Avenue, about a half block from where my brother, Tom, and his wife, Nola, lived for many years. She passed in 2021. Their home was a half block away from the diner and it explained why our dad adorned the wall along with Nola’s dad, Archie Anderson.

Although it had been decades since I met Archie at Tom and Nola’s wedding, I quickly spotted his photo on the wall as well. Archie and the Anderson family were well known in the Seattle area as owners of the Elephant Car Wash – the first of several automated car wash facilities in the state. They even had one in the Palm Desert, Calif. area.

We were in Anacortes for the inurnment of Tom’s ashes, next to Nola’s, at the Fernhill Cemetery last Friday. He passed on March 6 at 83 years of age. Afterward we boarded the Guemes Island Ferry to ceremoniously scatter some of Tom’s ashes and some flowers for Nola. Tom and Nola owned a vacation home on the island, even though it’s a five-minute ferry ride from Anacortes.

“Nice touch,” was my thought regarding the ferry ride. Equally impressive was Dad’s Diner, with its wall-to-wall dads. If I was planning to open a breakfast café in Long Beach, I would mimic the concept and have Samuel E. Beeler, Jr. in a very prominent spot.

How to Write Good, examples by Frank L. Visco. His several years in the word game as senior copywriter at USAdvertising “learnt” him several rules:

• Avoid alliteration. Always.
• Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
• Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
• Employ the vernacular.
• Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
• Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
• It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
• Contractions aren’t necessary.
• Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
• One should never generalize.
• Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
• Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
• Don’t be redundant; don’t more use words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
• Profanity sucks.
• Be more or less specific.
• Understatement is always best.
• Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
• One-word sentences? Eliminate.
• Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
• The passive voice is to be avoided.
• Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
• Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
• Who needs rhetorical questions?

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