It was 10 a.m. Tuesday at Ruby & Ketchy’s, and the parking lot was stacked just like one of those scrambled egg breakfasts that have been a signature since its first morning back in 1958.
While customers pulled into the lot, and then poured through the door, Jamie Lowe was a model of efficiency as she held forth with the fluency of an old-school, 1950s “waitress” – back when they were still called that.
Lowe, an assistant manager who started work at the venerable Cheat Lake diner while in her teens, had the dexterity and experience to take three orders, while carrying on four conversations, at the same time.
“Bear with me, honey. I’ll be right with you.”
“OK, sweetheart, what’d you need?”
“Gravy, too – right, dear?”
“Oh, yeah, hon. Word gets out. We’ll see what happens after Friday.”
The latter comment was especially important.
Because after 66 years, the current incarnation of Ruby’s & Ketchy’s is closing.
Friday is the last day – but there’s a new owner with a newly imagined place to reopen soon thereafter.
Jane Dinardi, one of the current co-owners, politely declined to discuss the terms of the deal or identity of the buyer while particulars are still being refined.
“We feel pretty good about it,” she said.
“I’m told some of the menu going to stay the same,” she said.
“That’s important for our customers. And we want to make sure our staff is taken care of. That’s important to us. We’re a family here.”
Which, for her, is the literal, DNA truth.
Recipes and racetracks
Dinardi, who also stepped in to run the place for a time, is the granddaughter of Wilbur “Ketchy” Nicholson and Ruby Weaver Nicholson – the Ruby and Ketchy of Ruby & Ketchy’s.
Ketchy was a “gatherer” at the old Beaumont Glass Co., a back-breaking job he did for 30 of his 48 years there.
Ruby, who stood just over 5-foot, was just as strong as her husband, for her frame, Ada Facer recalled with a laugh, as she finished up her breakfast Tuesday.
Facer, who waited tables there in 1971 dropped in to say so long to the diner.
Ruby Nicholson, the former employee said, did all the cooking in the kitchen – the meals, the pies for dessert – but she also held diners to a code of conduct.
“No discussions of politics or religion,” Facer recalled.
No rowdiness of any kind, either, which wasn’t always easy, since Ruby & Ketchy’s also sold beer and was right across the road from the former Morgantown Speedway.
People liked to wind down with a cold one after revving white-hot at the track all night.
You also had truck drivers and coal miners, Facer said – but it was all civil.
Except that one evening when it wasn’t.
“There was one guy who just wasn’t taking no for an answer,” she recalled, with a smile and shake of her head.
“Ruby grabbed him and threw him out – and he was a big dude.”
Most of the time, it was just a nice place to go for a good meal and the company of a good group of people, Dinardi said.
Fix a plate for your uncle
People like the late Jimmy Pugh – “Uncle Jimmy,” to all who knew the World War II combat veteran and Ketchy-confidant – who got free meals, since he was still eating there at the age of 104.
“Jimmy,” Dinardi said. “He loved our homemade vegetable soup and hot roast beef sandwich. That was his ‘usual.’”
Jimmy died in 2020 and the diner prepared and served the meal after his funeral for free.
Dinardi, like most of the other regulars there Tuesday, loved looking back on the diner’s halcyon days.
Ruby, who passed in 1992, was, as said, the recipe-commando in the kitchen.
Ketchy, who joined his wife four years later, was known for his storytelling from his perch at the counter.
Of course, his granddaughter said, that was after he worked a full day of acquiring local produce and cuts of meat from Morgantown area butchers.
“Everything locally sourced,” Dinardi said. “That’s how we still do it.”
Tuesday morning was just another breakfast rush at Ruby and Ketchy’s – except that it wasn’t.
‘They were special’
With two such mornings left now, before the deal is done, it was all a little wistful, perhaps.
Sure, Tom Stockdale rolled up with his grandson, Hayes Weidman, like he always does, for Hayes’ pancake-and-chocolate milk usual (which the 5-year-old pronounced “good.”)
And husband and wife, Wayne and Kathy Aquadro, dug into their heaping, hubcap-sized omelets, with Wayne joking he’d have a take a good nap after the most important meal of the day.
Cooks Addison Martin and Johnnie Taylor made it happen in the kitchen, with bacon on the griddle and country music on the radio.
A lot of the mementos and bric-a-brac that made the diner famous had already been removed Tuesday from the walls and shelves – including that candid of Ruby and Ketchy that was a fixture over the fireplace mantel.
Photographer Ron Rittenhouse of The Dominion Post snapped that one 40 years ago.
“I can still see them, and I can still hear their voices,” Dinardi said. Ruby & Ketchy’s ended up being a diner and destination, and she knows the two biggest reasons why.
“It was just special, you know? They were special.”
