Brigitte Bowers: A remembrance of things past in Atwater

It becomes clear just a few minutes into meeting Greg Olzack for the first time that he is in love with Atwater.

He loves the people, the buildings, the history. His story with Atwater goes back to the 1950s, when he was 16 months old and his parents, Ray and Lorraine, moved to town to partner with their friends Clark and Ruth Hunter, who owned a drive-in on Atwater Boulevard, where Tary Boscolo’s stands today.

Together, the couples owned and managed The Patio Cafe, a restaurant once located on Broadway, in the building that now houses the Stage Stop Gun Shop.

Olzack has served Atwater in many capacities, from his role as mayor and city councilman from 1980 to 1996, to a current position on the board of the Atwater Historical Society.

As I sit with Olzack in Atwater’s Jantz Cafe, sipping iced tea, he tells me the story of his parents’ restaurant, but he is so passionate about Atwater – and so knowledgeable about its people and history – that his story starts off in one direction, careens onto a side road, and then finds the original path again, only to run into a detour.

That’s because it’s impossible to separate The Patio Cafe from all of the other businesses and people of the time.

They are all housed together in his memory, all an integral part of Atwater’s mid-20th-century culture, a time when restaurant owners in Atwater and Merced subscribed to an unspoken rule to support each other by dining out at their competitors’ establishments.

Olzack remembers eating at Antola’s Restaurant, always a special event, and Mom’s Spaghetti House. He remembers The Ranch on 16th Street, now closed. He remembers a roadhouse on Santa Fe where customers could eat burgers while playing shuffleboard.

But the center of Olzack’s life in the 1950s and ’60s was The Patio Cafe. He and his brother Rob did not go home after school. Instead, they went to their restaurant, where they did their homework before busing tables, washing dishes and doing janitorial work.

Their restaurant was really their life, the place where they also ate dinner almost every night and where their parents could always be found. One of his fondest memories is of the people who came and went at the cafe, including employees such as Fannie Fletcher, a town character whom Greg describes as “larger than life.”

After working for the Olzacks, Fletcher opened her own restaurant, a breakfast-and-lunch place where Granny’s Pantry stands today.

The Patio Cafe served breakfast, lunch and dinner and offered such unique dishes as the frizzled ham sandwich, with thin-cut fried ham served on a hamburger bun. Greg runs into people, even now, who remember the frizzled ham sandwich.

“People can still name their favorite thing on the menu, more than 30 years later,” Olzack says. “I can always tell I’m talking to an old-time Atwater person if they remember the frizzled ham sandwich.”

It was a place where diners, and Olzack himself, could be star-struck when a local celebrity came by to eat.

“One time my brother and I were standing outside the restaurant, sweeping or something, and George Bloss came in,” Olzack recalled.

Bloss, whose downtown mansion, The Bloss House, is now a museum that opens its doors to the public on the first Sunday of every month, was the first mayor of Atwater after it was incorporated in 1922.

In 1933, Bloss donated the land for a community pool, the Atwater Plunge, and then he financed the pool, too, so that local kids could have a place to play and cool off during long Valley summers. The Atwater Stingrays, a recreation-league swim team, held its practices at the Plunge until Atwater High built a pool in the 1970s. Greg was on the Stingrays, so George Bloss’ presence at his restaurant held special meaning.

Eventually, the Olzack family had to give up The Patio Café in 1967. During the late 1960s, the U.S. and national economy faltered. The recession, while not severe compared with others before and since, took its toll on Atwater and businesses failed, one after the other, in a kind of domino effect.

But Ray and Lorraine were resilient.

They bought Bellevue Liquors and by 1975 they operated both a liquor store and delicatessen at the location near Five Corners, competing with Bernie’s Liquors in Merced.

A lot has changed in Atwater, of course, since Olzack was known in town as the kid on the swim team and the son of Ray and Lorraine.

The Plunge eventually grew old and decrepit and became too much of a burden to maintain. Olzack was mayor in 1983 when the pool was destroyed. Fannie Fletcher died in 1977. Bellevue Liquors is long gone. Castle Air Force Base, a driving force in Atwater’s economy since it had opened in 1941, was decommissioned in 1995.

But most of the buildings from that time are still standing, repurposed.

If you talk to Olzack, he’ll admit that Atwater is a challenging place for businesses to thrive. It is also a good place to raise a family. It’s still a small town where residents can recall each other’s old family stories, where a lot of the people who live there have known each other all of their lives – and in many cases remember each other’s grandparents, too.

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 3:11 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: A remembrance of things past in Atwater."