Courier-Post Staff
MOUNT EPHRAIM
The Harwan Theater is coming down, but the adjacent DiNic\’s Roast Beef, a former White Tower restaurant, is moving on.
To West Virginia.
A self-described \”dinerholic\” who grew up in Collingswood is paying to have the landmark little eatery picked up and trucked about 300 miles from the Black Horse Pike to his home in Morgantown, W.Va. The Mount Ephraim site is being cleared for construction of a Walgreens.
\”I always wanted a diner,\” John Shoaf, a 64-year-old retired teacher and respected preservationist, said Thursday. \”Most people pretty much think it\’s crazy. My better half thinks I\’m out of my mind.\”
A 1960 Collingswood High School graduate, Shoaf is hardly unique in his love of diners, which have inspired numerous scholarly and pop-culture books, as well as fan sites on the Web. The Mount Ephraim White Tower meets the definition of a diner despite its minuscule size because it\’s a manufactured structure and was shipped to its site (in 1946 or thereabouts, Shoaf believes).
Indeed, as Shoaf shared via e-mail, \”when I was younger, my parents told me I could go anywhere for my birthday, and I always (went to) White Tower (on) Admiral Wilson Boulevard . . . for a sack of hamburgers.\” So Shoaf is willing to spend his hard-earned money — Shoaf won\’t say how much — to bring the one-time home of that taste to West Virginia.
He\’ll place the old White Tower on land he owns overlooking I-79.
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