Owner Keeps Life’s Work as Private Museum : Closed Diner Offers Taste of Nostalgia

It’s been 14 years since the kitchen closed at the Olivero Cafe, but Minnie Olivero still entertains friends there and tidies up the counter she toiled behind for more than 40 years.

Although you can’t buy a meal at the diner, or pay 10 cents for a slice of homemade pie, the Olivero Cafe remains open to old friends and to strangers curious about times past.

“This place is a museum and I am too,” Olivero, who recently turned 82, said with a laugh. “I guess I’m an antique, like most of the things in here.”

The tiny cafe is a classic 1930 ‘s-era diner and soda fountain that seated about 25 people at its five tables and stools.

For 40 years, five months and three days, Minnie served sandwiches, coffee, her special chili, homemade pie and ice cream to hungry truck drivers, coal miners, motorists, farmers and residents of this town of 800 about 30 miles south of Peoria.

Was Open Every Holiday

The cafe was open seven days a week, often 12 hours a day, and every holiday through the Great Depression, World War II and the post-war boom.

“Louis always used to say we’d close when the last nickel goes by the window,” she said. “It was a part of our lives and we both enjoyed it. It’s not because we were more dedicated than anyone else or a different cut of people.”

Minnie dropped out of school in sixth grade to work in her parents’ general store in Panama, Ill., in 1919. She married Louis, a coal miner, in 1924.

The couple was flat broke three times early in their marriage, Minnie Olivero said. In 1933, Louis borrowed $100 from his wife’s family to buy a cafe on old Illinois 29 in Green Valley.

“When Louis told me he bought the cafe, I told him to go run it by himself because I didn’t like to cook,” she said.

But cook she did, earning a reputation for her homemade chocolate syrup and soda fountain syrups. She also cleaned, collected telephone bill payments, sold tobacco, candy, greeting cards and bus tickets and blew the community fire whistle every evening.

‘A Lot of Coal-Truck Drivers’

“The old hard road was the main drag between Springfield and Peoria,” she said. “We had a lot of coal-truck drivers and they hauled straw from all around here up to Quaker Oats in Peoria. We had a good business.”

In 1937, the Oliveros moved their cafe to a new building on the corner where Main Street intersected the highway. They lived behind the cafe and Minnie cooked in the family kitchen.

Their only child, Oliver, ran the candy counter and helped out at the cafe until he left to fight in World War II as a pilot. In 1945, he was killed over the Adriatic Sea and his body was never found.

“After that, Louis quit working at the coal mine and we both worked at the cafe,” Minnie Olivero said. “The only reason we worked that hard was to build a nest egg for our son.”

For the first time, they closed the cafe to take vacation trips each summer. The rest of the year, however, they remained open every day, Christmas included.

“I enjoyed it and Louis did too,” she said. “I think now how crazy we must have been. But it was our life.”

Kept Cafe as Private Museum

It still is Minnie’s life. Her husband died soon after they closed in 1974 and she has kept the cafe as a private museum ever since.

Shiny milkshake glasses and various size Coke glasses stand behind the soda fountain. Olivero still uses the antique cash register to hold her spare change, and the icebox and refrigerator hold her groceries.

Plates are on the walls, and hundreds of photos of relatives and friends are in the cabinets that once held pies, tobacco, costume jewelry and other goods. She still blows the fire whistle every night.