Beadle’s Menu Is Healthy Enough

Your article about Pasadena’s Beadle’s Cafeteria (Times, View, Feb. 7) features an 83-year-old who has eaten in the cafeteria every day for 33 years, a 64-year-old who is such a “regular” that he is extended credit when he bombs out at the track, an 85-year-old who is one of the 1,800 Sunday lunch customers, in addition to the 77-year-old owner, Gordon Hammond, who still “works about every day” . . . and, I assume, eats there sometimes.

Then, incongruously, you note that restaurant “experts” say that Beadle’s will have to be more “health conscious to appeal to a younger clientele” and their menu of “white rolls, mashed potatoes and Jell-O . . . has no substance.”

Well now. Maybe it doesn’t have substance but it certainly doesn’t seem to have a deleterious effect on longevity. And isn’t that the point?--you stay healthy to live longer? Pass the potatoes, Mabel . . . and I’ll have another white roll!

LOUISE HAUTER

La Canada Flintridge