‘30% of My Business Is From the Movie’

Even a romantic, curious, adventuring Irishman like Shanty Devlin wasn’t fully aware of the history he had encountered.

He knew when he leased the abandoned Sidewinder Cafe on Route 66 that he was signing to operate a chunk of ‘40s folklore.

But Devlin--a former teacher of hotel and restaurant management--undertook running a roadside greasy spoon as little more than a retirement pastime.

Enter a traveler from another desert: Hollywood.

The man wandered the little cafe, all Formica and bottomless coffeepots, examining its angles and sniffing for some apparent essence beyond the aroma of buffalo stew.

“He was going crazy about my place and said he had been a film student and had written a thesis on something called ‘The Bagdad Cafe,’ which had been filmed here,” Devlin says. “I’d never heard of the movie.”

But Devlin found a dusty copy in a local video store--”everything else was renting for $3 . . . I got this one for $1”--and settled in to see what all the enthusiasm was about: “I knew Jack Palance was in it and thought it would be a big action picture about mercenaries. I waited for something to happen for about 30 minutes, then fell asleep.”

Devlin came wide awake in the following months. Letters came from Europe. More tourists visited. The Bagdad Cafe of the 1987 movie clearly was arousing much more interest than the Sidewinder Cafe of Route 66.

Six months ago, Devlin changed the name to Bagdad Cafe. “I would say 30% of my business is from the movie, which is in its fifth month at a theater in Holland,” he says. “Another 10% of the business is in Bagdad Cafe T-shirts although I don’t know why the hell anybody would buy a T-shirt to advertise me.”

Route 66 is 66 years old. So is Shanty Devlin.

“I’m not sure if all the celebration is for the highway or me,” he adds.