ADRIAN — For a few hours on June 28, the old Adrian A&W restaurant was alive again.

Former employees gathered at Burr  Ponds Park in Adrian to reconnect, trade stories and remember the coworkers who are no longer with them. The restaurant itself is gone, but for the dozens of people who once worked there, memories remain vivid: frosted mugs, Coney dogs, carhop tips, late-night shifts and friendships that lasted long after the final customer was served.

Michelle “Mikie” Rion began working at the restaurant in 1971 and remained until it closed permanently in 1999.

“We were teenagers,” Rion said. “My older sisters answered the help-wanted ad and worked there, and then I worked there, and then my younger sister and younger brother worked there. We all worked there.”

She also met her future husband there.

“I fell in love with Nick, and fortunately he fell in love with me, too,” she said.

The Rion family had purchased the restaurant in 1947. For decades, the A&W occupied a prominent spot near the southeast corner of Main and Church streets, directly across from the fire station. It later operated as Zeke’s after leaving the A&W franchise.

The building was eventually demolished to provide additional parking behind the downtown storefronts.

Once she married Nick, Rion became deeply involved in operating the restaurant, sometimes working as many as 90 hours a week.

“We were open every day,” she said.

The hours stretched late into the evening, and Sundays included deep cleaning the grill hoods, bathrooms and floors. The restaurant employed hundreds of people over the years, many of them high school students working their first jobs.

Rion said the restaurant tried to accommodate school schedules and the hours employees needed. Young workers often began washing mugs before moving on to carhop, counter or kitchen duties.

But the job offered more than a paycheck.

“Nick taught our employees life lessons,” Rion said. “He didn’t know a stranger. Everybody knew him and loved him.”

After the restaurant closed, Nick worked at Country Market, where a photograph and plaque honoring “Uncle Nick” remain near the entrance. He died in 2005.

“He was a great people person,” said Renee Stewart. “He socialized with everyone who came in.”

The restaurant also became a gathering place for customers, firefighters and police officers. Regulars sometimes sat near the cash register and talked with the staff as they worked.

“We’d have people who would just pop in and philosophize with us,” Rion said.

Sue Fuss, who worked there off and on from 1973 to 1983, said Nick taught her customer service, how to handle money and how to count back change. 

She also remembers the day her toddler daughter, Liz, wandered into the walk-in cooler and was accidentally shut inside. Fortunately, she was found quickly.

Stewart’s sister, Kim Herbert, who worked there from 1979 to 1983, remembers earning tips as a carhop and being paid in cash.

“You could go home and have money in your pocket,” she said. “Back then, a few bucks would about fill your car up.”

Herbert met her longtime friend Kim Myers Kelly while working at the restaurant.

Kelly remembers using her earnings to buy Calvin Klein jeans on layaway and later saving enough to pay for her senior-year spring break trip to Florida.

“I learned a lot of responsibility from having that job,” she said. “It was a fun job.”

Don Rutledge worked there in 1965 and 1966. He remembers mixing hamburger in the basement with a canoe paddle and driving younger employees who did not yet have licenses to and from work. His mother, Tillie, worked at the restaurant for 20 years.

At the reunion, the menu included many of the foods employees remembered making and serving: coney dogs, chili, burgers, fries and carrot cake.

The food brought back the flavor of the old restaurant, but the gathering was really about the people.

The former A&W may now exist only in memory, but the friendships, lessons and stories formed there have endured for generations.

Rooty Bear also stopped by the reunion, posing for photographs and adding another familiar face from the restaurant’s past. Former employees tested their memories with a quiz about their years at the A&W, then paged through scores of photo albums that allowed them to revisit the people, celebrations and everyday moments that shaped their time there.

“We thought we were just working at a restaurant,” Stewart reflected. “But we were really growing up together. The building is gone, but the friendships and the memories are still here.”