then moved to Chester where he opened a tailor shop with a partner. How he was able to do that is worth telling later in the book. He started his climb up the econom- ic ladder by opening a gas station. Not long afterward Frank Shooster opened a small Drive-In Restaurant. It is hard to explain exactly what the times were like in those years after the war. We had been children during the Great Depression, came to adolescence and became young adults during World War II, and took on life-long responsibilities in the first years of the nineteen-fifties. We wanted everything to be new; the old world was one of poverty, war and oppression. The new one would be prosperous, peace- ful and filled with opportunity. We knew how difficult it had been for our parents to establish themselves in America; we were determined to finally fulfill their dream of a new world. If anything caught the spir- it of those times it was the one-of-a-kind Shooster’s Drive-In. These days a drive-in restaurant is just part of the commercial landscape. You take your pick of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, or dozens of others. But in the early years of the 1950’s the Drive-In was a unique restaurant concept perfect- ly suited to the times. Everyone had a car and drove everywhere, the baby boom had begun, and kids born just before the war and now known as teenagers were sudden- ly an exuberant, recognizable segment of society. The icing on the cake was the birth of Rock and Roll music. Shooster’s Drive- In was the place where it all came together. Not that everything was as upbeat as I make it seem. The years right after the war saw the beginning of the change in the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Russia went from being an ally to being an enemy. And in China, the communists, under Mao, had taken over the mainland and driven Chiang Kai-Shek onto the island of Taiwan, where he founded the Republic of China. THE COLD WAR
Herman Shooster working at Shooster’s Gas Station
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