"Diner Don" Sawyer enjoys a cup of coffee at the Putney Diner, his home gallery, on Tuesday as he wers a shirt bearing his artwork of the classic diner. Photo: JON OLENDER / RUTLAND HERALD

Lunch-hour rush at the Putney Diner. Both regulars and tourists file in, and the din of clinking dishes and cheerful banter increases by the minute. This is the way a diner is supposed to sound.

Don Sawyer, 61, a regular fixture, sits at the counter on one of the well-worn stools and nurses a cup of coffee. His artwork stares down from the walls. It's also displayed in crates that are arranged strategically so that patrons can see it — bump into it is more like it — on their way in and out.

The Putney Diner is Sawyer's home turf. To those in the know, he's "Diner Don," the guy who makes a living painting watercolor renderings of diners throughout the state and New England.

Sawyer, a simpatico guy with blue-gray eyes, gray hair and beard, is a talker. "I sacrificed my stomach for the arts," he says patting his stomach. "I've put on 56 pounds." This afternoon he's wearing a gray T-shirt that advertises "Lawton's Famous Franks, Since 1929."

"This one's in Lawrence, Mass., which is kind of a rough, tough area. It's one of the most humorous places I've ever seen. The sidewalk goes right through the middle of the building. So while you're ordering your hot dogs, a baby carriage might intersect you at the same time. The fire hydrant for that corner is located inside."

With that, Sawyer is off and running.

He knows lots about diners and the culture surrounding them. His knowledge and fascination with this American icon has also led to an unlikely career as an artist with a gustatory bent.

"A lot of the diner aficionados are so adamant about it that they even know the construction date, the plate number of each diner," he says. While he may not be quite so obsessive, he does know much about their history. The classic prefabricated diner was introduced in the 1880s to feed mill workers primarily, says the retired high school English teacher who taught for 22 years throughout New England and Maine. (One of his colleagues was Stephen King.)

"In some really old diners, the stools are so close together that gargantuan folks like myself would be unable to squeeze in." There was a reason for that, he says. Much like today's fast-food restaurant, the idea was to get the customer out as quickly as possible and back to the mill.

Sawyer, who grew up in Portland, Maine, says his love of diners stems from a bout of youthful folly and a book by J.D. Salinger.

In 1962, when he was a 16-year-old student at a Massachusetts boarding school, he became so enchanted with Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" that he ran away – with $7 in his pocket. "I hitchhiked north not knowing the area at all and I ended up in Brattleboro. I ended up at the Royal Diner. With two bucks I had an absolutely enormous cheeseburger with fries. I was a diner guy from then on."

He did return to school, by the way, two days later. "I started walking, hitching, back toward school. I got to Guilford — where I now live — and turned around on Route 5. Who picked me up but my dad who had come all the way from Maine. I now live about 10 feet from that spot."

Although he had dabbled in watercolors while still teaching, his formal foray into painting started with a $10 remedial watercolor course through adult basic education, from which he received a $3 rebate because he lived in a poor area in Maine.

"I was at the end of my teaching career in the late '80s. I took a remedial watercolor course taught by a friend of mine at adult ed. He said, 'Jeez, you're pretty good at this. You ought to do some more.' That's my only formal training."

He says that while he was still teaching he did some private commissions. "People would say, 'Gee. Why don't you paint our retirement house up in the Maine hills? Or my husband has a '57 Chevy. It's a classic, could you paint that for him?"

His big break, he says, came when a fellow commissioned him to paint an old diner — The A-1Diner — in Gardner, Maine. Since then, diners have been Sawyer's mainstay. He completed about a dozen diners in his first four or five years, he says. To date he has completed more than 200 watercolors of diners and other subjects throughout New England. His sites are now set on New York and New Jersey.

Who are Sawyer's customers? "These are hard-working people who don't always have a lot of cash on hand. Ninety percent (of his watercolors) are purchased by the owners of the diner Sawyer had painted. Sometimes he contacts an owner; sometimes the owners contact him.

"My whole purpose is to provide artwork for the masses, for everyone, and it's the most pleasing part of my profession. I have customers ranging from folks that have a family debate over $20 for a matted print to some extremely affluent folks that just get a kick out of the subject matter." Like the man in Connecticut who commissioned Sawyer to paint a diner whose parking lot was filled with renderings of all the cars the man had ever owned.

Sawyer says the future of diners looks promising and may even be on the rebound after a brief period of decline in the 1960s when fast-food restaurants threatened the slow pace of the traditional diner.

When he first began painting diners, he says, he figured his typical customer would be "some old guy that works in the mills." He discovered just the opposite. "I'll bet you 65 percent of my customers are 35 to 40, high-tech, BMW drivers."



Patrick Timothy Mullikin writes regularly for Vermont Sunday Magazine.