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Coffee Break, Arizona, United States, 1996

For many people, diners—and their colorful employees—represent relics of a slower, gentler era. Historians trace the first diner to 1872 in Providence, Rhode Island, where pressman Walter Scott sold food from a horse-drawn wagon parked outside the Providence Journal newspaper office. Nostalgic for the "good old days," Americans today are fueling a 21st-century diner revival.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Romancing the Road," September 1997, National Geographic magazine)

Photograph by Vincent J. Musi