Just before photographing this ghost of an old diner, I stopped for lunch at a small town restaurant just down the road. After seeing what other patrons were eating, I ordered the local specialty - a dinner plate-sized (really!) slab of breaded and fried pork served with mayo on a huge bun. We're not going to talk about my cholesterol level right now, thank you.

After rolling out the door and down the road, I immediately stopped to photograph this jewel of a diner. With the art deco details, it would have been the most modern building in this Nebraskan sandhills town back in the late 1940s. When I took the photograph in 1999, the Jewel Diner had sat there closed and empty, probably for several decades.

At an art show in Cincinnati, one woman was thrilled to see this photograph. She told me that she was raised in this small town and frequently ate at the Jewel Diner all those years ago. Recently she returned to the town and found that the diner was gone. Later, I was told that a man had bought the old diner and renovated it as a gift to his wife. Now it stands protected inside a steel structure on his property, where he uses it as a lively location for occasional gatherings.

Lee Rentz