FEBRUARY 10, 2008 --

The city is small; the diner is even smaller -- but Winsted, Connecticut and the Winsted Diner are survivors and worth noting.   

The Winsted Diner survived the devastating flood of August 1955 and photos of the natural disaster that turned Main Street into a canyon of rubble, taking seven lives in a city of 8,000 people were on display at the diner -- until December 2005, when a fire again threatened the diner's survival.

After a year and half, new owners Jean Bauer and Butch Sterpka re-opened this small but very special last August,  -- 52 years after the Winsted Flood.  

LPR stopped at the diner, January 18, in the company of MediaBids president Jedd Gould and Gary Pontelandolfo, a member of the MediaBids staff. (Previously, Jedd was publisher of The Voice, a community-weekly in northwest Connecticut, and Gary was editor.) MediaBids matches some 11,000 advertisers with 4500 publications.

LPR recommends that attention be paid to the Winsted Diner and MediaBids as effective answers to those who would leave the economic field to predatory free enterprisers.  

Jean and Butch at the Winsted Diner and Jedd Gould at MediaBids, a few doors away on Main Street, are effective symbols of the cooperative free enterprise, LPR believes, that would truly make the economy bloom.