Pennies for Heaven
We do see a resemblance to the Burger Man sign… Diner owner Frank Hall.
Friends, family and former employees are remembering Frank Hall, the man who gave Seward The Diner and its signature “Burger Man” sign, which many neighborhood kids thought was built in Hall’s likeness, said his daughter Darlene Follese.
Hall passed away on July 14 from complications with Alzheimer’s Disease. He was 87 years old. A funeral service will take place Thursday, July 19, at 11:30 a.m. at BRADSHAW (McDivitt-Hauge), 3131 Minnehaha Ave S., after which Hall will be laid to rest at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, according to a notice in the Star Tribune. (To read the full obituary and family and friends’ remembrances of Hall, search by last name at www.startribune.com/obituaries.)
In an interview with Ben Kreilkamp, taped in 1997 as a part of the Seward Theatre Project, Hall recalls his days as a boy adventuring in the rail yards in Seward’s “Hub of Hell” area, near 26th Avenue and 26th Street, where he collected grain from boxcars to feed the pigeons he kept. On Sept. 11, 1935, when he was 15 years old, Hall witnessed the labor union strike near the Ivy Building that left two people dead.
Hall graduated from South High School in 1939 and, eleven years later, he opened The Diner in a remodeled double garage that had space for 26 customers. Back then, Hall and his family lived in a small house behind the diner.
In 1960, Hall designed the famous neon “Burger Man” sign that was perched over 27th Avenue until this past February, when it was removed and donated to Seward Neighborhood Group. The Diner was sold last year and will be remodeled as Common Ground Meditation Center.
Follese shared stories and her hopes for her father in an interview with The Bridge.
“I think he’ll start another Diner up there in Heaven,” said Follese. At the funeral, she plans to place her father’s small plastic coin purse in his hand with four pennies — one for each of his children — as seed money to invest in the new restaurant. “When people find a penny on the street,” she said, “they’ll know that he’s showering down his profits.”
Even in his retirement and at Ebenezer Hall, where he was cared for in his last days, Hall never stopped being the boss. “He would just kind of look at me when he needed something,” said Follese. “I would get up and do it, like I would at his restaurant.
“The week before he passed away,” she continued, “we were walking through the dining room, and he just stopped. There was some silverware on the floor, and he looked at me, and he looked at that, and he looked at me, and he wasn’t going to move. And I said, ‘Dad, I don’t work here,’ but I said, ‘Fine,’ and I picked it up.
“You know, ‘Daddy always wins, Daddy knows best,’ that’s what he used to say,” said Follese, who has said in the past that her father “fed people’s souls and their bellies.
“Alzheimer’s might have taken some of his mind,” she said, “but it never took his heart.”
last revised: July 18, 2007