Miss Bellows Falls Diner - About Us

     It was third and seven when the orb squirted upwards, out of the hands of the last great hope and smack into the belly of the hulk who could squash it dead upon the ground.
     Larry McElreavy, a not particularly religious man, was feeling sweet redemption that bitter cold day as he stood on the 12, his team ahead with a minute left. Under the heavens, he witnessed the enemy bulling through to come from behind until it fumbled away the ball.
     Almost.
     Larry McElreavy, who has many times sighted the soaring's of birds and planes while throttling down the back roads in his red T-Bird, failed to see the pigskin arabesque through his lineman´s legs and back into the grip of the other team´s quarterback, a most fortunate person, as he was the one who had dropped it.
     He watched, instead, the spared, opposing leader joyfully fake the option, fourth and two, hut-hut, tuck the ball and take it in.
     Brown 19
     Columbia 16
     Now you could say that these, the standard-bearers of the stalwart neck who are formally the Columbia University Varsity Lions, the very team who lost this, the last game of their season. one football season past, have emerged, victorious as plucky young men. They have bulked up their characters in a squeaker or two (Harvard 35, Columbia 0; Pen 23, Columbia 0). They have tackled life´s meaning of real bad turf (Bucknell 62, Columbia 20).
Coach in the Locker Room

     Larry McElreavy, a 6-foot, 250 pound Mylanta addict who is in his third season as coach of the Columbia University Varsity Lions, the very team that lost this, the last game of their season, one football season past, and which has lost the last 40 football games before that, and which, in point of fact, has not won a game since around 4:30 in the afternoon on Oct. 15, 1983, and which holds the record for the most games lost in the history of the game in just about the whole wide world, doesn´t see it quite like that.
     "Quite frankly, I wanted to grab the referee and put both my hands around his neck," he says about the only game his Varsity Lions almost won.
     "When your´re gettin´ your socks dusted, and you´re about to pop a gasket, and your vein starts bulging, you try to stay composed on the outside because you don´t want your team to see you as a stark raving lunatic," he says about the 40 they clearly didn´t.
    And now, come next Saturday, when his lads trek to Harvard for the opener of the season, he has a chance to make it 42. "This is a way of replacing was," he says.
     He talks like that a lot.
1967 Mustang GT Fastback and Coach

     Here he is, a 41-year-old Vietnam vet who owns, besides the 1967 Mustang Gt-Fastback, T-Bird an ´ 86 Mustang Gt rag top that, like the T-Bird, he punches every now and then. He drinks Manhattan as taught him by a man named Eddie Migdalski. "The kind you don´t bother to dilute with ice."
     He rejects, with equal regularity, the on-field concoctions posted by a West Virginia insomniac who, inflamed with insight, draws a winning Lions playbook each sunrise.
     He has declined the offer, closer to home of a good-hearted Buddhist monk.