PHOTO BY BOB ROCHE
Rick Ford, along with his wife Tina, has owned the Little River Inn on Boston Street in Lynn since 1986, when the couple were newlyweds.
BY THOR JOURGENSEN
LYNN — Tina Ford tastes her first cup of coffee at 4 a.m. after she opens the Little River Inn for breakfast.
Thursday was no different as Ford and her husband, Rick, celebrated 30 years in business.
With its signature stars and stripes painted on the front wall facing Boston Street and the “cash only” sign on the front door, the inn is a West Lynn fixture that is part eatery, part neighborhood gathering spot and part museum.
“The food’s good and the people are great,” said Ernie Fratalia, a Lynn resident.
Fratalia has eaten breakfast at the inn’s counter for almost as long as the Fords have been serving bacon, eggs and pancakes. His favorite morning meal is hash and eggs but he has eaten “everything on the menu.”
Tina Ford said her husband’s childhood breakfast fare of bacon and eggs partly motivated him to open the lodge in 1986. Rick Ford said he talked Zigmond Szczawinski into letting him transform a first-floor apartment on Boston Street into a restaurant with the help of Ford’s late brother, Thomas, and friend Ernie Timpani.
“I said he was crazy,” Tina Ford recalled.
The newly-married couple pitched in to balance day jobs and the responsibility of raising children while rising before dawn to fire up the inn’s grill and start the coffee pot. The restaurant bears the former name for Barry Park and a trickle of a waterway that Ford said once flowed between the Saugus River and Sluice Pond.
A photograph of baseball fans packed into the park hangs on a wall in one corner surrounded by historic photographs of West Lynn and ones of Ford, including a photograph of the former city councilor with boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
“I saw him at the airport in Chicago and said, ‘Hey champ, how about a photo?’” Ford recalled.
Although loyal customers like Fratalia fill the inn’s counter stools and booths on weekday mornings, Tina Ford said the restaurant is busier on Saturday and Sunday. Children, even grandchildren, of the Fords’ original customers order breakfast on weekends.
Ford doesn’t know if one of her three children is interested in eventually running the inn. But she is in no hurry to stop having a quiet cup of early morning coffee before she greets a new day’s customers.
“We’re thankful for our restaurant family, we couldn’t ask for better,” she said.
Thor Jourgensen can be reached at [email protected].
