Black advocate reflects on reimaged Denny's
by Sheila Himmel
San Jose Mercury News Restaurant Writer
November 18, 1999

arl Ray knows what to wear to Denny's. His Tuskegee University sweatshirt.

This is the Denny's on Blossom Hill Road that caused the chain to pay $25,000 to each of 18 black San Jose teenagers because of an incident in 1991. The students had attended Ray's annual Christmas party for people interested in what has come to be know as the Black Colleges Tour. When they stopped at Denny's to eat, they were ordered to pay a cover charge.

"Now I feed them at the event!" Ray says, over his club sandwich at a recent lunch at the restaurant. The Denny's chain has been "reimagin" 150 of its restaurants this year, and Blossom Hill is one of the lucky ones. It closed for a week to clear out the tired coffee shop and awaken as a diner. At the reopening on Sept. 30, there were stainless-steel accents, a jukebox, comfrotabe new booths, quick and friendly server wearing bowling shirts, all new art. Now there are prints featuring African-Americans on the walls

"It was time," Ray says. "You were getting used to that old '50s [coffee shop] design."

He's still a little sleep-deprived, having just returned from shepherding 116 teenagers for five days. A 55-year old electrical engineer, teacher, stand-up comedian and playwright, Ray for eight years has on his own taken African-American students to the South in the fall. Many decide that a predominantly black environment is what they want in a college, especially colleges that have graduated such people as Thurgood Marshall, Marian Wright Edelman and Oprah Winfrey. This year 99 of the students were from the Bay Area, the other from Phoenix. It was the largest group ever from the Bay Area.

Homecoming at Tuskegee, in Alabama, capped it off for the Bay Area students. "The whole community comes out," he says. "Even the Club Scouts and Brownies are African-American."

As for Denny's, Ray has moved on. "People always ask me, 'Do you eat at Denny's?' Sure I eat at Denny's. If we stopped patronizing all the businesses that discrminated against blacks, we wouldn't eat out much.

"Denny's put forth an effort to correct a situation. That's all you can ask."