Tale of the tee: The Flying Machine

We introduced the Flying Machine design in 2018.

All I knew about The Flying Machine when we introduced it as one of our retro tees in 2018 was that it had been a restaurant in downtown Hershey, Pa. I had come across a Flying Machine ad in an early 1970s Hershey Bears game program.

I eventually learned that it was a bumpy flight for the restaurant, which lasted only a few years some five decades ago at 114 W. Chocolate Ave. The location subsequently played host to other restaurants and banks. For the past decade-plus, it has been home to the Chocolate Avenue Grill.

I was participating in a show in downtown Hershey around the time we launched the Flying Machine tee. Jessica Demopoulos came up to our tent and introduced herself as the owner (with her husband, Tim) of the Flying Machine. She explained that they found “Flying Machine” written on their slop sink when they moved in.

The Chocolate Avenue Grill now occupies the former Flying Machine building.

The original Flying Machine ad (below) featured a character called the Burger Baron, who wore World War I-era aviator goggles and scarf. Menu items also referenced the war: Baron Von Cheeseburger, Aerodog, Spad Spuds (Spad being the name of a French biplane).

But the Flying Machine word mark looked like something out of the 1970s, so we reproduced it in yellow ink on a green tee. The color combination is one of my favorites and reminds me of the uniforms worn by the great Oakland Athletics baseball clubs in that era.

Sweet dreams

I failed to find anything about the Flying Machine in online newspaper archives. So last summer, I turned to members of the Friends of Hershey Facebook group in the hope of learning more.

My inquiry prompted a couple of posters to wonder whether the Flying Machine name may have been in homage to the singer James Taylor.

One of his first bands was called The Flying Machine, and Taylor referenced “sweet dreams and flying machines” in his hit “Fire and Rain” on the 1970 album, “Sweet Baby James.”

This ad from an early 1970s Hershey Bears game program inspired our Flying Machine Tee.

“Best fries ever,” one woman wrote. The friend she tagged replied, “Absolutely, the best hangout ever!”

Lorrie Bushman, by way of a cousin who worked there, said, “There was a very cool, brightly colored airplane on the roof.” And Derry Township police ate for free.

Kathleen Spaziano Leo said:

“I worked there with several of my friends [she tagged two of them]. The owner had a dog in the back who would jump over the counter. Grease dripped from the fans on to our heads. We were forced to wear baseball hats. Our paychecks always seemed slighted and the back room reeked of pot. Lots of funny stories I could tell.”

Grease was the word, apparently.

Wearing a chicken suit

Steven Luttrell, who worked at Flying Machine the summer before his freshman year of high school, said the restaurant “windows were so greasy the posters wouldn’t stay up.”

I dug in a little deeper with Steven, who recalled earning $1.65 per hour. He remembered a corridor adjacent to the kitchen with approximately 10 pinball machines.

“There were sometimes lines waiting to get on a machine,” he said. “All of us who used to work there got hooked on pinball and would always get in trouble for playing pinball during work hours.”

He described a hamburger grill that “spun around slowly. The burgers would go around once and stop at a ‘paddle’ looking thing. At that point you’d flip them over and let them cook on the other side.”

Luttrell said the owner was Elliott Goldstein, who “came in every day for a few hours, gave some orders, then left on his motorcycle. (Another Friend of Hershey commenter said the owner was Bruce Barckley.)

“A very pretty girl named Nancy was the person who managed everything and kept us all in line,” Luttrell said. “Once in a while she would leave on the motorcycle with Elliott Goldstein. Everyone said she was his girlfriend.”

Flying Machine ashtray

Every day, Goldstein would pick a person to hand out flyers in front of the Hershey chocolate factory at lunchtime — dressed as a chicken.

“One day I was standing there in my chicken suit, and Tony Tatangelo came up to my face and gave me a mean, threatening look,” Luttrell said. “Tony’s family owned Lucy’s Cafe down the road, and we were competition, I guess. It scared me so much I refused to wear the chicken suit again.”

Luttrell said the Flying Machine went out of business at the end of that summer. He took one of the table-top ashtrays (photo, left) with him as a memento.