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A place where we come together

The Coney Island hot dog place is where people go to bump into old friends.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published October 17, 2006

BROOKSVILLE - Blair Hensley came home.

Now he's trying to help others do the same.

Hensley, 28, who graduated from Hernando High School in 1997 and comes from one of this town's most active, well-known families, bought the Coney Island Drive Inn hot dog place not quite six months back. The restaurant is a local landmark that had gotten a little dusty. Hensley said he took it on because it made good business sense.

But this is not just about a spruced-up hot dog stand. What Hensley has done with Coney Island is turn it into the kind of central community gathering point that's been fading away for decades here and in small towns all over the United States.

"I was trying to get local folks back," he said this month.

"He's cleaned it up," said Derrill L. McAteer, Hernando Class of '95, an attorney who recently moved back from Tampa. "That woke everybody up. It was like: 'Oh, okay, let's go back to Coney Island.' You walk into there and you know everybody at every table. It's the old Brooksville crash point."

"Once Blair bought it, some of the guys started coming around," said Don Whitehead, Class of '91, who's in his first year as Hernando High's head baseball coach. "You feel like you're walking into your own house to eat."

Whitehead said this a couple of weeks ago at Tuesday dart night. Dart night consists mostly of pitchers of Miller Lite, guys with flip-flops and shorts or boots and belt buckles and blue jeans with faded, circle-shaped dip-can lines in the pockets.

And lots and lots of guys with last names that are familiar to anybody who's ever stopped in this town and spent some time to say hey.

"This is old Brooksville," Don "Duck" Frazier said between drinks and throws.

Frazier is Class of '80, "born and raised, never left."

"All these guys have been here most all of their lives," he said.

Coney Island opened in 1960. Hensley is the third owner.

The Lykes brand dogs are $1.90, the fries are $1.25, and the restaurant on E Jefferson Street just outside downtown still draws customers from Citrus and Pasco counties and all over west-central Florida.

But it's a Brooksville icon.

Hensley likes that. He was born here, raised here, played on the golf team here.

Larie Hensley is his mother. She owns the popular Mallie Kyla's Cafe by Rogers' Christmas House Village.

Don Hensley is his father. He is a chiropractor downtown and the president of the Hernando High alumni association. He's been the team doctor for Leopard sports for about three decades.

"The group I hung out with," Blair Hensley said. "All their parents went to school together here."

After he graduated in '97, he went to Western Carolina University, finished at the University of West Alabama and worked in real estate in South Florida and Sarasota County. Then he came home.

Now he's blending old-time values with modern marketing and social networking.

He drives a pickup with a missing hubcap - it's in the parking lot early in the mornings - and his business card says he's a dishwasher. But Coney Island now has a MySpace page at myspace.com/gotfootlongs. The restaurant's main Web site is gotfootlongs.com.

Hensley got local businesses to sponsor tabletop ads.

He put up old photos and banners and signs. Some of them are practically pieces of pop art.

And he not only opened his doors, he also invited people in.

Sounds simple. But since the late 1960s, Harvard public policy professor Robert D. Putnam said in his book Bowling Alone, social capital in this country - "sociological superglue" - has been getting more and more brittle in social and community clubs and organizations.

"Americans in massive numbers," Putnam wrote in Better Together, the followup book he co-wrote with Lewis M. Feldstein, "began to join less, trust less, give less, vote less, and schmooze less."

Monday night. Coney Island. That means the high school booster club's weekly meeting.

Tuesday is dart night.

Wednesday? The live broadcast of the Coaches Corner school sports radio show.

Thursday is bike night.

The Greater Hernando County Chamber of Commerce had its Networking at Noon lunch at Coney Island on Friday.

There's even a monthly Red Neck Truck Nite.

Locals are coming back to Coney Island not only to eat footlongs covered with chili and cheese but also because there's a good chance they'll run into people they know.

The way it used to be.

Coney Island was a hangout for Hernando High students in the 1950s and '60s. But then that crowd shifted down U.S. 41 to the A&W, then to the McDonald's when it opened, and then to so many different spots in so many different areas, as Spring Hill started to get big and tip the county more westward.

Now, though, that place is starting to be this place.

"It's not a corporate chain," Hensley said. "It's got an ambience. Applebee's tries to do it in every town and can't do it.

"What is it?

"What's the feeling?

"What makes this different than going down and eating at McDonald's or Taco Bell?"

Hensley has up a yellow sign with black letters on the back wall of the kitchen:

Coming Together is a beginning

Keeping Together is a process

Working Together is a success

"People keep in touch here without trying," said Carson Barnes, Class of '99. "You bump into people."

"Blair wanted to bring it back to where it was," said Tricia Bechtelheimer, Class of '77, Hensley's godmother. "He wanted to make it more of a family place, not just a hot dog place."

"This is home," Hensley said.

A group of local fiddlers stopped by Monday evening. They've done this a couple of times in the last month or so.

It was right around 6:45 and they were playing in front. The sun started to set over the oaks and the palms and the power lines across the street. Blair Hensley flicked on the lights for the fiddlers on his porch.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified October 17, 2006, 07:05:19]