Sunday, July 19, 2015

Coerced Retraction?

Well the plot has thickened.

I just received an email from the folks at the restaurant where Mr. Shatner and his entourage ate and left without paying their bill. 

In the email they were quite upset and related to me that Mr. Shatner’s crew HAD paid his tab and left them a “very good gratuity” Apparently they also gave out two $100.00 gift cards to winners of a poster contest that was held so their day was a positive day cash register wise.

Apparently they never realized that I was going to publish the story they told and are afraid of negative feedback, or the whole event was fabricated and meant to be a great story to tell customers as they stopped for dinner. I'm not sure which is true. Their email also said that they didn't appreciate the negative attention my blog post created and had already had a documentary film crew cancel visiting their establishment.

My post was up for 27 hours total and had 18 individual visits. A dozen of which are people I personally know. So out of the remaining six people who saw my post one was a documentary film producer who decided to cancel his meal plans at said establishment? And all this happened on a Saturday afternoon in Holbrook Az from my little blog posting?

That sounds overly embellished as well. 

So it seems I have been duped. I related an honest story as it was told to me and the party of 10 people at our table by our overly enthusiastic waiter. I have since removed the offending story as the last thing I would ever want to do is hurt an honest business struggling to make it on America’s “Mother Road”.

I will also, as a courtesy, remove any references to their establishment in the forthcoming book that is being written about our Route 66 travels. The review that we had prepared of their establishment was extremely favorable and it’s a shame it won’t be seen. As offended as they are about being mentioned in my blog, it pales to compare to the bad taste left in my mouth after being openly and publicly lied to by their employees.

As for you readers, I have documentation of the related incident including statements, dictated and recorded by our waiter and the gentleman at the cash register. They were more than happy to let us pay for Mr. Shatner’s lunch and thought the idea of me posting it on the internet was funny.

Everyone who wonders why I carried that dictaphone with me everywhere should now understand.  It would seem pretty stupid to make false statements to a person holding a recording device who asked you to make a recorded statement for him.


It’s a shame an over zealous waiter needed to fabricate a story such as this to entertain his customers. You would think the history of Route 66 would provide plenty of stories to relate rather than slander a public figure.





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