From front left: Jeff Peterson, Bob Keane, Tiffany Hurley, Mike Sullivan, Ken Kneisel, Bill Raser, John Joyce, Mike Tanner, Scott Kessler, David Jonker, Harry Green, Joe Carlson, Sam Lane, Robert Prager, and Steven Crounse.
er ore art thou,
ROMEOs?
As light in yonder diner breaks, it’s another Friday morning meeting of the Amelia Island ROMEOs, group of friends who gather each week for fun and friendship. BY MANDY HAYNES • PHOTO BY SHERRY CARTER
o, a retired New York Times journalist, a civil engineer, and a minister walk into a diner. If this sounds like the set-up for a joke, it’s not; in fact, it’s serious business. Bob Weintraub, Bob Keane, and Harry Green get together with a dozen or so other ROMEOs (Retired Old Men Eating Out) once a week for coffee, breakfast, and conversation. Or as David Jonker put it, “We’re having coffee and telling lies.” So maybe it’s not too serious, but the Friday morning meetings for these guys are a long-standing tradition. Sam Lane, Steve Mobbs, Scott Kessler, Bob Keane, Robert Prager, and Michael Tanner are the original members, the “old timers” of the group, who started meeting five years ago. “Steve Mobbs got the idea for the name when he read a stranger’s obituary. It mentioned the guy’s friends—the Romeos—who met once a week at different restaurants. It fit our group, so it became the name we used. Little did we know that there are
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ROMEOs all over the world! We’d been meeting for a couple of years when we found out,” laughs Steven Crounse. I did some research and found that Tom Brokow mentions ROMEO clubs in his book The Greatest Generation, which was published in 1998. Apparently, these groups have been around for decades, started by men in retirement who realized they missed the camaraderie they had with their coworkers. I learned about the Amelia Island ROMEOs three years ago when I met David Jonker. He’s a great storyteller, who knew I’d love meeting this diverse group of fellas as fodder for my own stories. In fact, his exact words were, “If you want to meet some characters, I know where to find them.” Back then I was working at Story and Song Bookstore, so my schedule kept me from going, and then Covid showed up and made getting together a lot more difficult. Now that continued on next page MARCH 2022
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