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My coffee cup was always full before I finished saying yes to it. On one of his visits, I brought my late uncle Kevin to the Driftwood to give him an authentic flavor of Marblehead — the reporter’s instinct, to pick the one counter that holds the whole town — and the corned beef hash arrived on a heavy plate while a shark’s jaw watched from the ceiling, hung beside a harpoon and a tangle of fishing net. He got his Marblehead.
On Friday, Colleen Galvin filled the last cup. After 45 years in her family’s hands, the Driftwood Restaurant at 63 Front St. served its final breakfast under her ownership. The little red building on Marblehead Harbor will open again under new owner Maria Torres, but the family that shaped the place will not be behind the counter.
Northshore Magazine once put it plainly: the room was “not much wider than its door and two windows facing Front Street.” You folded yourself into it. Red vinyl stools ran the length of a red counter, and the close quarters were never kind to my habit of spilling liquids. Wood paneling had absorbed decades of coffee and weather and talk. Lobsters and old photographs hung on the walls, and the patriotic streamers looked like they had survived a few summers. One sign by the door asked people to be decent — “It’s Nice to be Nice.” Another, taped to the glass, set the only hard rule: cash only. The kitchen ran 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Upon reading of Galvin’s retirement, I set out to write this piece and fell into the building’s past. The address is older than its menu. Before the Driftwood, it held a tea room called the Bide-A-Wee and, by 1957, a soft-serve window called the Harbor View Dari Whip. Galvin has said Peg Upchurch opened the Driftwood around 1960, and the name matched the tide outside the windows.
Her family bought it in 1981. Rocco Losano was the co-owner and the restaurant’s “PR Man,” a title that told you what kind of host he was. When Losano died in February 2008 at 76, Galvin took the room and kept it the way regulars needed it — same booths, same menu, the same faces year after year. While the harbor turned from a working waterfront into real estate, the Driftwood stayed stubbornly itself: low prices, lobster on the wall and no interest in a trend.
You couldn’t buy a better seat. Money didn’t move you up the line or get your eggs out faster; the stool you took was the one that was open, and your mug was the same heavy ceramic as the mug beside you.
The counter mixed people who might not otherwise share a room. What counted was never your title; it was whether you were decent, tipped fairly and gave up your seat when a line formed out the door. Galvin presided over the mix without making a show of it.
Some of those faces stayed longer than seemed possible. Jan Frost started at the takeout window in September 1970, selling ice cream on weekends as a student. A waitress didn’t show one morning, so Frost stepped in. She stayed more than 50 years. Between Frost and Galvin, regulars’ orders were known before they sat — which mattered most to the ones who came alone and timed their mornings around the place. You didn’t make a plan. You showed up, someone there knew you, and they knew how you took it.
I kept returning for reasons beyond hash. When we celebrated the first edition of the Marblehead Current, we gathered at the Driftwood. I held one-on-ones there. I took conversation when I wanted it and quiet when I didn’t, and the cup stayed full either way. Mostly, I came for conversations and catching up — especially with Vicki Staveacre and Rhod Sharp, Anthony and Jo Ann Silva and the late Ed Bell.
None of it ran itself. Galvin didn’t reinvent the Driftwood; she protected it — a place where the lonely found company, the town traded its news and nobody pulled rank over breakfast. That was the thing she cultivated and sustained.
The news moved the way the place did everything, quietly. Galvin is retiring; the spot will reopen under Torres in some iteration. Word went out to stop in and wish Galvin well, and for a few days people did, in the kind of numbers that show up once something is finite.
At 1:38 p.m. Friday, a photograph pinged my phone, sent by photographer Steve Rood. In it, Galvin and cook Thomas O’Malley stood just inside the door, taking down the American flag, folding it between them. “End of an era,” Rood simply wrote. Outside, the harbor did what it always does. Inside, for the first time in 45 years, Galvin locked a door that had mostly stayed open.
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