Days after owner’s death, fire closes Maniac Mike’s Cafe

May 01--Mike Stewart's body was cremated April 20. Hours later, his restaurant at Upland's Cable Airport, Maniac Mike's Cafe, burned.

It was an eerie confluence of events, one that family members and friends can't help but ponder with amazement.

"They were saying he took it with him," family friend Beth Brooks told me.

The well-liked Stewart died April 16 of complications from ALS at age 62. After his cremation, his wife, Annette, and daughter, Kristina, went to a wedding. There, they got a call from the airport that a plume of smoke was rising from the restaurant, which had closed for the afternoon a couple of hours earlier.

Firefighters cut holes in the roof and got the fire out. A freezer condenser had overheated. Annette thanks Cable employees for their alertness and firefighters for their quick work.

The building still stands, but smoke and water damage is extensive and the cafe isn't expected to reopen until later this year.

"I lost my husband and my restaurant in the same week, within four days," Annette told me Monday morning on the restaurant's patio, accessible only past yellow caution tape.

Just as the family is processing Mike Stewart's death, they have to make the sort of serious decisions that are supposed to be put off in the wake of a tragedy, Annette noted.

It's hard for the family to resist finding humor or a larger meaning in the fire.

"His heart and his soul was in this place," Annette told me, saying her husband spent 17 years running the cafe, seven days a week, with only four holidays a year off. "Sometimes strange coincidences happen, right?"

Mike's mother, Millie, was one of airport founder Dewey Cable's five children. Stewart grew up at the airport and briefly ran the cafe in the 1970s before embarking on a career in inventory control and cost accounting in Silicon Valley and then in Pomona at General Dynamics.

The tug of his roots led him back to Cable and he took over the cafe in 1999. After a renovation, which almost wiped the family out financially, it opened as Maniac Mike's in 2000. Stewart told me in 2010 that by the opening they had $22 in the bank.

But the restaurant became a success, serving airport employees, pilots who would fly in and people in the community who liked the food, the view of the airfield and the good-humored, energetic Stewart.

I wrote about him in 2010 at Maniac Mike's 10th anniversary. "This is a kid magnet," Stewart said then. "Everybody loves airplanes."

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Last summer he was diagnosed with progressive bulbar palsy, a form of ALS, gradually losing strength in his mouth and tongue. He stopped going into the restaurant in December and died at home in Pomona. "A lot of people didn't even know Mike was sick," Annette said.

Kristina had worked side by side with her father and was in the Lions Club with him too. The past six months she had run the breakfast-and-lunch cafe full-time. On Monday she was taking inventory to see what was salvageable. Most of the interior looks like a loss.

Once they get the go-ahead from the insurance company, the Stewarts will submit plans to the city for a remodeled cafe. Son Michael, a graphic art designer, is working up ideas with Kristina. A reopening is months away.

"Maybe this was Mike's way of saying, 'I had my dream. It's time for you to have your dreams,'" Bob Cable, the airport president, told me regarding the cafe's loss. "They're going to expand it a little, expand the patio, maybe put in an observation deck."

Why the name Maniac Mike's? Stewart's mother, who also died of ALS, told him he was a maniac to want to take on the restaurant given the burnout he experienced the first go-round, when he worked 18-hour days without a day off for a year.

Cable said his cousin was a live wire, an unpredictable element that rounded out an otherwise staid family.

"He was a true-sense-of-the-word character," Cable said. "And everybody knows him, everybody knows that mustache, everybody knows Mike."

Ah, yes, that mustache. His upper lip was just its point of origin; from there, it plunged down both sides of his mouth to hang almost to his clavicle. When he waxed it, it would extend from his chin like wings.

A history buff who loved documenting stories about the airport, Stewart with his handlebar mustache resembled an Old West figure -- albeit one who favored Hawaiian shirts.

"His mustache was his trademark," Annette said. "He started growing it at age 23 and he never shaved it off. He'd feel naked without it."

He was clean-shaven when they met 40 years ago but soon began growing a mustache. His wife said: "I have a picture of him without it. He looked like a baby."

More stories about Stewart will be told this week. A meet and greet with the family is planned for 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 2, at Hangar Q. That's meant for people who can't attend the larger event from noon to 6 p.m. Thursday, May 3, in Hangar 2.

That celebration of Stewart's life will include remarks by Annette and others, a fly-by with a missing man formation, then a party with a taco bar. Show cars and motorcycles, both favorites of Stewart's, are encouraged.

"He touched a lot of people," Annette said. "I feel bad for their loss too. They stopped here first and then started their day. This was their home. We're going to rebuild their home for them."

David Allen makes his home in the newspaper Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook, follow @davidallen909 on Twitter and buy "Getting Started" and "Pomona A to Z."

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