Washington state diner with cash on its walls donates $10K to charity

Patrons at Fat Smitty's Diner on Washington's Olympic Peninsula show their appreciation for the restaurant's oversized burgers and friendly service by tacking signed dollar bills to its walls.

It's a tradition that began in 1985, when a salesman left a dollar bill and his business card pinned to the wall after his meal. In the years that followed, thousands of satisfied customers did the same.

"I've never taken any dollars down," Carol Schmidt, Fat Smitty's owner since 1983, told the Kitsap Sun. "This money never belonged to me."

And so the money collected for 27 years, covering the walls and ceiling of the diner — until last weekend.

As the restaurant was being closed for the season, Schmidt and a team of volunteers that included Boy Scouts, collected the bills.

A total of $10,316 was removed from the walls and ceiling.

Schmidt says he's planning to donate all but $3,000 of the money to the Boy Scouts' Camp Parsons kitchen project in Brinnon. They rest will be donated to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennesssee.

"Multiple troops of Boy Scouts have made a tradition of stopping at Fat Smitty's diner after a camping trip. One wall was covered not only in bills, but in Boy Scout patches" ABC News reported.

Casey Carson, Fat Smitty's manager and Schmidt's nephew, says that the restaurant will reopen in March with a new look, but hopes the empty walls won't stay that way.

"It is hard to take all this down," Carson admitted. "It makes it easier to know that they money is going to charity, and hopefully people will put it back up again."

In case you were wondering, despite the cash-on-walls reputation, there have been no break-ins at the diner, and very few occasions of attempted stealing.

"There was guy who tried to take a few bills some time ago," Carson told KOMO News.

"But I just took the money back and threw his sorry ass out."