Alan Stillman

In the 1988 film "Cocktail," Tom Cruise plays an ambitious young man taking business courses by day at City College in New York and bartending by night at a popular East Side singles bar to support himself. When one of his courses requires that he submit an original business plan for a hypothetical company, Cruise charts the national expansion of a similar fern-bar concept. Unaccountably, the professor teaching the class dismisses the plan as farfetched and gives Cruise's character an "F."

The irony of the scene cannot be lost on anyone who knows something about the history of the restaurant industry -- particularly if they had already recognized that the singles bar in which Cruise's character works is the original T.G.I. Friday's on First Avenue in Manhattan. In fact, the only thing farfetched about Cruise's plan was, had his character done a little research, that it had already been executed successfully 20 years earlier by a man named Alan Stillman.

Stillman's original T.G.I. Friday's -- generally regarded to be the first singles bar -- was not only responsible for spawning a successful restaurant chain, but also it gave rise to a countless number of copycats around the world.

But perhaps what is more important, some observers suggest, is that the Friday's singles-bar phenomenon emerged as a powerful vehicle for change.

Commenting back in 1984 on Stillman's innovation, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in the New York Times, "When the social history of the late 20th century comes to be written, it is possible that the name Alan N. Stillman will figure in it."

Ten years later, Van Gelder's prediction was proved out when American Heritage magazine, in a historical appraisal of how American society has evolved over the past four decades, profiled Stillman as one of "Ten people who changed the way you live." "You've probably never heard of them, but these 10 people changed your life," Phil Patton wrote in the December 1994 issue of American Heritage. "Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone's world in 1954."

Stillman himself did not claim to have been possessed of any remarkable social insight when he opened the first T.G.I Friday's on March 15, 1965. Rather, he maintained, he...