A man pours coffee into a Styrofoam cup on a busy morning inside Richard's Coffee Shop in downtown Mooresville, N.C.
Men and women wearing caps with military insignias sip drinks and eat biscuits off paper plates. Around them, newspapers, photos, maps and flags cover the walls.
Jack Wales and Butch Fogg finish their meal and hoist a heavy, framed document onto an empty space on the wall.
The document, they explain, is a charter for their local chapter of the VFW. One of their friends who often drank coffee with them recently died, and they reprinted the charter to include his name.
The men hang the charter on a study-looking nail, and Fogg thanks Wales for his help. "My pleasure, brother, my pleasure," Wales responds.
The charter now hangs beside thousands of artifacts filling more than eight rooms. There are helmets, medals, and uniforms from World War I through the war in Afghanistan.
In one room hangs a portrait of a man with piercing blue eyes and a white mustache.
"He’s the one who started this whole museum," Wales said, standing by the portrait.
His name was Richard Warren. He was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam who opened this shop, in part, to create a community for veterans he felt weren’t getting help from the government.
Herman Bullard, also a Vietnam vet, met Warren in 1995.
"Everybody that came through the door, he wanted to know them, and if they were a veteran, he really wanted to know them, and he wanted to welcome them home," Bullard said.
At the time, the shop was named for Warren’s wife, Pat, in a building across the street. When Warren died in 2009, his patrons including Bullard raised money to move the shop and carry on his mission of giving veterans space to meet and help each other.
"Not only for me personally, but a lot of veterans would probably not be here today if it weren’t for this coffee shop," Bullard said.
Every Thursday, there’s free coffee for service members, and volunteers to help them apply for benefits. Patrons also take up collections to help veterans pay for cars, homes and utilities.
Veterans like Tim Gerard keep coming back for the fellowship.
"For some of these guys, it’s hard to open up and get in the weeds about certain things," Gerard said. "When they’re sitting across the table with someone who’s served, they’re a little more at peace, and it’s easier for them to talk to these guys."
Gerard discovered Richard’s in 2022, when he was struggling with his mental health. On one of his first visits, a patron suggested he get a service dog.
"Within a week of talking to somebody and then coming, I had a pup. A little 9-week-old named Maggie," he said.
And bringing that yellow American Lab home "absolutely" made a big difference for him.
He’s been coming back ever since. He even brought his own artifact to the shop — an American flag flown at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, folded in a display box.
"It’s sitting on the table, right underneath the pictures," he said.
He left it under a screen showing pictures of customers who’ve died. It’s his own small tribute to the people who built this place for veterans in need of company, conversation or a hot cup of coffee.
