A photo on the front page of Saturday’s Journal, showing Bobby Kennedy’s son Max campaigning for Barack Obama at Jim’s Steak and Spaghetti Restaurant in Huntington, W. Va., brought back memories.

Jim’s was the center of my culinary universe when I did two reporting internships in the mid-1970s at The Herald-Dispatch, Huntington’s morning newspaper. Living on my own for the first time, in a small town very different from my native Chicago, I found a people who were warm and friendly, making me feel at ease in a place of contrasts.

As they prepare to vote in today’s Democratic primary, I think back to a place with a sophisticated museum, the Huntington Museum of Art — yet close enough to its rural roots that one of the paper’s copy editors, a man with a neatly trimmed beard, one night brought in for dinner a thermos that neatly held the squirrel he’d shot earlier in the day, now skinned and roasted. (He let me try it, and yes, it tasted like chicken.)

It was a place where a large college, Marshall University, worked to bring the world’s diverse cultures to its students. And a place where, as I whistled while walking down the street near Marshall one afternoon, I was stopped by a woman who exclaimed, “You seem so happy — you must be a Christian!”

It was a place with ambition for the future, where a new Holiday Inn was touted as the beginning of a downtown renaissance. And a place where the past lurked so close that a young man named Nick Joe Rahall II could win a 10-way primary for Congress in 1976 on the strength of an ad campaign that declared him a “fighting FDR Democrat” — even though Rahall hadn’t been born until 1949, four years after FDR’s death. (Rahall, by the way, won the seat and this year is seeking reelection for a 17th term.)

Jim’s was part of this world of contrasts, standing firmly in the center of Huntington’s culinary extremes.

The town’s fanciest restaurant, Rebels and Redcoats, may have been tucked away in the Colonial Lanes bowling alley, but it featured dark-paneled walls and white tablecloths. It was the kind of place you took your parents when they came to visit, even if you never ate there yourself.

Georgia’s Grill, on the other hand, was a dingy hole in the wall where the prime rib dinner cost almost nothing — but the meat came swimming in such a sea of grease that it was virtually inedible. The editor who brought me there, Ray Evans, knew the food was awful; he explained afterward that in many West Virginia towns, this would be the best dining spot around, and you had to be able to eat there and never show your disgust.

In the middle was Jim’s, presided over by Jim Tweel, a Lebanese immigrant who had opened the place in 1938 and spent the intervening four decades offering his customers his warm smile, bright lights and hearty food, at prices an 18-year-old student could afford.

With no money coming in during my first internship, which was unpaid, I ate a lot of canned baked beans in my furnished apartment before or after work. I was happy to learn they came in all sorts of sauces, including barbecue and molasses.

But when I was on duty, it wasn’t practical to go home for dinner. And Jim’s was just down Huntington’s Fifth Avenue from the newspaper office, with great hamburgers, spaghetti and pie. Jim would greet you as you walked in, making you feel at home, chatting as he led you to your seat. The booths were for couples and groups; I sat at the counter and enjoyed the grown-up feeling of being on my own in a restaurant.

I ate there almost every night.

After college, I had the chance to return to Huntington, but an offer from The Journal — a newspaper with a national reputation, and one that had offered me $100 a week more than The Herald-Dispatch — lured me instead. It’s been decades since I’ve been back to West Virginia.

Jim Tweel died in 2005, 67 years to the day since he opened his restaurant. Now his daughter, Jimmie Carder, runs the place. Stories on the Internet indicate that it hasn’t changed much over the 30-odd years since I last ate there.

As West Virginia votes today, the presidential race is in the hands of the customers of Jim’s Steak and Spaghetti. If their choices reflect the honest, homey feeling Jim always projected, I’d say we’re in pretty good shape.

arosenbe@projo.com