DINAH’S EVOKES DINER MEMORIES OF YESTERYEAR
Photo by Barry Stein
By Bob Vickrey
Entering Dinah’s Restaurant brought back youthful memories of my hometown diner where I hung out with friends and routinely argued about how much each of us owed after the bill arrived.
Back in the day, my evening hangout was Angel’s Grill in Pasadena, Texas (yes, we also had a Pasadena.) The place had red-pleated vinyl booths and a mini-juke box on every table—to which we repeatedly fed nickels and dimes to hear Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” The seasoned blue-haired waitresses patiently tolerated our excessive behavior while we stared at the cute girl with a ponytail in the corner booth who looked like Sandra Dee. (But on second glance, we realized all the girls in that booth had ponytails and looked like Sandra Dee.)
Our monthly lunch club group thought a trip to Dinah’s Family Restaurant on Sepulveda Boulevard might rekindle some of the “diner” nostalgia of our past—hopefully, without the ensuing traditional battle over the bill.
Dinah’s is a family-owned restaurant that opened its doors in 1959. Dinah’s staff prides itself on its oven-baked pancakes and its “original recipe” fried chicken, which is prepared with herbs and spices and other secret ingredients. But those are about all the details I’m allowed to share or my dining privileges could be permanently revoked.
Joining us as our featured monthly guest was our favorite engaging contrarian, Don “Troy” Galias, who has been a prominent figure in the Palisades village for more than forty years. Don’s nickname emanated from his hometown of Troy, New York, where he graduated Renssellaer Polytechnic Institute. He was captain of the tennis team there and later played on the amateur tennis circuit.
Don’s family had migrated west and landed in Pacific Palisades where he became an entrepreneur in fields as diverse as real estate, private mail box services, and book advertising and marketing. He once wrote a weekly college football “top ten” column for the local newspaper, which regularly featured his distinctly different take on the sport than what the national polls often reflected. In fact, his many friends know him as someone who traditionally enjoys going against the grain regarding almost any subject.
Lunch Club with Special Guest Don Galias (second from right). Photo by Sylvie Waring.
We arrived to find a full house at Dinah’s and quickly remembered that the crowds start arriving in the early morning and the steady stream of customers continues throughout the day. Arnie informed our waitress Milagros he was ordering the large-sized oven-baked “Gourmet Apple Pancake” with a cinnamon glaze, which takes twenty minutes to prepare—and two weight-lifters to deliver to the table.
That gave the rest of us time to peruse the extensive menu and make our choices before she returned. Barry had time to roam the room and take his photos of Dinah’s memorabilia and of several employees and customers. Several of the latter had been coming there so long; they practically blended in with the memorabilia.
Barry ordered the grilled-cheese sandwich on rye with a side dish of coleslaw, which he later added to the contents of his sandwich—a little trick he learned years earlier. Our guest star Don chose the Dinah’s club sandwich and I opted for “Pigs in a Blanket” because it had a catchy name. I couldn’t remember exactly who or what was under the blanket, and after I finished eating it, I still wasn’t sure.
Our server brought Arnie his oven-baked apple pancake, which was approximately the size of the last steel-belted radial I bought at Firestone Tires. His plate covered about half the table, but Milagros managed to find room for the rest of our plates. We were pleased that we were not forced to move to a separate table and leave Arnie alone with his cinnamon-covered Goodyear blimp.
When our check arrived, Arnie threw in more than his fair share since his meal was more expensive than ours. After enduring the Angel’s Grill antics of years past, Arnie had added a refreshing new twist on settling the age-old question about how to split a lunch tab. Now this was exactly the kind of negotiation that I could easily begin to get used to.
Bob Vickrey is a writer whose columns appear in several Southwestern newspapers including the Houston Chronicle and the Waco Tribune-Herald. He is a monthly contributor for Boryana Books. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
