Photo by Craig Carlson

Johnny’s waitresses take 350 to 400 orders a day. Hamburgers, ham sandwiches, pancakes, fried chicken, soup.

"I've come down here every morning for twenty-seven years. To this day, I like it. My wife comes in every afternoon. She’s the soup maker and waitress. Only once, for two days, that’s the longest time we were ever closed,” said Dee Binder, owner, with his wife Jeanette, of Johnny’s Cafe, an eatery on the north side of the 300 block of West Broadway.

Johnny’s hunkers between the Can Can Club and a shop that advertises itself on a marquee the color of diluted mustard as “Adult Movies.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

“When they tear this block down, well, then it’s good-bye to all this. I really don’t care. We're near retiring. We have another two years on the lease. I don’t think we’ll renew. Every time, the last few years, it’s come time to renew, we didn’t want to. But then, we didn’t want anyone else to have the place, either. So we stay and we stay and my poor wife, she stays and she stays. Really, it would be a blessing in disguise to take a hammer and knock this place right on down. That way we wouldn’t have to say, ‘We quit.’ ”

Jeanette and Dee. He asked $30,000 for the business. "I scrimped and saved and got together the down payment, and when the day came for us to take over, I said to Jeanette, ‘Well, okay, we got our own little business.’"

Photo by Craig Carlson

A faded red-and-white striped canopy shades Johnny’s front door. A dusty palm grows out of the sidewalk. Open around the clock 365 days a year (“We stay open for Christmas and sell hamburgers like usual”), Johnny’s hunkers between the Can Can Club and a shop that advertises itself on a marquee the color of diluted mustard as “Adult Movies.” Down the block: Master Tattoo, a barber shop (Nichols House of Style), and Topless A Go Go. Farther west, on the corner, lights flash and bells clang in the arcade. Beyond that is the brown YMCA, where new waitresses at Johnny’s sometimes stay while they save up to rent an apartment. These blocks give off nostalgic decay, a whiff of a long time ago, and are not quite of the same world as the downtown banks whose glass sheaths reflect clouds.

"My God, can you imagine? A big ol’ fire goin’ back there on the grill, flames and such, and people just kept on eating."

Photo by Craig Carlson

Johnny’s waitresses take 350 to 400 orders a day. Hamburgers, ham sandwiches, pancakes, fried chicken, soup. Plain, unpretentious cooking. Decor plain, worn, scrubbed clean.

Pancakes on the grill. Dee had never cooked, and Jeanette, he said, “is so-so” at cooking. “I had to learn fast."

Photo by Craig Carlson

You can tell time by the flow of customers into Johnny’s. At night, cops, Greyhound drivers, dancers from the Topless A Go Go and Can Can Club, homeless men and women, and sailors sip coffee in the subaqueous light.

You can tell time by the flow of customers into Johnny’s. At night, cops, Greyhound drivers, dancers from the Topless A Go Go and Can Can Club, homeless men and women, and sailors sip coffee in the subaqueous light.

Photo by Craig Carlson

At six in the morning. Dee shows up. A big man who has recently lost weight, his green jump suit falls loose over his belly. His cheeks are ruddy, his ears stick out some from his broad face. He sweeps, does books, checks and orders supplies. Breakfast regulars — bus drivers, construction workers, retirees — slide onto one of the dozen red stools at the counter or take a booth in the back near the pay telephone and juke box. The waitress doesn’t even have to ask “What’ll you have?” of the regulars, and the cook, who nods good morning, starts up two eggs over easy sizzling on the grill, ham, pancakes, or whatever.

At seven-thirty. Dee pulls up a chair to a table near the wide plate-glass window that looks out onto Broadway. Dee’s close friend Bob, a maintenance engineer, comes in about this time. “Bob has coffee privileges,” said Dee. “When you get to know me real well, you don’t pay for your coffee. There’s not many people like that. But there’s a few.” By eleven, downtown workers begin to come in for lunch. Many ask for the beef-vegetable soup Jeanette makes up when she comes in at three in the afternoon. (“Vegetable Soup and Tossed Green Salad, Choice of Dressings, French or Blue Cheese, $2.05,” reads a sign above the counter.) Those who come in from mid-afternoon until after dark include retirees, workers waiting for buses home, and folks on downtown night shifts.

It was four on a weekday afternoon. Fan blades circulated aromas of hamburger, bacon, and fried eggs. Jeanette, slender and dark-haired, slow to wrath and quick to smile, instructed a new waitress who had just started her first shift. A Greyhound driver brushed back his mustache with his knuckle and joked with the new waitress. Where he stood, by the cash register, the patch of linoleum had been worn bare. His bill, for Johnny’s Chicken Basket, came to $3.50. Customers pitched forward, elbows on the counter, and stared at individual boxes of Com Flakes and Rice Krispies and the glass-enclosed shelf, like a jeweler’s window, where slices of pie shimmered. On a triangle of apple pie, sugar sparkled.

Dee leaned slowly across the red table at the back booth. He wore a navy-blue billed cap that read, “It must be Ford country. You can hear the Chevy’s rust.” He looked, smiling, toward Jeanette, mother of their three children. “She’s a good girl, a very good girl, Jeanette.”

Dee, whose grandparents came to North Dakota from Germany, was born in 1924. He grew up in North Dakota, on his father’s form. In 1929 the depression hit. Then came grasshoppers and drought. “From 1933 up until 1938, drought just completely devastated farms. It was horrible. We lived in quite a bit of poverty. Growing up poor like I did, though, I didn’t know no better. It was just the way people wear pants.

“We had relatives who came out to California during the depression. They would write back and send us picture postcards.” The pictures and letters described a paradise: no snow, fresh fruit, jobs. Then, when Dee entered the service during World War II, he came through San Diego on the train. “I got a little look at it and was greatly impressed.”

In November of 1948, Dee and his buddy Wes packed up their motorcycle bags, said good-bye to their folks, straddled their bikes, and headed for Lodi, California. Why Lodi? “In Lodi you could shake hands with scores of people from North Dakota ’cause that’s where they went. If you lived in North Dakota and you went west to California, well, Lodi was California.

“It was pretty darned cold when we left home. We decided against going through Montana and Utah. We swung south to Texas and came across that way to California. But by the time we got to San Diego, we had only a couple of dollars left. It was just before Thanksgiving. I said, ‘Let’s look around for a job.’ We stopped at the YMCA right down here, same place, and we looked for jobs. We couldn't find nothing. The war was over, and it was ‘Let’s forget it’ far as finding work.

There wasn’t a job to be bought. We went down to unemployment, and they had a job, temporary, shaking hides, at the Cudahy packing plant. They were paying a dollar and a quarter an hour. Good money then.”

Dee and Wes found out why the money was good. “After they slaughtered the cattle, they spread out the hides and salted them, then let the hides cure for a month. Pee-yew. They stunk. We walked in that first day into the cellar at Cudahy, and I turned around and said to Wes, ‘I can’t do this. No way.’ But I felt my pocket, and my pocket was empty.

“There were twelve of us that first day, and we shook hides for eight hours. About four o’clock, the boss said, ‘Okay, fellas, ever’body come back tomorrow.’

“That night we went on back to the Y. We were smeltin’ like a hide cellar. The next morning, aw, we were stiff, sore, and still smelly. We went on down to Cudahy. Wasn’t a soul showed up out of those twelve except me and old Wes. The boss said, ‘Just go ahead and sweep down and straighten up, and we’ll have another crew come down from unemployment.’ Sure enough, about ten, another crew come. We shook hides. Four o’clock come, it was the same thing, ‘See you in the morning.’ “Next morning we went down again. Not a soul showed up but me and old Wes. Same thing, ‘Sweep up and we’ll get another crew.’ They did. Along about two o’clock, we had the hides all wrapped and loaded up and in the box car. The boss said, ‘Go on up to the office and get your pay.’

“We were all sitting out on the lawn, and the boss man brought the checks and handed them around. Then he said to me and Wes, ‘How would you boys like a job here steady?’ We said, ‘No, no, no. Not that, not the hides.’ He kinda laughed and said, ‘We hire outside help for that. That’s how we hire our men, those that stay through the hides, them’s good men.’ So I got a job up in the assembling room, putting orders together.”

Wes moved on to Lodi. Dee stayed here. He rented a studio apartment in Ocean Beach. He wasn’t much of a cook, and he ate most of his meals out. In November of 1951, he met Jeanette, a waitress at Johnny’s Lucky Lunch (also called Johnny’s Number One) near the Orpheum Theatre at Fifth and Broadway. Dee visited the Lucky Lunch daily, courting Jeanette. “I didn’t care about eating. The food was secondary.” A year later, they were married. Jeanette kept her job at the Lucky Lunch.

In 1953 Cudahy’s Los Angeles plant closed. The company brought men with top seniority to San Diego. Dee, a warehouse foreman, “got bumped back down.” Convair began to expand. Dee took a job there.

“Convair was good work and fairly steady. But I had horrors, thinking that if everything worked out okay, I would retire from Convair when I was sixty-five. There I was not even thirty yet, and I had to go do this same job for thirty-five more years. I don’t think I could’ve taken it. Just the thought of all those years, it was a terrible nightmare.”

In 1959 there were seven Johnny’s Cafes scattered around San Diego County. (Johnny’s Number One, the Lucky Lunch at Fifth and Broadway; Number Two, next to the downtown Mission Theatre; Number Three, by the California Theatre; Number Four, at the corner of First and Broadway; Number Five, the cafe at Union and Broadway owned by the Binders; Johnny’s Cafe Number Six, at Thirtieth and University; and Number Seven, in the South Bay Plaza in National City.)

Of the seven, only the Binders’ cafe and Johnny’s Cafe Number Six, owned by Jeanette Binder’s brother-in-law, are still in operation.

All seven cafes did a good business. “Actually, I didn’t look to buying this place, never even thought of buyin’ a restaurant, but the old man — Johnny Barsky — was getting on in years and wanted to sell all five. He called me in one day and asked me if I wanted to buy one of them. I said, ‘Sure. You betcha I want one.’ ”

Dee and Jeanette chose Number Five. Barsky had bought Number Five four years earlier, renovated it, and built a dependable clientele. He asked $30,000 for the business. The rent was $500 per month. "I scrimped and saved and got together the down payment, and when the day came for us to take over, I said to Jeanette, ‘Well, okay, we got our own little business.’ On that first afternoon at two o’clock, Johnny closed out his books for the last time. He said, ‘Here’s the keys to the office and the cash register. There are no keys to the front door. That door is never closed.’ I was shaking his hand, getting ready to go to work. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘I ain’t got no money, I only got the six dollars in my pocket. If somebody give us a twenty. I’ll be lost.’ So Johnny loaned us $300 to use for a couple of days.”

The couple kept Johnny’s name because the sign, new then, had cost Barsky $3500. Nor did anything else change. Jeanette worked as a waitress. Barsky’s crew of nine, a waitress and cook for each shift, with one person as relief, stayed on. Dee remained as an assembler at Convair and came in to the cafe several times a day. He swept, ordered food, went to the bank. The menu — hamburgers, fries, sandwiches, eggs, bacon, pancakes — was not changed. “I’ve found out over the years that people like to eat hamburger,” said Dee.

The first New Year’s Eve, a fire started. “The place was loaded, jammed with people. By midnight we were packed in. We had turned the grill way up to accommodate the burger patties. The grill got so doggone hot that the grease caught on fire. The fire extinguisher was old. It wouldn’t work. The grill was flaming away. Somebody called the fire department, and they rushed in and put out the fire. The cops came and stood at the door to keep folks out. But not one soul got up and left. My God, can you imagine? A big ol’ fire goin’ back there on the grill, flames and such, and people just kept on eating.

“We didn’t close up, either. Be damned if we were going to close. We didn’t have no grill. It had been sprayed full of that old foam from the fire extinguisher. We could only serve cold sandwiches and coffee and malts. But, by golly, we kept ’er open.”

Dee quit Convair in 1960. He was at the cafe full time one day when the cook took off. Dee had never cooked, and Jeanette, he said, “is so-so” at cooking. “I had to learn fast. I asked myself, ‘Why can’t I do this? It ain’t all that complicated.’ The first order was this young sailor who wanted French toast. I said to myself, ‘I know how to handle French toast. You take some milk, you beat an egg into it, you slice some bread, you dip the bread in the egg and milk, you put the bread on the grill.’ I did that, real careful, put it on the grill, got it brown. Then I arranged it on the plate, arranged it real nice. The sailor said, ‘This is the best French toast I ever ate.’ So I’m all blowed up. I’m saying to myself, ‘I’m a cook!’ Next thing I knew, I looked and that sailor, he was gone. He had run off and didn’t pay. My first meal, and the guy snuck out without paying!

“There was a time it was sailors, nothing but sailors down here on West Broadway. It was .a different kind of a navy then. Young guys that weren’t married. They used to tell them boots, ‘Now stay off of Broadway, don’t go in the jewelry stores, the photo shops, the tattoo places,’ and that’s exactly where those sailors’d head for, and they’d get nailed every time. Those young guys, they thrived on gettin’ ripped off.

“I remember how them photo shops and jewelry stores used to operate. They had a man standing out front of the photo shop — ol’ Lou — he’s gone now, so I can talk about him. Ol’ Lou would see a bunch of young sailors coming down Broadway. He’d say, ‘What company are you from, boys?’ They’d say, ‘We’re from Company B.’ Lou, he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s the one I was in.’ If he could get them to stop, that was all he needed. He had them. ‘Surely you have a dollar on you,’ he’d say. Then he’d offer the boys an eight-by-ten photo of themselves for one dollar. That was his pitch. There were some days Lou would tell me, ‘I got a hundred customers today.’

“So the boys would go in, and they’d get their photo taken. They’d tell them to come back in a few hours, and then they’d have the photo for them. They’d pay their dollar. They’d come back and they were told to go into that booth, and a girl will get you your picture. Now here was this attractive young girl, and she had a whole set of photos already made up for this sailor. She’d say, ‘Here’s your eight-by-ten black and white and a couple of five-by-sevens for the billfold.’ The whole package came to, I think, thirty-seven dollars. If the sailor said he didn’t have the money, the gal would say, ‘Well, we’ll take a note.’ Most of these young sailors would then either buy the whole packet or they’d sign the note. And if they didn’t pay the note, then their company commander would get a letter from the photo shop. . Also, the gal in the booth, she’d get these guys’ home addresses. The photo shop would package up the photos and mail them COD to parents. ‘Why, look at these beautiful photographs of l’il Billy,’ the parents would say, ‘I guess he don’t have no money,’ and then the parents would pay for the packet. So one way or another, the photo shop got those poor sailors’ money.

“And the jewelry stores. They would have the same deal. They would have a Mother’s Day special or Valentine’s Day special, a ring, always for the sailors’ mothers.. They wanted about thirty-five dollars for that ring. They would get hooked on this and go in the store, be sat down with an attractive girl — always a girl! — and the girl would say, ‘Here’s your ring for your mother. Now, how about something for your father? The reason I wear this ring is to remember my father. I just lost him.’ Now, she never lost her father, but she would play on these guys’ sympathy. This second ring was not thirty-five dollars. It would cost a lot more. Usually the guy wouldn't have the money for it, so again, like at the photo shop, he would be told he could sign for it. It got so bad that there were sailors picketing them, and the commander put them off limits.

“They were rowdy youngsters, the sailors in those days. But we were lucky. We never had no bad fights in here. They were what you might call fun loving. They’d drink, and then they’d come in here in the middle of the night and sit at the counter and try to sober up.

“Most of the waitresses who go to work here, they’re following a serviceman. When they get here, they want enough money to rent an apartment. If a person comes in here and says, ‘I got three kids and no husband, and I gotta have a job,’ we will discourage her because she and those kids can’t live on what we can pay. No way. And sailors are not good tippers. Plus, generally, this is not the best place for tips. If a guy comes in drunk, he might leave a five or ten, but that is not a legitimate tip, so to speak. Probably from me is the biggest tip these gals ever get.’’

Dee and Jeanette have been mother and father to the waitresses who worked at Johnny’s. “But we tried not to let ourselves get too involved. One time we allowed ourselves to get in deep with a girl who asked us for help. We found out that she had lied about her age on her application. Turned out she was only fifteen. She had no place to stay. So the juvenile people took her. We went to them and said we’d give her a home. But it didn’t work out. Just like the old saying, ‘A wolf will always look to the woods,’ and she did. She ended up stealing from us."

Jeanette motioned to Dee, and he excused himself. In the booth behind sat two young men, one wearing a black Motley Criie T-shirt, and the other, a thin-faced blond with a puny mustache. They ordered fries and Coke. The two men sat close, leafing through Hustler. Across the table from them, a girl in her late teens fed quarters to the small juke box hung above the table. Michael Jackson sang “Thriller.’’ “That’s nothin but sick sex and beaver shots,’’ she said, nodding toward the magazine.

“It beats Penthouse,” said the Crue-wearer. “That’s nothin' but Jewish American Princesses smeared over with Vaseline.”

“Say,” the mustached man asked the girl, “what’s a Mexican that marries your sister?” The girl shook her head in the negative. “He’s a Spaniard ”

“I don’t get it,” said the girl and asked for two more quarters.

In the booth ahead, two young women had shopping bags from Horton Plaza tucked next to them. The women were in their midtwenties, clean, and carefully dressed. They drank malts. “Beth’s mom don’t let her listen to no music any longer,” one said to the other.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause her mom’s turned off super religious”

“What’s Beth gonna do?”

“She said she would marry Bob except that he’s a semi-lapsed Catholic.”

“I thought he was already married,” said the second woman.

“Well, that’s what some say,” answered her companion.

Then there were only sounds of whirring tires on Broadway, slow-moving fan blades, turning pages, thick malt sucked through straws. Dee returned to the booth. Jeanette had asked him to replace a salt shaker that had disappeared from one of the tables. “I’ve bought bushels of these salt shakers and enough sugar shakers to fill the place, and every week, I buy a dozen more.”

Dee talked about the “hippie era.” He frowned. “During the Sixties, the hippie days, quite a few boys went over the hill. In the hippie days — I could never see the hippies — we had a lot of runaways come in. We could tell ’em. The girls, we advised them to stay away from certain guys. But one thing you can’t compete with, we found that out a long time ago here, that’s a girl and a guy she’s hangin’ around with. You are always going to be the loser. Sailors would buy ’em food, and they would furnish their lodging, too. Back in the older days, the Sixties, the morals were a little bit different than they are now. I remember one time lately, I was sittin’ back here, and a girl had come in and told me she just come in on the bus and she was tired. A young sailor came and sat down next to her. They struck up a conversation. She said, ‘Come on. Get me a room. Let’s go.’ That’s how she got a room, she just come out and ask for one.

“The change down here has been gradual. When we first came here, the sailors were all in uniforms. There was a navy fella, Elmo Zumwalt — he was a liberal bugger. He came in as head of the navy. [Nixon appointed Zumwalt chief of naval operations in 1970. Zumwalt issued a series of directives called Z-Grams. With a goal of bringing navy life closer to civilian life and countering declining enlistment, Z-Grams relaxed regulations for conduct, grooming, dress, and shore leave.] Zumwalt allowed sailors to come ashore in civilian clothes. Before that, they could only come ashore in uniform, and if they wanted to change into civilian clothes, they’d rent a locker in one of the locker clubs, change into their civvies, and store their uniforms in the locker. There was a locker club right up above us on the second floor. After the sailors changed clothes, they would come on down here and get a hamburger.

“When Zumwalt changed that rule, it knocked out locker clubs. It was a blow to all downtown businesses, especially here on West Broadway, where we all catered almost entirely to sailors. I began having trouble just trying to survive.

“There was a restaurant operating where the Continental Trailways is now. It was a restaurant that had been built with the idea of taking care of the courthouse crowd. By a stroke of luck, at about the same time Zumwalt changed the rules on uniforms, that restaurant closed up. I could see the opportunity of grabbin’ off those customers that had gone there. I changed the place to accommodate the day trade somewhat. We put in booths, and by golly it worked.”

Only once has anyone attempted a holdup. “Along toward the end of the Sixties, we had a night cook, a big ol’ mean woman. It was three o’clock in the morning. I had mopped up the back, and she was sweeping the front out. I had a freezer in the back, and the pan was rubbin’ up on something, makin’ an awful noise, I was layin’ on my back workin’ on it. I heard this ol’ woman screamin’, ‘Get out of here! I won’t give you a penny.’ I raised up and looked. This guy was goin’ out the back door and the ol’ gal was chasin’ him with the broom. I said, ‘What happened?’ and she said, ‘He told me to give him all the money in the register.’ I said to her, ‘Jee-zus Kee-rist, we just had a holdup. Go out and get the police.’ Then she collapsed in a heap, cryin’, ‘I been held up.' The guy was wearing a yellow jacket, and he didn’t even get up to the bus depot before the cops had nailed him. He told the cops, ‘I didn’t want all their money. I just wanted enough to go home.’ He was over the hill from the marines. A likely story that he would have taken only enough to go home, but that’s what he told them.”

“But sneaking out without paying,” said Dee, “that’s gotten worse over the years. It’s gotten so bad now that we have to do that.” Dee pointed to the sign above the counter. Please Pay Waitress When Served.

“Some people resent it. But I tell ’em, ‘After all, you go into the bar and get yourself a drink, you pay right away.’ But it still makes some people awful mad. If we know the person real well, if they’re a regular from way back, we won’t ask for them to pay right up. But most of them do it anyway.

“This is a bad place to run, and it has been, all throughout the years. Picture this. At nighttime we have, I don’t want to say we have bad guys, but we have the street people coming in here, and you have ladies of the night. Now, we don’t allow the ladies to do business in here, but if we throw that element out, we don’t have anybody. Everybody’s got to eat. They’ve all got money. We serve them. In the daytime, of course, we switch 180 degrees. We attract people from the courthouse, from Greyhound and Trailways. But at night, it’s that rougher element.”

Two years ago. Dee started hiring men as cooks. “Sailors wanted a mother or a sister or a sweetheart figure. A man didn’t fit into that. And we couldn’t pay a man enough. We have to pay within the industry. Well, how could a man live on that kind of wages? But of course, as the economy has got worse, there were some men that would take a job at what we could pay. Now we have two men here, one from three until eleven and one on at night.”

As Dee talked that afternoon, his thick, restless fingers tap-tapped on the red Formica. His steady hazel eyes roamed the tables. A pale, middle-age woman, tattered sweater around narrow shoulders, feet rough and dirty in sandals, drank coffee and chain-smoked at a nearby table. At the counter, three battered, bearded men hovered, as if for warmth. From the blanket poncho that covered one of the three, tanned hands emerged and grabbed up the cheeseburger served him. In his first bite, he took half the burger.

“I feel sorry for all these street people. I say to myself, ‘Except for the grace of God, yeah, there go I. But, honest, I can’t help them. Because, my God, we’re not set up for charity. I have to take a low approach to them. If you come in here and order and can’t pay, I don’t say, ‘Aw, go ahead and eat it anyway.’ I throw the food away. Yes, I do.

“I used to help out in our early days. A sad story. I’d go for it. You know, ‘I left my money in the hotel,' that kind of thing. I’d fall for it. But not one of those people ever came back and paid up. None.”

For all Dee’s tough talk, he has made exceptions. There is the man Dee calls “Ol’ Red.” He would come for dinner every day for two or three weeks. Then for five days, they would not see him. One day Ol’ Red said to Dee, “I just get so much money, and if I don’t spend it, somebody cons me out of it.” Ol' Red asked Dee if he could run a small bill. At first. Dee refused. “I said, ‘Red, why don’t you just give me ten dollars, and I’ll let you eat on that until it’s gone.' ” Red did that. After a few months, Dee suggested, ‘‘You don’t have to pay me the ten. When it gets up to ten. I’ll tell you.”

Time passed. Dee told Red, “Eat what you want.” Red ate some twenty-two dollars’ worth a week at the cafe. Every week he paid. One day. Red said, “I can’t pay today.”

“I realized he was on unemployment and that it had run out on him. I said, ‘Well, don’t worry about it.’ An’ he didn’t. He just kept on eating. I didn’t pay no attention. One night Jeanette called me up at home and said that Red had bills that totaled over sixty dollars. Next morning I said, ‘Red, you owe me some sixty dollars.’ Well, he said he didn't have any money but that he'd pay me when he could.”

Red didn't come into Johnny’s anymore. Dee wrote off the sixty dollars. “Then, one night Jeanette called. ‘You remember that Red that owed us all that money? Well, he’s in here and wants to pay on the bill.’ He gave Jeanette twenty dollars. We didn’t see him again for several months. Then he brought in the rest. He said, ‘It took me this long to save this.’

“To this very day, any waitress that gives Ol’ Red a bad time will have to answer to me. Because Ol’ Red, that’s a man. Most people, when they owe you money, you don’t see them no more. Yeah, I feel real warm toward Ol’ Red.”

Elderly people who live downtown eat at Johnny’s. Dee and Jeanette became fond of one couple. “Mom and Pop, we’d call ’em. The old woman was blind, and the old man was quite elderly. They'd come in every day. He’d lead her, and they’d have the soup Jeanette makes and a doughnut for dessert. We'd give ’em a little discount. When we raised prices, we didn’t raise theirs, that kind of thing. Then for a long, long time, we didn’t see ’em. Well, we came to learn that somebody run over her and killed her. It shook him so bad, they had to put him in a home for a while. But now, he comes in again every day. Yeah, Mom and Pop, an’ Ol’ Red.” Dee sighed, looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after five. Cars and buses roared on Broadway. “About five-thirty you’ll see Pop come in.”

Dee has made “a load of good friends” at the cafe. But nobody ever got as close to him as “Ol' Harold.” “This ol' fellow come in here from Chicago, kind of a heavyset guy. He was drivin’ a cab. I warmed up to this guy immediately. I come to find out he must’ve been a successful swimming pool contractor back there and quite well-to-do. He had married this woman who had two children, who, so he said, made his life so miserable for him, so intolerable, that he couldn’t take it no more. So he blew the whole cahoots and took off. left the business, the home, everything, and came to San Diego.

“We become real close friends. He had privileges, he had more than coffee privileges. And he helped around here. He helped me put this floor in.

“Well, Harold decided he’d try one more time to go back to Chicago and see if he couldn’t possibly make it go with his wife. It must have been on his consciousness a lot of the time. So he bought a little ol’ car, the first compact that come out. and loaded it out with his everything. He was heavyset, and him and his dog, they barely had room to set in there. Away they went to Chicago, and he wrote to me. He said he walked in the door and his wife, she lit into him again, so he kissed the kids and turned around and went back out. He stayed with his parents that winter, and he had a couple of heart attacks. And then, summertime come. In June he drove back to San Diego. He said, ‘I’ve come back home.’

“Harold fell in love with one of my waitresses, and they lived together for some time. Finally they decided to get married. Jeanette and I stood up for them. That night he got another heart attack. He went to the hospital and he died. That tore me up. That was the twenty-second of December, 1975. He was a brother to me. I liked that man. When he died, I lost the best friend I ever had.”

Dee spoke of how much had changed downtown. “I can remember when they had Wards, Sears all downtown, and Jordan Marsh, and the Broadway — that was called Marshall’s in those days. Now, even Walker-Scott has gone. It’s all standin’ empty. At one time, West Broadway was just alive with arcades and restaurants and movies. Where all that was is nothin’ but parking lot now. And what’s on this side of the street? Half the stores are gone.... Eventually downtown redevelopment will succeed, but we’re going to have quite a slump before it does. I imagine there’s a lot of small businesses that has to bite the dust before downtown hits its stride.

“Now the sailors go to Fifth Avenue, which is still kind’ve a slummy part of downtown, and even this Gaslamp thing, as much as they’ve put into it, it still hasn’t worked, although you see more sailor boys down there now. They like that excitement, those crowds. The tourists, it’s the beach they want, or the zoo.

“That Gaslamp redevelopment started about ten years ago. I used to go down there and get my vegetables a couple of times a week, and well, it was pretty bad. To a person like myself that has been here for thirty years and has seen that area, it just seems they’re trying to preserve the old look, so it’s hard to see too much difference. It was old to begin with. Now, they’re trying to just fix up the old.”

Dee is pragmatic about the block on which his cafe sits. “It’ll go,” he said. “We thought it was going to go a year ago. I’m surprised they even let it stand, an eyesore like this.

“I’m not bitter. This place has been good to us. We never got wealthy, but we kind’ve situated ourselves. Besides, Jeanette wants one of these small places, a little lunchroom in an office building, something that opens at seven and closes at three, five days a week. No matter what we do, I imagine I will keep on coming down here every morning for a while ”