Ernie Serfas, 83; His Sports Bar Was a Hangout for Athletes, Fans

Half a century ago, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was the hub of professional sports in this city; the NFL’s Rams were packing the stadium every Sunday in the fall, and the Dodgers were filling the stands while waiting for their ballpark in Chavez Ravine to be built. In the early 1960s, the Lakers took up residence at the Sports Arena next to the Coliseum in Exposition Park.

And a few miles to the west was the House of Serfas, where the athletes held court before and after games. Known as the place “where Stocker, La Brea, Overhill and good friends meet,” the View Park watering hole was one of the first sports bars in Los Angeles, a hangout for athletes and fans.

Ernie Serfas, who with his brother Nick ran the House of Serfas from the mid-1950s to the mid-’60s, died at his Corona home March 18 while watching a basketball game on television. He was 83.

The cause of death has not been determined, his daughter Dana Fox told The Times this week, but she said, “It was exactly the way he would have wanted to go.”

Behind the restaurant and bar was a motel, where “half the sports figures in town lived,” said John Hall, a sports columnist for the Los Angeles Mirror, The Times and the Orange County Register.

Among the athletes who made the House of Serfas their home base were Jon Arnett, halfback for the Rams; Harland Svare, who played for the Rams and later became their coach; Gorgeous George, the professional wrestler, and Paul Anderson, a world-class weightlifter who was called the strongest man in the world.

“Everybody hung out there,” said former Dodger pitcher Ron Perranoski, now a scout for the San Francisco Giants. “I was a rookie in 1961 when I met Ernie. His place was always filled with ballplayers. There were Angels, Rams and Dodgers. It cut across all sports and teams.”

In a 1970 column by Hall in The Times, Serfas recalled that his clientele included members of pro baseball and football teams in Los Angeles on road trips.

“We never had any trouble in the place,” Serfas said. “All those athletes, night after night, and never any fights. Well, maybe we had a couple scares with [Ram kicker] Lou Michaels.... I think there was one time when Lamar Lundy was about to hit Lou over the head with a loaf of bread. But never any real trouble.”

(Lundy, a defensive lineman, was one of the Rams’ Fearsome Foursome in the 1960s, along with Rosey Grier, Merlin Olsen and Deacon Jones.)

“It was nothing on a Sunday afternoon to have Harland Svare and Don Drysdale there for a spaghetti feed,” Serfas’ daughter Fox said.

Sundays were busy days when the Rams were home. “I moved 11 buses -- 548 people -- to a Ram-49er game once on a single Sunday,” Serfas told Hall in 1970.

Jack Disney lived at the House of Serfas in the mid-’50s when he was a young sportswriter working for the L.A. Herald Express. “It jumped,” he said. “The food was good, and for those of us who lived there, it was walking distance to our rooms. There was such an array of characters living there.... Ernie was the proprietor of the motel, and he allowed so many of us to live there for next to nothing.”

Added Hall: “I lived there in 1957, between marriages.... A lot of people lived there between marriages.”

Ernie A. Serfas was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 23, 1923, to Greek immigrant parents. A 1941 graduate of Manual Arts High School, Serfas attended USC and as a distance runner earned a letter on the 1947 track team coached by Dean Cromwell that was NCAA runner-up to Minnesota.

His USC education was interrupted by his service in the Navy during World War II. Serfas graduated from USC in 1948, and in 1954 he and his brother bought what Hall called “a bankrupt, broken old barn named Flaps Down.”

For the next decade they operated a West Coast version of Toots Shor’s, the beacon of New York nightlife for actors, athletes and other celebrities.

After the Watts riots of 1965, they sold the business. “During that time people were afraid to come to the club,” Serfas’ daughter said.

The brothers started a new venture in Corona, the Serfas Country Club. They owned and operated the golf course and restaurant there and ran the restaurants at Montebello Country Club and Los Amigos Country Club in Downey.

In addition to his wife of 30 years, Jean, Serfas is survived by eight children, Dana Fox, Nicholas Serfas, Timothy Serfas, Theresa Acevedo, Clarence Serfas, Trudy Acevedo, Rick Serfas and Ernie Serfas II; 12 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Nick Serfas died in 1996.

Times staff writer Steve Henson contributed to this report from Vero Beach, Fla.