Amid Abuse and Coffee, Town Enjoys Breakfast

It’s 6 in the morning at Mary Etta’s Cafe and Larry Sturholm is working as hard at turning a gargantuan sausage-mushroom-onion-tomato-green pepper-cheese omelet as he is at dodging the insults from the local good ol’ boys.

“We don’t come here for the food. We like the entertainment,” says one, who sort of starts things off.

In here, everybody is the entertainment as they try their darndest to hurl insults at Sturholm, a big guy with wavy gray hair and a stomach that fills every crease of his silk-screened “Where the hell is Flinn Springs?” shirt.

“You think we like eating here? Hell, it’s the only place you can eat breakfast in Flinn Springs.”

“We never send the food back to the cook. We just get used to it.”

“This place is pretty consistent. Same old mess every day.”

“It may be a new year but Larry’ll still remember how to burn the eggs.”

“Larry doesn’t have to buy much bacon. He carries it on him.”

Some of the customers get here at 5:30--even though only a couple of lights are on--to hunker down in their favorite booth while the griddle gets hot.

Sturholm’s wife, Mary Etta (yep, there is a Mary Etta at Mary Etta’s Cafe) comes in around 6:30, after she’s put a load of clothes in the washer, to give Larry a hand.

She’ll work the eight counter stools and four dinettes as the one and only waitress. If she’s got her hands full, customers will walk behind the counter to pour their own coffee. She’ll razz the regulars who don’t clear their own plates. For Christmas, someone gave Mary some new curtains to hang by the window next to the cash register. It’s that kind of place.

By now it’s pushing 6:30 and the sky outside is showing a hint of pink. A customer leaves to go to work and Larry knows who it is and shouts a goodby without turning

his back to the eight-foot-long griddle.

It’s the start of another typical day in Flinn Springs, a little town between Johnstown and Chocolate Summit. (Or, if that doesn’t ring a bell, head off on Old Highway 80 between El Cajon and Alpine.)

Nobody famous lives here and nothing too exciting happens here, unless you were around back in 1977 when the opening scene to the movie “Stunt Man” was filmed outside Mary Etta’s because the guy who searches for movie locations stumbled across the cafe and thought it looked like the quintessential small-town truck stop, which the opening scene called for.

It’s not easy to stereotype a town--even one with only 500 people or so, like Flinn Springs. But you can say it’s rural and off the beaten path and blue-collar and everybody gets along. One day a guy said he needed to borrow a sledge hammer and the next morning there were seven of them at his front door.

And while everyone knows each other, an outsider who walks into the cafe doesn’t feel like a lightning rod for cold stares and wonder if maybe his nose is upside down. He’ll just be challenged to order the biggest omelet on the menu and everyone will sit back to wait and see if he can finish it. It’s a sure bet he won’t.

If a town has a routine, it’s Flinn Springs.

The day starts at Mary Etta’s for breakfast, where you play the kidney contest (first person to cave in to too much coffee buys coffee for everyone else).

Come midday, you head over to the front porch at Flinn Springs Feed & Supply, and let owner Dietrich Schroeder reminisce about going to school in Poland--he’ll reminisce even if you don’t ask--or listen to a customer talk about his champion mule, Big Red Loretta.

In the evening, tip a few at Julian Phillips’ Flinn Springs Inn, do the two-step to a live band and close the place down around the pool table. Then show up the next morning at Mary Etta’s, and try some new insults on Larry.

For variety, you can do coffee in the morning at the feed store and have lunch at Mary Etta’s. The hamburgers are as big as the omelets but you can’t hang around too long because the place closes at 2, when Larry and Mary are too pooped to continue and there’s no one else to do the work.

There’s more to Flinn Springs than meets the stomach at Mary Etta’s.

There’s a little Italian restaurant, a motel, an egg-processing factory, a couple of antique stores (the stores look older than the antiques), a couple of feed stores, a saddle repair shop, a butcher, a concrete and masonry outlet, a fellow who sells firewood, a county regional park and three or four mobile home parks.

But there’s no barbershop or gas station because, after Interstate 8 was built back in the early ‘60s, life in the fast lane started passing Flinn Springs by.

Ask someone what’s new here over the last 10 years and you’d better find a way to kill some time while they search for an answer.

The place was founded around 1918 by, of course, a guy named Flinn (Harry, who drove a stagecoach along the Butterfield Line) and you won’t be surprised to hear that there’s a spring on the hillside that feeds a creek that runs through the park.

The early folks grew tomatoes and boysenberries, and there were a few lemon and orange groves.

A lot of today’s residents are retired; others drive west into El Cajon or San Diego or La Mesa to work, wearing cowboy boots and Caterpillar baseball caps.

It’s after lunchtime and Larry Sturholm is now sitting on the other side of the counter, working on his second can of Lite beer and a plate of fries, well done.

He talks about the kicked-back life style of Flinn Springs, even though he works so hard. He used to own three different pet supply stores in the Los Angeles area, then moved into wholesale pet supply sales. But the Los Angeles freeways ate him up and spit him out, so he retreated down here to catch his breath. One day nine years ago his wife stopped in the cafe for a hamburger; the next thing he knew, they bought the place. “Kind of ridiculous, but we got a hell of a deal,” he says. He learned how to cook in two days and took over the joint. He says he has never been happier.

The cafe’s closed only on Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Sturholms take off Monday and Tuesday, when they hire others to cook and serve. And don’t figure on attacking a nine-inch slab of ham on a Sunday morning unless you get here at 6 a.m. sharp or are prepared to stand around for an hour or two and wait, in which case the coffee’s on the house.

The cafe’s walls are plastered with beer mirrors and bumper stickers. There’s “Even the Poorest Fishing Is Better Than Any Kind of Work,” “This Is Not Burger King--You Can’t Have It Your Way,” “I Refuse to Have a Battle of Wills With an Unarmed Person,” “I’d Like to Help You Out--Which Way Did You Come In?” and “I’m Not Easy, But I Can Be Tricked.”

There’s maybe 50 or 75 bumper stickers. Sturholm has added only one since taking over the place nine years ago: “Don’t Trust a Skinny Cook.”

It’s all one big happy family here in Flinn Springs.

Julian Phillips and his wife, Betty, who own the Flinn Springs Inn, eat breakfast at Mary Etta’s. Larry and Mary Etta Sturholm eat dinner at Flinn Springs Inn.

If there’s a big ballgame in San Diego or someone gets it in their skin to go to Las Vegas, they’ll rent a fun bus and invite the whole town to go along.

“Gotta pour some concrete? Just put the word out and everyone’ll give you a hand,” Phillips said.

“If Charlie’s pigs get out, we’ll all go over and push them back through the gate,” Schroeder said.