Odds & Ends Around the Valley

Movable Feast

The good news for nostalgia freaks is that the Canoga Park Bob’s Big Boy at 21222 Sherman Way has gone back into the carhopping business.

The bad news is that there were no Elvis sightings at the recent grand resumption of the carhop service, which had been discontinued more than 10 years ago.

Well, never mind. The cars were lined up around the block, according to manager Mike Beardsley, so the King wouldn’t have had a ghost of a chance at one of the 47 parking spaces.

Beardsley enlisted the help of his district manager, Chuck Hogan, in talking the Marriott Corp., which owns the restaurant chain, into trying out this experiment in revival restauranting. For uniforms, he has neon pink and green shirts and matching hats that are worn with shorts. He hired two waitresses who hopped cars in the ‘70s to teach the present food servers how to do it. He put out the word over the radio that the service would be available. Then he waited to see what would happen.

After the first couple of days, Beardsley was sitting in his Simi Valley residence in a semi-daze.

He doesn’t know if the business will keep up, but the initial response was a pleasant surprise, Beardsley said. “The first day we opened for business at 11 a.m. and nothing much happened. Then about 6 p.m., the cars just started rolling in. The next morning, by 11 a.m., the phone was ringing off the hook,” he said. “People were calling from all over Southern California wondering if it was true that we had the old-time Bob’s carhop service.”

Beardsley said he talked to some of the customers and found people had driven in from as far away as Orange County and Santa Barbara.

“The nice thing about carhopping is how cheerful and friendly the customers are,” said Bob’s waitress Julie Parker, 19. “It’s really like you imagined it to be in the ‘50s.”

And tips are good, Parker adds.

“People at car service tip about twice as well as those inside.”

Robert Regrets

The Pritikin Fitness Center in Sherman Oaks is closing Sept. 15, so its 1,800 members are going to have to find another place to tread the mill.

“People are really unhappy,” maintenance manager Oscar Jiminez said. “But the place is not making money, so what can we do?”

Robert Pritikin, who inherited the Pritikin health empire after the 1985 death of his father, Nathan Pritikin, knows that people are unhappy about the closure, but not as unhappy as he has been trying to keep the place open.

“They have been a nightmare,” Pritikin said of the centers in Southern California and Texas. “We started 10 of them in the ‘80s in conjunction with the HMO Maxicare. The HMO was going to encourage health plan subscribers to use the facilities as a prevention against heart and other diseases.

“We were all set up to do a long-term study of program participants and a control group to see if the Pritikin methods of diet and exercise did, in fact, retard the onset of these diseases,” he said.

The program never really got off the ground.

“Maxicare swallowed up a smaller HMO with a multitude of problems and got terminal indigestion,” Pritikin said. “Maxicare was swamped by trying to absorb all the costs. It finally went under.”

That left Pritikin with 10 health spas that were a drain on the Pritikin Foundation’s resources and so, one by one, they were shut down.

Pritikin said that at first he had tried to keep the centers open, although Pritikin is strictly a health-oriented organization, not set up to get into the glitzy spa business where “the appeal is cosmetic and has to do with finding a date for Saturday night.”

“Spas offer no initiation fee and monthly dues of $20 or so. We couldn’t compete with that. Our clients are older and coming to the center for medical reasons. Our staff is all university-trained. Our fees, after the $150 initiation, came to about $66 a month.”

Still, Pritikin tried to get other organizations interested in taking over the centers and found it a hard sell. “The numbers crunchers didn’t understand the Pritikin program, and they didn’t like what they saw on the spreadsheets,” he said.

Because he thought that the people at the Sherman Oaks center were particularly loyal and eager to continue, he tried to get the Sports Connection to take over.

“In the middle of our negotiations, the Sports Connection went out of business,” Pritikin said.

Party Time

Karen Kelly of Eccentricities in Van Nuys says her party-planning service has done a lot of work in Valley back yards this summer, and she sees the trend continuing into the fall.

“People are entertaining informally, but well, and often at home,” Kelly said. “We are doing a lot of luaus and barbecues, but they’re very upscale.”

One of her recent back-yard birthday parties had an East Coast flavor.

“We served Maine lobsters along with the usual barbecue food, and carried out the theme with lobster traps in the Jacuzzi, drinks served from a wheelbarrow, and we served a cake that had been decorated like a lighthouse.”

At another barbecue, held at Tampa Farms in Reseda, Kelly served smoked salmon, bow-tie pasta, chicken with champagne dressing as well as beans and ribs. There were Jell-O barn-yard animals for the children, who also got to pet the farm’s real ones and take pony rides.

Kelly says the catering business is no longer just weddings and adult parties with gourmet pizza. She says that’s dead. Gourmet barbecues are in.

She says the people who hire her service are ordinary people who “have good taste, want good food served, and want to spend time with their family and guests rather than running around trying to do everything.”

Overheard

“I hate doing hair and makeup in the morning. I’m always putting the mascara wand in my eye and using deodorant for hair spray.”--Valley girls at the Sherman Oaks Galleria discussing the hardships of going back to school