Going East : From a Drive-Through Cobbler’s Shop in Simi Valley to Waterfalls and Wildflowers in a Corner of Thousand Oaks

Editor’s note: Future stories will spotlight discoveries in the West and North County areas.

To know a place, to truly know it, you have to have been there.

Actually, you can know a place by merely reading about it, but it’s best to have been there.

Of course, if you’ve never been to a place and you haven’t read about it, you can still know it, in a way, if you’ve been told about it in detail, or if, at the very least, you once overheard someone who might very well have been talking about it.

These are all fine ways to know a place. The reader will be pleased, then, to learn that we have utilized all these methods in compiling this guide to places in east Ventura County that are obscure, easily overlooked, known only to locals, or all three.

It is best to have been there, though, so in each case we went. Our findings:

SIMI VALLEY

* Jerry’s Coffee Shop features eight tables, a dozen or so counter stools and no one named Jerry. This is an anacronism: a no-frills, family owned and operated diner with terrific food, great service and prices stuck in a time warp. Few items on the menu cost more than $3.95.

Jerry is the woman who used to own the place.

Yen Yang is a Taiwanese immigrant with a distinctly American diner that he bought from Jerry six years ago. “People say, ‘Don’t change,’ ” Yang says, recalling his first weeks as the new owner. “This is local restaurant. Don’t change.” That’s why Jerry’s still serves American food--omelettes, burgers, sandwiches, eggs, biscuits and gravy--and is still called Jerry’s.

There is nothing about Jerry’s as seen from the street that would induce you to stop. You have to have heard about the place. Yang, sounding like the product of a 1950s business seminar, explains why people always go back. “Good quality, good service,” he says. “Consider customer always No. 1.” Most of his customers he knows by name.

Jerry’s is tucked between Spatz Insurance and Green Valley Lawnmower at 4817 Los Angeles Ave. Open for breakfast and lunch seven days a week. Closed the second Tuesday of every month.

* Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village has acquired some renown over the years and is recognized by the state of California as a historical landmark. But it’s easy to miss unless you know where to look, which is immediately east of the condominiums at 4583 Cochran St. (between Tapo Canyon Road and Stearns Street).

The offical plaque out front describes Bottle Village as “one of California’s remarkable Twentieth Century folk art environments.”

It’s also a testament to human obsession.

As the story goes, one day in 1956 a certain Grandma Prisbrey, nearly 60 at the time, inexplicably started building shrines, sculptures and structures from recycled items and things from the local dump. She was partial to bottles. Pop bottles, wine bottles, cider bottles, liquor bottles. If it was a bottle, she grabbed it.

At least Noah had a goal. Grandma Prisbrey just kept on building. Today, 13 buildings and 20 sculptures constructed with bottles of every description comprise this odd monument. The fenced and gated yard contains wire bins stacked with more bottles. Apparently, Grandma Prisbrey wasn’t finished.

* Penny Pinchers has the distinct advantage over Bottle Village of featuring more than bottles. This maze of retail bills itself as “a collector’s paradise” specializing in antiques, collectibles, used furniture and “junque.” Every known artifact falls into at least one of those categories.

Established 26 years ago as a hobby, Penny Pinchers has gradually gobbled up an entire strip mall on a back street just north of Los Angeles Avenue.

Sixty purveyors of the odd and practical rent space from founder Kathy Ervin. An 8- by 10-foot area costs $250 a month, plus 10% commission.

The renters, predominantly housewives, aren’t present, but their stuff certainly is here.

Furniture, bird cages, lamps, cribs, paintings, mirrors, drinking glasses, golf clubs . . . Where else can you find a Belknap Delux wooden sled in good condition for $32.95?

Stuff is where you find it. Penny Pinchers’ renters find it at estate sales, swap meets, auctions, garage sales and in friends’ attics. Ervin stocks 25% of her store’s floor space herself.

Unlike her renters, however, she doesn’t search for stuff. Stuff comes to her. Most of it belongs to everyday folks who want to get rid of it.

“When you make somebody an offer and they think it’s worth more, they’re unhappy,” Ervin explains. “I don’t make offers. I ask them what they want, and if the price is fair I just buy it.”

Penny Pinchers is at 4265 Valley Fair.

* El Taco de Mexico, curiously enough, specializes in French pastries. No, actually, Adam Valenzuela, owner-manager of this year-old enterprise, is building his reputation on soft-shell tacos and burritos. Some people say the tacos are better than in Mexico, he boasts. Plus the drive is shorter, unless you’re starting in Chula Vista.

El Taco occupies a squat, powder-blue, cinder-block edifice next to A.D.M. Check Cashing in the 1500 block of Los Angeles Avenue. Parking is available in the back, but good luck getting one of the 12 spaces during peak lunch and dinner hours. Apparently, it’s worth the hassle. Rumor has it that cooks and staff from the area’s chain Mexican restaurants eat at El Taco.

“Lotsa people say they like little hole in the wall,” Valenzuela says. “That’s what they call this place--hole in the wall.”

* Cobblers Bench Shoe Repair may owe its longevity to a hole in the wall: a drive-up window in the back of the shop. The business has survived 32 years at the same site, which is remarkable considering its poor location. The shop is nowhere to be seen from the street.

“In ’59 we were really the only shopping center in Simi,” recalls Joe Erwin, whose father launched the business that year. “Everything has closed in around us.”

Cobblers Bench is now buried behind a thrift store, which itself is buried behind a strip mall (Southwest Plaza) in the 1400 block of Los Angeles Avenue. Erwin estimates that the shop does 60% of its business through the window, an innovation conceived by his father in the early 1960s. Better to have profits coming in the window instead of the other way around.

* Elmer’s Bar, according to owner Elmer Schemm, sees a complete turnover of clientele every five years. What’s amazing is that it takes only five years for a new set of customers to find the place.

Elmer’s has a sign in the back and another on a roof overhang that you can’t see because it’s hanging over you. Just finding the door is a challenge. It helps to know that the bar is behind the liquor store, which is next to the Bank of America in the 1300 block of Los Angeles Avenue. The bar door itself is unmarked, as is the brick wall through which it passes.

Schemm has been squirreled away in this dark little cubbyhole for 21 years. If the Cobblers Bench owes its survival to a drive-up window, Elmer’s Bar has lasted two decades in no small part because of a gas barbecue grill at the end of the bar. Elmer’s sells only 400 or 500 hamburgers a week, but the grill brings in the patrons. “If I just had a beer bar (with no grill) I’d be down the tubes just like everyone else,” Schemm says.

Elmer’s does a big lunch business, but Saturday nights are dead. No matter what the night or how much beer is flowing, Schemm doesn’t stay open past the bewitching hour. “When it gets to be midnight,” he reasons, “all I’ve got to look forward to is somebody else’s trouble.”

* Strathearn Historical Park and Museum occupies 6 1/4 secluded acres, a swatch of unsullied countryside tucked behind the asphalt-bound K mart center at Los Angeles Avenue and Madera Road. The park is the former site of a Chumash village called Shimiji, from which the name Simi was derived. Museum Director Patricia Havens of the Simi Valley Historical Society says the two-room adobe portion of the park’s Strathearn Home is probably the oldest surviving building in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

The Simi Adobe, with three-foot-thick walls, was built nearly 200 years ago. Even the newer portion of the Strathearn Home is a century old.

Other historical structures have been moved to the site, including the original Simi Library. And anyone who appreciates old farm implements will be dazzled by the variety on display here. Anyone who does not appreciate old farm implements will be bored silly by them and would do well to loiter under a shade tree or in the tiny gift shop.

OAK PARK

* Oak Park itself is obscure, easily overlooked and known only to locals, so we feel compelled to include the entire community herewith. You hear Oak Park mentioned occasionally, and it shows up prominently on maps, but who ever goes there? Nobody except the 13,000 people who reside there, and the only reason they go there is because they reside there.

Oak Park is a squeaky clean cluster of new houses and condominiums in the rolling hills north of Agoura Hills. For a place called Oak Park it has very few oaks. It does have several parks, however, and three schools and a Church of Latter-day Saints under construction. What it does not have is a Main Street, a post office, a zip code or a history.

The focal point of Oak Park is the Oak Park Shopping Center, a circular configuration of businesses anchored by Ralphs supermarket, Thrifty Drugs, Blockbuster Video and an El Pollo Loco restaurant. The parking lot looks as though it could accommodate all 13,000 residents.

The problem with Oak Park, other than the lack of oaks, is that it’s not on the way to or from anything. That’s also the beauty of it.

THOUSAND OAKS

* Harold’s House of Omelettes at 2440 Thousand Oaks Blvd. sports a sterile strip-mall facade, not the sort of look that beckons you from the road. Never mind. Harold’s has been there for 28 years. You don’t last that long by making lousy omelettes.

Harold Warner, 68, was a drummer in the Midwest before the cold and snow drove him out of his native Green Bay, Wis., in the 1950s. He landed at DuPar’s in Hollywood as an inexperienced cook.

“Every time somebody ordered an omelette, the cooks got upset because they’re a hassle to make,” Warner remembers. “So when I started my own place I decided to do omelettes.”

With his batter pre-mixed, Warner can make an omelette in 90 seconds. Favorites at Harold’s House are the ham and cheese, the beef stroganoff and the chile verde.

But be nice to Harold. “If he doesn’t like you,” says daughter-in-law Nancy Warner, who manages the restaurant, “he’ll dump your food and tell you to get out.”

* Wildwood Park is a 1,700-acre wilderness in the Santa Monica Mountains. Where Avenida de los Arboles peters out just west of Lynn Road, residential tracts give way to this hidden sanctuary. An extensive trail system grants access to Wildwood Creek, Wildwood Falls, spring wildflowers and habitat for 37 species of mammals, 60 species of birds and 22 species of reptiles and amphibians.

Many Hollywood productions were shot on location at Wildwood, including “Wuthering Heights,” “The Shores of Iwo Jima” and episodes of television’s “Wagon Train,” “The Rifleman” and “Gunsmoke.”

More on Wildwood Park: See For The Kids column.

* Conejo Swimworks is well known in the competitive swimming community, less so in the world at large. “The best-kept secret in the area,” owner Barbara Mandich says. And no wonder, given that this tiny shop is situated near the end of a long driveway (next to Pierce Brothers Mortuary) off Wilbur Road, behind the Conejo Recreation and Parks District. There is no sign on the street to indicate that the store is back there.

Both the store and the adjacent Daland Swim School opened about 4 1/2 years ago. Starting with two racks of swimsuits, Swimworks now has more than 5,000 suits in the store with an emphasis on girls’ and women’s suits.

Swimworks supplies suits and accessories to schools and clubs from Santa Paula to the San Fernando Valley. “My closest competition is in Orange County,” Mandich says.

Orange County might be farther away, but at least you can find it.

* Lupe’s Restaurant is no secret to locals. But Mexican restaurants have a limited sphere of influence in Southern California, where there are more Mexican restaurants than schools, libraries and hospitals combined.

Thousand Oaks has grown up around Lupe’s, which has been at the same site (1710 Thousand Oaks Blvd.) for 45 years.

Martha Zuniga, now 82, opened the eatery in 1947 and, thinking “Martha’s” a poor choice for a Mexican restaurant, named it after her third daughter.

Locals swear by the place, but it helps to know what to order. Touted are the flour taco, guacamole flour taco, steak picado and chile verde.

The decor is distinctly Mexican, dominated by velvet paintings and tapestries of bulls and bullfighters. Oddly, Martha Zuniga has never been to a bullfight and abhors animal cruelty.