Dishing at Norm’s : Given the Cast of Characters, It’s No Wonder That the Food’s Just Part of the Show

Don’t be thinking just because bacon and eggs go for $1.99 that big britches haven’t stopped by Norm’s coffee shop.

The guy who played TV detective Joe Mannix? He ate here once on his way to divorce court. A Santa Ana cop still carries his ticket book autographed by oddball comic Andy Kaufman.

“And that idiot I hate--Wally something, Wally George on TV. And the Indian! Oh, the Indian man who’s in the commercial where the tear is coming down his face? He was here,” says Agnes Willis, veteran waitress of 16 years.

Even then-Gov. Jerry Brown once got a slice of life when he rendezvoused for coffee with a former police chief. It was the graveyard shift, with “all the drunks and vegetables at that hour,” one officer says with glee. “The governor was right at home.”

So, it seems, are the regular characters that make this generic Main Street diner a neighborhood within a neighborhood.

Like any other always-open joint, Norm’s is occasionally home to lowlifes and losers with nowhere to go. But the core cast appearing almost daily form a melange of culture and age, from the Mexican patriarch who learned English from Santana records to the rich lawyer who breakfasts daily but leaves just a quarter tip.

It’s a place where where pie a la mode is served on dainty Dogwood-pattern china, and where waitresses will telephone elderly people who fail to show up for the early-bird special.

“Then,” waitress Willis says with a grin, “they get their butts chewed out if it turns out they’re OK.”

Couples such as Lenny the air-conditioner man and Ginger the nurse met here and married; in fact, Lenny and Ginger still drive in daily from Riverside for breakfast. Retirees such as Bob Bostick, 81, a pipe fitter who helped build Disneyland, an Edison plant and two freeways, check in nightly for chat and chow.

Others in the ensemble:

* William Rodick, a grizzle-faced loner who likes to puff cigars and sip iced teas while reading paperback Westerns at the counter.

* Marge Neil, a vivacious 69-year-old widow four times married, who once met John F. Kennedy and says, slyly: “That charisma! I don’t blame Marilyn Monroe or any woman for, well, you know.”

* Jesus Batista, a Mexican immigrant and janitor whose family of five visits every other Sunday after church, plus Christmas and Thanksgiving, so his working wife doesn’t have to cook.

* Darleen and Darleen, wonderful and adoring mother-and-daughter redheads who unconsciously mirror each other as they eat french fries, then apply fresh lipstick.

The daughter, who works at a linen boutique, extols the virtues of a properly dressed table, an appreciation “I learned from my mother and grandmother. We think it affects your digestion,” she muses as they eat off paper place mats.

Darleen and Darleen ate at Norm’s on Mother’s Day, which, with more than 2,000 meals served, was the finest hour at Norm’s.

“This was our busiest holiday ever, though, and the economy plays a part,” says Assistant Manager Shannon Schroeder, 30. “I rang up one bill where a family of nine people ate for $47. Where else can you eat for that?”

By day, Norm’s feeds residents of the working-class neighborhood and commuters who stop in from the nearby Santa Ana Freeway. In the late afternoon, families and senior citizens, who can get discount meals, come in. Nightfall is when the colorful and mangy tend to emerge--sort of an Edward Hopper painting meets the “Star Wars” bar scene.

The homeless show up early and late, parking their bedrolls and shopping carts out back. Hookers in Christmas-ornament earrings stroll in, but their numbers have declined since the pay phones were ripped out. And ever since the Greyhound Bus Depot next door was replaced by a photocopy place, there is less trouble with transients and newly released inmates from Orange County Jail.

“I still drive around to check the perimeter in the morning and wait for another employee to show up before I go in, though,” says Penny Middlemiss, an assistant manager and cook. “Our store does sometimes have problems with the indigent of the world, but the police take good care of us.”

And Norm’s takes care of the beat cops, feeding them for free on Christmas and Thanksgiving. Officer Paul Zugman, 53, eats a cheeseburger and soup five nights a week on his swing shift--as he has since the place opened 16 years ago.

“It’s a cross-section of society there, a cross-section of a lot of types of people,” says Zugman, a Santa Ana patrolman for 27 years. “A lot of guys won’t eat there because of the kind of people who frequent it on graveyard.

“Me? I try to ignore almost everybody,” he admits. “I just want to read my paper and talk to the waitress for a minute, but sometimes there’s this weird old duck who goes on and on with today’s problems. . . . I don’t know, it’s just habit now.”

The special touch seems to set this Norm’s apart. Waitresses and diners remember each other’s birthdays. When Bob Bostick was hospitalized for pneumonia, the restaurant called to check on him, and employees collected money to send him flowers.

“We have a whole list of people and their phone numbers, and if they don’t come in, we call and check on them,” says Willis, 51.

Assistant Manager Schroeder makes sure there is a flower for each female customer on Valentine’s Day. On Mother’s Day, the restaurant was dotted with floral arrangements for the staff.

“You get involved in these people’s lives,” says Schroeder, who grew up in Norm’s--her father has managed many of the chain’s 15 Southern California coffee shops. “Some stores are closer than others. Some (employees) in L.A. have worked together 20, 25 years. Huntington Park in East L.A., the chef remembers me since I was a baby. Cleasiana Williams--she starts talking about my little runny nose when I’m in there!”

As Schroeder sizes up the afternoon lull at about 2, a customer named Julie walks in and hugs her. “What time is it?” she asks with a big smile that is missing a tooth. She exchanges a few more greetings, then finds herself a booth.

Schroeder cracks up: “She orders the Salisbury steak every day. Asks me what time it is. One guy comes in every day for a tuna sandwich, and we give him the A-1 sauce so he can prop up his newspaper.”

Water no ice. Oatmeal no milk. Yolks broken over easy. Sundae with extra cherries. The familiarity of Norm’s, some say, is the next best thing to Mom’s kitchen table.

“I used to have a waitress--till she moved to Sacramento--who would surprise me,” Zugman says. “It was kind of like being home, and Mom would bring you whatever you were gonna get for dinner--and that’s that.”

The horseshoe-shaped counter is favored by lone diners, says General Manager Ray Butterfas, who managed his first Norm’s at 18 and hopes eventually to run the chain--founded in 1949 by car salesman Norman Roybark.

“We have a lot of older people and lonely people, and it’s not as intimidating to eat alone there,” he says.

Neil, a sweet-faced blonde who lives in senior-citizen housing a few miles away, perches at Norm’s many evenings a week. Mother of five, grandmother of 17 plus nine great-grandchildren, she ate alone on Mother’s Day eve. She was a tad melancholy, but mostly it was OK to be away from her clan.

“They are all doing well,” she says with a slight smile, ticking off their far-flung whereabouts. “You don’t want to be too close. You know why? Get into their cocoon, and they don’t need that. And it’s hard enough to be married. Don’t I know?”

Her first husband was a nice man, although “a frigid Englishman,” she says with a sigh. “We were both virgins. What a disappointment that was. . . . My second husband, he was great fun, but he was no good for me. He was a Trader Vic’s bartender--from the old school, he made his own grenadine--but he had a drinking problem, and he always had another woman. We’re still friends, though. I like his wife.”

Neil, a former cocktail waitress, teases the teen-age boy behind the cash register. “You got a little snort back there? No? Heh, heh. Uh-huh. That’s what we used to do. He wouldn’t admit it, though.”

Her past is offered easily, plus musings on an array of topics, from her stint as a florist to quoting Maurice Chevalier songs and presidential picks.

“Perot, I don’t know enough about him, but did you see (the skit about him on) ‘Saturday Night Live’?” She throws her head back, laughing. “Oh! That was funny!”

Finally we get to husband No. 4, her last, a Santa Fe engineer who died 20 years ago.

“Don’t ever marry a railroad man,” she concludes. “He’ll have a broad at every whistle stop. He looked just like Steve Garvey.”