Merchant of Main Street : Jinx Verona’s Six Taxi Taxi Businesses Are a Driving Force in Downtown Huntington

If this city were a Monopoly game, downtown Main Street would probably represent that initial strip of low-rent deeds: Mediterranean, Baltic and such. And chances are that as soon as you left Go, you’d land on one of Jinx Verona’s properties. In a few short Main Street blocks, he owns or co-owns six businesses--a newsstand, two clothing stores, a guitar shop, a pizza place and a bar.

All are named Taxi Taxi because, Verona says, “I used to fly planes and drive a cab: ‘Taxi, taxi.’ ”

Striding to keep up with him along the bustling street, one soon became accustomed to hearing the Jinx Verona interjected sentence:

“In a lot of ways we in the downtown here--Steven, Hey! What’s happening, bubbie! How’re the kids?--are the Seattle of Huntington Beach. We are the Dadas. This is where the ideas are. We try--Hey, Darlene! How are ya?--to keep the spirit up between individuals. We never stop advocating for these three blocks. It needs a voice. I may not ever visit the rain forest, but I hope somebody--Hey, lady! Hi!--is there fighting for it the way we are this.”

There is no mistaking Verona for a native Californian. Under his perpetual wool beret, the 40-year-old has a decidedly East Coast-born caffeinated intensity, reminding one of a leaner, but no less hyper, Bill Graham. Adopted though his beach town may be, he evinces a father’s love for it and seems to be regarded in return as something of a godfather figure.

Along with his knowing and greeting seemingly everybody on the street as we talked and walked on a recent Thursday, locals and business owners stopped him to discuss strategy on local issues, artisans made deals to feature their wares in his shops, and two young women came up to thank him for finding them a home.

His little business empire started in 1987 with the first Taxi Taxi vintage clothing store, in the narrow cubbyhole where his guitar shop now resides. Now his businesses extend to clothing stores and newsstands in San Francisco and Napa, and the former city is also home to a pair of innovative “cyber-bars.”

Those basically are computers installed in pre-existing coffeehouses, allowing folks to surf the Internet for about $7 an hour. Verona recently closed an unsuccessful Taxi Taxi clothing store in Costa Mesa’s Lab mall--he says his employees got to vote on the decision--but has plans to expand in the county with a coffeehouse and cyber-bars soon.

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When he ran for City Council last year, the ballot read Emil “Jinx” Verona. Though accepted politician nicknames run more along the lines of “Bud” or “Bill,” he still came in 10th in a field of 24.

He got his nickname from the cartoon cat, he of “I hate meeses to pieces!” fame. Growing up in a small town in Connecticut, that was his favorite phrase as he chased his two older brothers around the house. Everyone just called him Jinx by age 3. He and his wife, Diane, have a son now, Denim Fitzgerald Verona. That’s denim like the vintage jeans Taxi Taxi sells, and Fitzgerald, as in JFK.

Verona said, “He was one of my biggest heroes. When he died, I was a little kid working selling newspapers in the street, and I had to yell all day, ‘John F. Kennedy shot in Dallas! Killer at large!’ My father had worked in Nixon’s campaign--I have a photo of Nixon holding me in his arms--but on that day, our house was dark and solemn. And I was haunted by this because I thought that I had done something wrong. You know the way kids think. And after that, whenever I did something wrong as a child, I didn’t see Jesus, I’d see John F. Kennedy shaking his finger at me.”

Perhaps it’s the fear of getting the presidential finger that keeps him acting as if he’s in Camelot. When Verona speaks of his businesses, it’s in terms of an inspiring quest, and to hear him and others talk, he’s Mr. Dream Boss. When I met with him, he was in back of his bar, sawing on a piece of junk Formica. “I built most of my businesses out of swap meet junk. It’s so much fun being creative,” he said.

“He’s always so excited about everything,” said bartender Laura Detterich. “He’s an older guy, but he still has like a little kid inside of him. He’s absolutely the greatest guy, totally fair, and he cares about his employees.

“He has fun when he’s working when he’s here. He has so much energy that when he comes through the door, everyone goes, ‘Hey, hi, Jinx!’ He loves almost all our patrons. He kicks the ones out that he doesn’t like.”

The inventively decorated bar--with a jukebox ranging from the Velvet Underground to Duke Ellington--is without the eye-blighting beer banners and ads of most bars. Verona is opposed to them, as he was to most of the customers who came with the place when he and partner Cody Carroll bought it two years ago.

“When we took this over, we dumped about 70% of the customers,” he said. “They were white supremacists, having racist conversations. They had no respect for anything. Slowly but surely, we got the best clientele in here: fun people, good people, people who listen to NPR.”

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He has partners in most of his businesses, such as James Naismith, who runs the newsstand and is, Verona said, 99% responsible for the cyber-bars.

The Englishman met Verona years ago when he was a motorcycle courier with a leather jacket that was coming unstitched. He went into Taxi Taxi to buy a new one, and instead Verona lent him one to wear while he restitched the old one for him. The two became friends and have motorcycled over much of the United States together.

“My most important people are the people who work with and for me,” Verona said. He’s taken them all bungee jumping and has river rafting and mountain climbing trips planned. He says he trusts them all, never counts the money in the register at the end of the day and doesn’t throw his weight around with them.

“An employer shouldn’t have to be testing how much power he has. Your loyalties from your employees should come naturally because they want to do it for you because they care for you. I don’t think you should get rich on your business. You should make a living, help others to, pay your bills and try to get a health plan,” he said.

Those born without halos usually don’t warrant unanimous acclaim, and Verona isn’t without detractors. “I don’t buy the Jinx line. He’s all talk, an actor. You can’t shut him up, and he never listens,” says one former employee, who preferred not to be named. Unlike other employees, she says he was neither a fair nor fun boss.

“He’s a very interesting man, and I’m not just being politic saying that,” said Main Street business owner Stephen Daniel, who, as president of the Downtown Merchants Assn. is at odds with Verona on a major street issue. “He has some good values and good ideas. To me, he’s a throwback to the ‘60s. But he’s always talking and just won’t listen.”

The issue between them is a plan approved by Daniel’s association and the city that would compel downtown businesses to close on the evening of July 4.

It is an unwelcome Huntington Beach tradition on the holiday that revelers and police clash, and last year was no exception.

Blame the kids who set an old couch alight in the street and tossed firecrackers, if you like, or blame the police, who responded by hosing revelers and bystanders alike with a water truck and responding aggressively with batons, resulting in seven civilian complaints and a civil rights investigation by the FBI.

In either case, it was a mess no one on the street particularly cares to see repeated.

Verona, in opposition to the city plan, thinks last year was just a “boring Fourth of July” until the water truck shook things up, and he believes plans to shut the area down are similarly heavy-handed.

“You run the street like a business. It’s supposed to be managed, not bullied around. You want to get a high score on a pinball machine? Be delicate. Don’t push and shake it until it tilts. Well, the city’s always tilting this street,” he said.

Initially he was suggesting an alternative plan of early closings and security fine-tuning but has more recently come to prefer the idea of no plan, of trusting to the individual businesses to act responsibly. He says he has the backing of 75% of the businesses, which, conversely, is about the amount Daniel says supports the closure plan.

“We’re concerned with safety. We’re supportive of the police,” Verona said. “But you don’t close this street down on the Fourth of July, the most important holiday of the year to me. When you have a baby just born, you don’t whisper it. And this is the birth of a nation! You scream and you yell it: We are born, we are free, we are alive!”

Verona first came to California as a history major at San Francisco State. Later, while traveling the country by Greyhound in 1979, he got off the bus in Huntington Beach.

As we walked, he pointed to a franchise ice cream shop on a corner.

“Let me tell you something, man. Right where that is used to be Terry’s Diner. Just to get off the bus for a while, I sat in that restaurant, had a cup of coffee, and said, ‘This feels good. This feels right .’ I called my family saying I’d found a place to live. There was so much love and caring and ideas inside that place for me.

“I like the way family businesses were run in the old days. I think people who sell ice cream should love ice cream and should know how to make ice cream. I don’t think people should just decide, ‘Oh, I’m going to buy a coffeehouse this month,’ when they’ve never sat in coffeehouses in Europe and don’t know about the Dadas and Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh and Rousseau. They need to know what can come out of these places,” he said.

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He thinks Main Street, one of few places in the county with a recognizable street life, has been in jeopardy since the redevelopment of it in the last decade.

“What will be next here? Blood banks?” he wondered. “How do you compete with a 49-cent taco? For every franchise business that goes in, they know four regular businesses go out. What are you going to replace them with: more franchise businesses? That does not make community. You need places that are unique, and that means people creating and owning their own businesses.

“When they redeveloped this city, I would say that 70% of the people who were part of this community moved, to Seattle, to Portland, to Northern California. I said, hey, I’m staying and fighting. This is my town. I’m staying right here. They’re going to do this stuff everywhere anyway. They did it to Greenwich Village, to Cape Cod, to Haight Street.

“They’re trying to make it some soft, little silky white place, but this is still a workingman’s town.”