Talk about needing a caffeine fix!A reader...

Talk about needing a caffeine fix!

A reader sent in a Westside weekly whose crime blotter included this entry: “8 a.m., 1600 block of Butler Avenue. A thief stole coffee makers from the lunchroom of a police station.”

THEY DON’T MAKE ‘EM LIKE THAT ANYMORE: In his new book on the mostly vanished world of drive-in restaurants, Jim Heimann points out that a Rosemead eatery once advertised that its square hamburger was a bargain. After all, you got “four extra bites--one at each corner.”

PORING OVER THE MENU: Some other bites from Heimann’s “Car Hops and Curb Service”:

* Most servers at the early drive-ins of the 1920s were known as tray boys--they were males. Later, the owners discovered that females were a bigger draw. They were called car hoppers (or hops), tray girls, car hostesses and (our favorite) glamburger girls.

* Carhops at Hody’s Drive-In in L.A. were given a list of instructions, including this warning: “Each employee is allowed 30 minutes to eat during a shift. Caps will be removed while eating. Onions should not be eaten before or during a shift. . . .”

* Only novice customers honked for service--flashing headlights received better service because the car hops couldn’t tell where the honking was coming from.

* In the movie, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), Spencer Tracy dines at a drive-in. As a younger man, according to a carhop at Carpenter’s Drive-In on Sunset Boulevard, the hard-drinking Tracy was fond of dropping in during the 1930s “and knocking the trays off car doors, which isn’t funny to me.”

* In the 1950s, The Track, on Beverly Boulevard, tried to eliminate carhops (an early example of downsizing) with a motor mat--a system whereby food was taken to the cars via automated conveyor belts.

* The Nip and Tuck Chicken Inn in San Diego bragged: “No Knives Served With Fried Chicken.”

* One writer who wasn’t nostalgic about drive-ins was novelist Raymond Chandler who, in “The Little Sister,” refers to “the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-in as gay as circuses with chipper hard-eyed car hops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad.”

We bet Chandler wasn’t a big tipper.

DOES ROVER NEED A SECOND FUR COAT? Michael Bird of Calabasas found a mini-mall that seems to cater to the fur tastes of four-footed customers.

miscelLAny:

The March issue of the American Journalism Review gave its “Correction of the Month” honors--a boo-boo in Rolling Stone that prompted a letter from singer Elvis Costello. “In your fine tribute to dear Jerry Garcia . . . I fear a word became scrambled on the telephone line,” Costello wrote. “So no one will take offense, I actually said Jerry sang with the ‘author’s voice,’ not the ‘awfulest voice.’ Is there even such a word?”