A Red Hot Stand Against MTA
The man in the Metro hard hat sags onto a stool and orders a cheeseburger. He only has a short break, he says, before he’ll have to get back in the tunnel.
“Can I have that soon, please?”
“As soon as it’s blanking ready,” Tommy Geas growls. “Otherwise, get the blank out.”
Some words in this story have been changed to protect the innocent, whose numbers do not include Tommy Geas. Cigarette hanging from his lips, Geas wields his spatula with menace. His rugged face seems vaguely familiar, vaguely criminal.
“I’m the first actor who ever raped a nun on TV,” he boasts. “That’s no joke.”
Jack Palance killed him once and he had it coming. From the 1960s through the ‘80s, Geas appeared in something like 140 TV episodes and movies, almost always as the heavy. “I still get some residuals from ‘Johnny Cool.’ ”
And for the last 20 years, Geas has also appeared, almost daily, in the real-life role of Bud, the popular, profane proprietor of Bud’s Red Hots, so named after the Chicagoan term for hot dog. Situated on Chandler Boulevard just west of Lankershim, Bud’s is one of those little independent burger and hot dog stands that makes L.A. what it is.
But L.A. is changing, and so Geas is no longer playing the heavy. Now, at 62, Tommy Geas finally gets to play the little guy, the underdog, the small-business man battling the awesome force of “progress” in the form of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Metro Rail is coming. And so Bud’s must go.
But not quietly. Geas, defiant, is playing hardball.
“I’m not going out of business,” he says. “They better send a blanking truck with a machine gun in front.”
A few days ago, Geas says, a couple of MTA suits came to try to push the agency’s $15,600 offer for the burger stand. “I threw them the blank out.”
It’s not as though Geas has been caught by surprise. A huge pile of reddish dirt looms across Lankershim where the NoHo Station is expected to open in May 2000. Properties on all sides have been closed to make way for the construction process. Bud’s must go, officials say, because Chandler will be widened to accommodate traffic to the Metro station. The MTA, which already owns the property that Geas leases, plans to use the site as a staging area to bring rail into the tunnel.
Jim Wiley, manager of real estate acquisition, says that the agency has been “more than fair” and Geas has been less than reasonable. The MTA, he notes, acquired the property from Southern Pacific seven years ago and assumed Geas’ month-to-month lease, the terms of which provide for a 30-day termination and would require Geas to remove the building at his cost. “We felt it was unfair to enforce the lease,” says Wiley. “We made what I think is a very fair offer.”
In addition to the $15,600, Wiley says, the MTA would be legally required to pay up to $10,000 in relocation costs, and would also compensate him for loss of business goodwill.
“He believes he has a very valuable business,” Wiley says. On this point, Wiley says, the two sides are far apart. The MTA also wants everyone to remember that the taxpayers’ money is at stake.
It is hard, Geas suggests, to judge the value of Bud’s by what you see today. Business dropped precipitously, he says, when Metro Rail started making its impact here, closing several local businesses that provided steady clientele. Metro Rail construction workers have not come close to making up the difference. Nearby, another locally famous eatery, Phil’s Diner, went out of business last year. (Phil’s will reopen, though at a different site.)
Today Bud’s is a dowdy place, but in better times the four picnic tables were filled and customers were lined up three deep at the counters. A regular named Jerry likes to tell of his Washington law associates who came to the Valley on business and became smitten with Geas’ cheeseburgers. When they got home, they called with a special request. Jerry obligingly bought a dozen cheeseburgers, packed them in dry ice and shipped them overnight.
Homeless men who collect cans eat here, Geas says, “and I’ve had guys pull up in Rolls-Royces.”
The tattered menus, held together by masking tape, include this note: “Best hamburger stand in the Valley”--L.A. Weekly, 1984.
The menu’s cover also features a drawing of a 1949 Cadillac parked in front of Bud’s. Whenever Geas is there, the Caddy is there. Once it was a beauty, creamy beige with fat whitewalls. It still has whitewalls, but now the hood is scabbed with rust.
“That’s so sad,” Felicia Geas says, frowning at the condition of her father’s old car. A 26-year-old medical student, she is home for the summer. Felicia remembers the days when her father would take her and her sisters to school in the Caddy. Her friends, she says, thought it must be neat to have a dad who was a tough guy on TV, owned a great hamburger stand and drove a cool Caddy. Her smile suggests that it was.
The way Tommy Geas tells it, he got the hamburger stand because of his girls. Raised in Massachusetts, he joined the Navy during the Korean War and later came to Hollywood to be an actor. Actress Nina Talbot, he says, “was my first wife. No, wait. I think she was my second wife.” He laughs. “I think I got married before that.”
Nina, he explains, was Nicole’s mom. Then came Felicia and Christina by his third wife. Now there is also 7-year-old Matthew by his fourth wife. Growing up, the girls all worked behind the counter, when business was brisk. “My dad would be telling everybody to go to hell,” Felicia recalls. “And they loved it.”
The actor’s life, he says, was up and down. He’d make $5,000 some weeks, and then a month of pocket change. Before he bought Bud’s, he had been a regular customer. When the original Bud died, his widow suggested that Geas buy the business. Geas says that he and a friend, singer Phil Everly, bought the place and that he bought Everly out a couple of years later.
Geas himself sold Bud’s in the mid-1980s. The new owners, he says, made the mistake of changing the menu. They wound up selling it back to Geas at a loss.
Geas may not have created the role of Bud, but he made it his own. That is why it angers him to have MTA officials vowing that Bud’s will be history, one way or another, by November.
This seems to have given him an idea. Geas’ latest tactic is not the kind used by two-fisted guys on “Mannix” or “Cannon” or “Mission: Impossible.” He is trying to prove that Bud’s is already history, the kind worth preserving.
Geas says he has long suspected that this little building was once attached to the old, shuttered Southern Pacific station next door, already recognized as a cultural heritage landmark. If so, he reasons, Bud’s is landmark too. This wouldn’t prevent condemnation, but would buy him time. The MTA says there’s no evidence to indicate that Bud’s deserves such designation.
If the cultural heritage gambit fails, Geas says, he’ll still find a way to raise hell. Maybe he’ll call the mayor, he says, or some other “‘motherblanking, scum-sucking, blanking” politicians.
Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St. , Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.
