A Winning Serve

At Bobby’s Coffee Shop on Ventura Boulevard, a greasy breakfast joint that’s still packin’ ‘em in after more than 50 years, Mary Wood, as usual, is hard at work.

She shuffles from table to table in her white New Balance sneakers, taking her orders, usually with little more than eye contact or verbal shorthand.

“Ready?” Mary asks one diner.

He nods in the affirmative. “The usual,” he says.

Two poached eggs. Wheat toast, Mary scribbles. That would be Buddy.

Mary knows most of her customers by their orders, and well she should. She’s been waiting on tables at Bobby’s since 1963.

Some quick number crunching with a reporter over pie and coffee reveals she’s waited on enough people to serve every man, woman and child in Gambia--twice over--and poured enough coffee to fill the cup of every person in Dallas.

“I’ve spent more than half my life there,” says Mary, mother of three and grandmother of 10. “I could write a book about the place.”

It was an ad in The Times that led Mary to Bobby’s, then one of just a handful of restaurants at the western end of Ventura Boulevard, just beyond Fallbrook Avenue.

Not long after she started, the first owner, Bobby Perkins, decided to knock off early one day.

“I asked him, ‘Who’s gonna do the cooking?’ ” Mary recalled, her voice still lightly accented with the drawl of her native Tennessee. “He just looked at me and shrugged, and I thought ‘Oh, Lord. What have I gotten myself into?’ ”

She was there for the building boom of the ‘80s when she said opening the front door of the coffee shop was akin to opening floodgates, with construction workers filling every chair in a matter of minutes.

But perhaps the best yardstick for Mary’s years of service is inflation: Today, the breakfast special at Bobby’s is $3.51--still a bargain for sure. But when Mary started work, the same meal was just 69 cents.

What regrets does Mary have after her 36 years of taking orders and serving up steaming plates of Bobby’s West Valley-famous hash browns?

“When you get so busy, you’re not giving your customers the service they deserve,” she says. “They never complain, but you feel that.”

It’s that attitude that has her customers, many of whom she’s been waiting on for decades, all agreeing: There’s something about Mary.

“Busy as she is, she’ll just look you in the eye and she’ll say, ‘How are you?’ and she’ll mean it,” says Jay, a retired linoleum layer and customer of Mary’s for 25 years.

“She’s the Mother Teresa of Ventura Boulevard,” proclaims Frank, a regular from the neighborhood.

“She’s not the pope, but she’s the next best thing,” says Bud, a retired heating and air-conditioning guy who’s been sitting in Mary’s section since the ‘60s.

*

The religious references probably come from the fact that, as Don puts it, “she’ll preach to you a little bit if you let her.”

Nothing too heavy, the guys all agree. Just little reminders.

“She’ll just remind you that the Lord will take care of you,” says Don, a 68-year-old bald-headed Harley rider who Mary recently visited in the hospital after he was hit by a car. “She keeps you on the straight and narrow.”

Not that Mary can’t be a bit of a cutup at times, too.

Her shift starts at 4:30 a.m. but she arrives an hour early, she jokes, “to put an extra coat of grease on the walls.”

Then there was the time she got fed up with Leroy’s bellyaching about Bobby’s not serving waffles.

She plopped his plate of pancakes down on the table, leaned over and proceeded to poke holes in the fluffy hot cakes with her finger.

“There you go,” she said with a smile.

“Waffles.”

On a recent day, a reporter sat among Mary’s faithful during the breakfast rush as they recalled stories about their favorite white-haired waitress.

These are guys who throw her a birthday party every year and who attended her 50th wedding anniversary celebration. They’re like a gang of protective big brothers.

But just how deep--and how wide--the feelings run here for “Mom,” as some of the guys refer to her, becomes clear in a moment when a customer who overheard the conversation from a nearby table approached ours and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Son,” he said, “don’t you write anything bad about Mary.” Without saying another word, he turned and walked out the door.

As it turns out, there’s only one “bad” thing I could come up with: After 36 years, Mary Wood is finally calling it quits. She plans to retire sometime this year.