Page 2 / News, Trends, Gossip and Stuff To Do : Around Town : The Quirky Pleasures of Pomona

Like a whale navigating its vast bulk through an aquarium tank, Charles Phoenix’s 1963 Dodge 880 pulls alongside the plate-glass, double-drive-through window of Pomona’s Taylor-Maid Do-Nuts. “I don’t really like doughnuts,” Phoenix admits, after ordering two glazed, “but I certainly like to go through the motions of buying them.”

On this early stop of the automobile tour that inspired his recently published “Cruising the Pomona Valley” (Horn of Plenty Press, $16.95), Phoenix is all candor. “This book is not about good architecture,” the Pomona native cautions. “It’s about the unique, the outstanding, the outrageous or original,” he says, recalling the eclectic ephemera of his youth.

Like the book, Phoenix begins his tour at the L.A. County Fair, which begins Thursday in his hometown. He charts a bewildering voyage through that city, Montclair and Ontario, a kitschy realm of French-dip stands and erector-set coffee shops, patriotic ice-cream parlors and Polynesian apartment complexes, forsaken drive-in theaters and a bravura pedestrian mall designed by Southern California artist Millard Sheets.

Swinging his Dodge toward Holt Street, Phoenix takes a bite into his Taylor-Maid, which is enough to reassess his doughnut aversion. “You know, I could eat doughnuts every 20 minutes,” he says, “but I can’t because then I’d be as big as a house. . . . OK, here, believe it or not, was the ultimate space-age Cadillac dealership.”

He applies the brakes before a massive flying saucer of a building, which more recently served as home to the Blood Covenant Christian Center. “It was spectacular in its day, floating with a recessed base,” Phoenix explains.

Drifting toward Montclair, he beholds the double concrete canopies of the Bowlium, built in 1958. “It’s that George Jetson meets Fred Flintstone architectural style, accessorized by clustered palms and an ocean of asphalt with parking for 90 cars,” he lectures.

In Ontario, the Dodge 880 prowls Euclid Avenue, where Phoenix picks out an Chinese restaurant called the Yangtze. “It has the most spectacular original interior, avocado tuck-and-roll booths with these brass buttons,” he says. “They still serve tiki drinks in these little tiki gods and sea shells. You can film a James Bond movie in there and not even have to do a thing to dress the set!”

Back in Pomona, just off Holt, Phoenix stops at the tiny Art Deco facade of Logan’s Handmade Candies, which is headquarters not only to the largest homemade candy cane, but also the most malleable candy canes: They are twisted into green shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day and hearts for St. Valentine’s. “It’s an experience just to watch a candy cane being made,” Phoenix says. ‘You see a candy cane, you eat a candy cane, but you don’t really imagine the twisting of the candy and everything.”

Ending his cruise in a crescendo of Pomona Valley gigantism, Phoenix pays homage to the towering fiberglass cowboy above Carl’s Acres of Trailers, “the world’s largest mobile home dealer.” At lunchtime, the Dodge 880 is parked outside sprawling Vince’s Spaghetti, “the largest spaghetti house in the world”--”over 15,000 miles of spaghetti served each year.” Despite Vince’s success, Phoenix says, “the family is unpretentious. These people are like your next-door neighbors.”

Phoenix too has remained modest, even after returning to the Pomona Valley of his boyhood in triumph. “I’ve become a hometown hero because of the book,” Phoenix acknowledges.

Charles Phoenix will be signing “Cruising the Pomona Valley” at the L.A. County Fair, Sept. 17, 8 p.m., at the Millard Sheets Gallery. (323) 665-2456.