Verdugo Views: Eatery faced adversity and won over customers

By Katherine Yamada

July 15, 2015 3:48 PM PT

In 1949, Jack Whitten broke his leg playing baseball and lost his job at a delicatessen in Hollywood. He heard that a woman named Billie needed help at a tiny sandwich shop on West Wilson Avenue in Glendale.

The 33-year-old family man found that he could pivot on his leg cast in the narrow workspace and serve up sandwiches handily.

Billie, it turned out, wanted to get out of the business and, with financial backing from meat and bread suppliers, Whitten took over. To save costs, only two letters were changed on the neon sign: Billies became Billy’s, or — as the oldest Whitten son, Lee, wrote in a family history he recently sent by email — “Jack became Billy.”

Jack and his wife of 10 years turned Billy’s into a Jewish delicatessen. Molly Whitten began making gift packs of imported delicacies, handling the bookkeeping and filling catering orders as they began to pour in.

“Customers were wonderful. Strangers shared tables, and Jack soon repaid his suppliers,” Lee Whitten wrote.

The Whittens lived on Temple Street near Glendale Boulevard and, to get to the deli, they merely hopped on the Red Car as it came out of the subway terminal and headed straight to Brand Boulevard and Wilson.

“Glendale is now such a vibrant and open city that it is hard to recall a dark corner of its past. One night that first year, vandals broke in, painted swastikas on the walls, and dumped food on the floor. Petty cash in a drawer was untouched. I was 9 years old, but I could see my father’s quiet chagrin as the detective said something about petty burglary, asked about employees and disappeared,” Lee Whitten wrote.

“My parents learned that while average Glendalians were supportive, there was an unusually dense concentration of far-right organizations, some religious, and most overtly anti-Semitic,” he added. “They had a strong influence in the city, and through radio programs, on much of the country.”

The Whittens cleaned up, dug in and, when a furniture store on Orange Street became available in 1952, they moved. Business grew and the mostly non-Jewish patrons came from Pasadena, Burbank and La Cañada for the Friday night fish dinner of halibut steak with boiled potato and butter. Billy’s sold thousands of them, according to Lee Witten.

“A terrific fish store, Fish King, on Glendale Avenue, run by the Tuchmans, provided Billy’s with the freshest fish. Fresh produce came from a stand at Wilson and Orange run by the wonderful Levinson family,” Lee Whitten wrote.

Bob Levinson later managed their growing catering business. Church and civic groups relied on Billy’s to provide quality meals. Policemen ate at Billy’s with their families, and for years ran an extra patrol or two by the deli at night. Jack was everywhere, in the kitchen, on the dining floor; everyone wanted to say hello to “Billy.”

In the mid-1950s, he had a visit from a group — with Nazi connections, Whitten wrote — that had recently come to Glendale.

“They wanted my Dad to stop using hams from Poland. Billy’s sold a lot of ham, and Polish ham was the best. But Poland was a Communist country, and the group threatened a boycott of Billy’s or worse,” Lee Whitten wrote.

“My dad told me that he had tried to argue that most Poles were Catholic, and that he was trying to help Catholic farmers. They weren’t buying it. I don’t think they liked Catholics much, either. As was his way, Jack offered them lunch, and later ordered hams from Czechoslovakia, too.’’

During an extensive renovation completed in 1970, Lee Whitten designed a new facade with a striking ceramic mural, which art historians are now seeking to preserve. More about that in another column.

Readers Write: Jill Benone, who wrote and directed the long-running Verdugo Woodlands’ Fathers’ Follies for many years, also wrote a history of the early days of the Follies, which appeared in a recent Verdugo Views. After the column was published online on June 3, she emailed this comment: “Thank you for your story in the News-Press. Really good! I have decided I will never graduate from Fathers’ Follies.”

KATHERINE YAMADA can be reached at katherineyamada@gmail.com. or by mail at Verdugo Views, c/o News-Press, 202 W. First St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. Please include your name, address and phone number.