Emilio's
During the mid 1960s we were students at Occidental and used to eat at Roma Pizza. It was across the street from Bob's Big Boy drive-in at 900 east Colorado Street in Glendale. The one-man, owner-operator of Roma Pizza was Emilio, a Russian immigrant, who had built the place himself. He bought the lot, put up a small one-story box-like building made of cinder blocks that looked like it had been transported from Leningrad, along with Emilio.
The restaurant was open seven days a week from 4:30 pm to 2:30 am. Len Fisk found the place and dragged me along with him one night to meet Emilio. Fisk was a dead ringer for Ernie Kovacs in both looks and mental state, drove a 1949 Chevy convertible which had no reverse, later married a Lebanese belly dancer and settled in San Mateo, California.
I was immediately taken with Emilio and ate there when ever I could afford to. It wasn't expensive; I just didn't have any money. Our typical day of raising hell would wind down around twelve or one in the morning, and we'd make our way over to Emilio's. He would take our order, prepare the food, bring it to our table, and then reel off these incredible stories about Mother Russia.
He claimed to speak nine languages but admittedly was fluent in only seven. New customers were quizzed on their background and Emilio would start conversing in the appropriate language. Most of the time, despite where their parents may have come from, the customers spoke only English, which to Emilio was a travesty. He would ask them, "What kind of parents are these that would rob their own children of their heritage?" He used to also berate us "college brats" for being spoiled and for not appreciating how lucky we were to live in America.
He told us that one time during a blizzard in Russia he had gotten lost and spent days walking in a white out looking for shelter. At one point he fell and his hand felt something in the snow. He pulled out what appeared to be a frozen potato, and half starved, began eating. He was half way through it when it became obvious to him that it was a potato from a horse's ass.
Emilio lived with his wife and five kids in a house on the same block as the restaurant. He told us when one of his kids caught a cold, the other four soon followed. His cure was to load all of the kids and their toys into his Buick sedan. He would start the engine and let it sit idling in the driveway, in the sun, with all the windows rolled up. He would then turn up the heater full blast, and join the kids in a rigorous two-hour play-time sauna. He claimed this never failed to cure the kids, and as a bonus, he would drop eight to ten pounds.
Emilio was large in every way, when his apron strings became too short to tie off, he would resume his exercise program. From the time he opened in the late afternoon until closing time, every ninety minutes, business permitting, he would remove his apron and run around the block. There was a clock inside the restaurant that hung on the cinder block wall that was used to time each lap. He would try for a personal best each time. He really ran hard, his head back and his arms pumping. We would be at the starting line with a dish towel to signal when the second hand on the wall clock hit twelve. Emilio would take off, circle the block, come home to the starting line, now serving as the finish line, and we would make note of the time so he could post it to the chart he kept on the wall.
We asked him why he had chosen to put a restaurant across the street from Bob's Big Boy, which at the time was the place to go if you were a teenager in the area. He said it was intentional. He wanted to get in Bob's face by showing people real food instead of those ridiculous burgers across the street. Emilio's place had the ambiance of a bomb shelter and you had to step on a small roach once in a while, but his pizza was great and his lasagna was even better. He would often say that he was saving his money and would someday have a fancy new place with all of the trimmings.
Bob's Big Boy was started by another entrepreneur named Bob Wian. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Wian, a Glendale High grad, sold his De Soto roadster in 1936 for $350, and started a ten-stool, tin-roof hamburger shack called Bob's Pantry. The drive-in was added in 1938 and years later grew into a nation-wide chain. In 1948, Wian became Glendale's youngest mayor at the age of thirty-four.
A year after we graduated from Occidental, Emilio told Hartwig and me one night that he was packing up his family and moving to Fresno where he was going to build a new restaurant at 1800 east Belmont Avenue.
In 1972, my wife and I were travelling by car up to Northern California. When we got to Fresno, I turned off onto Belmont Avenue and we found Emilio's new place. It was really impressive, maybe even a little over the top for Fresno with the live lobsters. It was everything he had described to us when he held court back at Roma Pizza. It had been six years since I'd seen Emilio but you wouldn't know it. He said he wanted a bigger place but the city required so much space for parking he'd had to cut back. He bought a big house on a hill not far from the restaurant and he and his family had a good and happy life.
I went on Google Maps yesterday and used the street view device, Bob's Big Boy, Roma Pizza and Emilio's Fresno place are all gone, not one cinder block left.