A week ago I made a long-delayed visit to L.A.'s Skirball Center to see its exhibit "Bob Dylan's American Journey 1956-1966."

I'm a Dylan fan of almost 30 years standing but it took a while for my interest in seeing the show to overcome my inertia. Viewing a cache of memorabilia didn't strike me as a must-see as far as deepening my appreciation of Dylan's music, and as it turned out, I'm not sure the visit did help all that much.

And yet for me the visit was diverting enough to have been worth the trip and the $10.

One of the first things you see is a wall of 45s featuring 100 versions from all over the world of "Blowin' in the Wind." Among the grab-bag of performers: Trini Lopez, Spike Jones, Marlene Dietrich, Les 3 Menestrels, Odetta, the Harmonicats, Sven-Ingvars, Vince Guaraldi, Stevie Wonder, Gun Sjoberg and Srecko Zubak. Some of them sound like characters in one of Dylan's more surreal songs. Odetta's version, by the way, is the more grammatically precise "Blowing in the Wind."

Inside the exhibit are typed and handwritten lyrics to classic Dylan songs, concert tickets, handbills, photos, video clips, correspondence and recordings of songs by Dylan and by folk and blues artists who inspired him. It made for an enjoyable hour.

Some of the material wasn't new to me and yet it was neat to see the actual object. I'm thinking here of the famous Robert Shelton review that led to Dylan's recording contract. This version is the original, clipped from the New York Times. I've seen young Robert Zimmerman's 1959 Hibbing High yearbook photo in many books, but here was the actual yearbook. I knew his stated ambition was "to join Little Richard," but did you know his club affiliations were "Latin Club 2, Social Studies Club 4"?

We also see his inscription in a female classmate's yearbook that includes the charming comment: "You have the most beautifullest hair in school, too." There's also a 1964-ish letter to Joan Baez's mother written by Dylan openly pretending to be Joan, talking about how in love they were and how wonderful he was.

Silly, inessential stuff, but kind of fun.

I overheard a tour guide say that Echo Helstrom, Dylan's first girlfriend, phoned and was given a private tour of the exhibit. There were plenty of regular folks there when I visited, from all ages. Including polite but bored children enduring their parents' mini-lectures on the 1960s civil rights movement.

One of the coolest objects was Bruce Langhorne's tambourine, the one that inspired "Mr. Tambourine Man," in a glass case. I recall reading where Dylan described the tambourine as being as large as a wagon wheel. Well, it's not that big, but it's probably 15 inches across.

If you're curious about Dylan, whether you're a neophyte or a hardcore fan, I'd say the exhibit is worth a visit.

The exhibit, which opened in February, continues through June 8. Many of the neatest lectures, films and other ancillary events are past, but there are more. On Sunday, Ann Powers, the L.A. Times pop music critic, will lead a tour at 2:30. Wish I'd waited a week to go. And the rare documentary "Eat the Document" will screen May 29 at 8 p.m.

If you're not curious about Dylan, thanks for reading this far.

This week's restaurant stretches the definition: Costco, with locations at 11800 Fourth St., Rancho Cucamonga, and 9404 Central Ave., Montclair.

When a few budget-conscious friends invited me to lunch at Costco, I wasn't sure what to make of it. I'm not a Costco member and I didn't even know you could eat there. But they said anyone can eat at the cafe, which is on the patio, and that the $1.50 hot dog and soda special couldn't be beat.

So a group of us met at the Rancho location across from Ontario Mills. You line up, place your order at a window from the very basic menu depicted in giant blow-up photos on the block wall above, get your food and sit at the one of the plastic benches on the utilitarian, hose-it-off-before-closing-time patio.

I got only the 1/4-lb. hot dog and 20-oz. soda, $1.62 with tax, to relish the novelty of the cheapest lunch I've had since Del Taco halted its three tacos for 99 cents deal.

The hot dogs and Polish sausage are Hebrew National, all-beef. I had the Polish and asked for the off-menu sauerkraut, one friend's tip.

The dog didn't live up to the hype and didn't taste like anything other than a hot dog, but for the price, it was outstanding.

Curious about the $1.99 pizza slices, I visited the Montclair Costco a few days later. This time I got the frozen yogurt chocolate and vanilla swirl ($1.35) as well as a combo slice, and no drink. Total: $3.61. While these prices, and the 59-cent soda with free refill, are eye-poppingly low, my guess is that with its high volume and low overhead, Costco still makes a profit.

The pizza slice was only average, which still made it better than some pizza I've paid more for. The swirl was tasty but as it came in a 5-inch-tall plastic cup, there was enough for a whole family.

It would take only three more visits for me to try every type of food on the menu: the chicken caesar salad, the turkey wrap, the berry sundae, the berry smoothie, the ice cream bar and the most mysterious item, which is called the chicken bake. It seems to contain chicken, cheese and bacon, all deep-fried into a hot dog-like form. It's oddly compelling.

Social critics will grind their teeth at hearing that at $3.99, the salad and turkey wrap, the healthiest items, are the most expensive other than a full pizza, thus encouraging us all to stuff our faces with hot dogs and chicken bakes.

The two Costco cafes are identical except in Rancho there were ropes to funnel us through in one line, whereas in Montclair we lined up at individual windows, like we were at a ballpark. Also, in Rancho the patio has overhead heaters. Perhaps corporate HQ thinks Montclair has a naturally hotter climate.

Both locations are good for people-watching if you take an academic interest in the type of people who shop at Costco. In fact that thought was just crossing my mind in Montclair when a mother with two children in tow passed by pushing a shopping cart containing one item: a crate-like box of diapers with the number 264 on the side.

Charles Phoenix, "born in Ontario, California," made LA Weekly's People of 2008. He's the L.A. slide-show king and author of the "Cruising the Pomona Valley" guidebook. Congratulations, Charles!

Marilyn Varney writes:

"I noticed this picture on eBay for " '20s snapshot photo Honeyville in Pomona, CA." Could Honeyville really have existed in Pomona? Have you heard of this in your past research? I know you have learned many interesting things about this nice city and I wanted to pass along this information to you."

Honeyville is a new one on me but judging from the photo it was a roadside farm stand, maybe on a road like Holt or Mission or Foothill used by pre-freeway travelers.

There used to be orange juice stands too, an idea that used to strike me (born in the soda era) as ridiculous until it dawned on me that back then, fresh-squeezed OJ was probably a novelty, and a refreshing one at that.

I got an e-mail from ex-Ontarian Bill Gunn the last time the Ritz Theater was mentioned here. Now that the Ritz is on the blog again, here's Bill's note, as timely as ever:

"I was wondering what the Ritz Theatre was all about until I realized you were talking about the California. What about the Park? It was toward Holt from the Ritz about four doors. It was Ontario's third theater."

Ontario's leading theater was the Granada, still standing on the west side of Euclid Avenue at 305 but used now as a church. The Park and the California, later named the Ritz, were on the east side of Euclid. The California/Ritz, at 136 N. Euclid, burned down.

The Park is the most obscure of the three, not least of which because it went through multiple names. It seems to have had the Park name from 1948 to about 1962. Here's what I found out Tuesday from the Ontario Library's Joanne Boyajian:

The theater was built in 1913 at 122 N. Euclid. First it was the Isis, owned by Jacob Lerch. In 1915 it changed hands and became the Euclid when the competing theater across the street, the Euclid Photoplay, took it over and relocated.

The new Euclid theater had more than 500 seats and up-to-date stage and dressing rooms to accommodate "any road show that comes to the city," according to the Daily Report. Owner H.E. Milling's stated specialty was "high-class moving picture dramas and only the better class of vaudeville." Inferior acts were "strictly barred." But of course.

The Euclid remained through at least 1928. It was known to be vacant in the mid-1930s, in the depths of the Depression. (The California and Granada theaters apparently closed in the Depression as well before being reopened in 1933 by Jack Anderson.)

From 1937-1938 the Euclid was resurrected as the Forum Theater and it remained under that name until 1948 when it was named -- finally! -- the Park Theater, owned by the Anderson brothers.

But by 1962, it was a pawn shop, Euclid Loan and Jewelry Co. Today Euclid Loan is still operating, but the pawn shop is slated to relocate across Euclid so the building can be demolished for the great downtown project that at this point isn't looking so great.

Whew!

Anyone have any memories of the Park?

Charles Bentley writes to inquire about a fondly recalled Pomona restaurant:

"My father has been trying to come up with the name of a Pomona restaurant that was extremely popular for many years. After many weeks of pondering, he believes the name of the place was Orlando's.

"Can anyone out there help with this one?"

My files indicate that Orlando's was at Holt and Dudley, by the DMV, and was known for its steaks and its dumplings. But it was before my time. Anyone able to tell us more?

Almost five months after comments were made here about Ontario's old Ritz Theater, previously known as the California Theater, a new comment came in. Except at this late date, reader Dave Linck was unable to append the comment to the entry, and neither was I.

So, here it is:

"When the California became the Ritz in 1961, my Dad, Ontario Postmaster Charles Linck Jr., became a minority investor. He was a huge movie fan and it was a dream come true for him.

"But I can still see the theatre's interior...walls covered in faux lava rock with sparkly ceilings...new seats unfilled. And there's my brother and I, racing up and down the empty auditorium aisles, 6-year-old 'owners' of our own theatre!!!"

Oh, to be 6 and have the run of a movie theater.

[Q turned out to be the hardest letter and the only one for which I felt compelled to pick something that no longer physically existed: the WW II-era Quartermaster Depot. (Although some of the buildings still stand.)

This column was originally published Dec. 26, 2004.]

Finding a Q for Pomona means turning to an old warhorse

"Pomona A to Z," my quixotic quest to document the city's quality, today reaches the letter Q, and you can imagine my qualms.

With readers' few Q suggestions mostly quartered in other cities, I was in a quandary, my qwerty keyboard quiet, until research -- whew! -- turned up examples of my quarry.

Let me queue up a quartet of possibilities:

* Quilt made for Pomona's 1988 centennial depicting structures from city history. Check it out on the second floor of City Hall. Can you identify each panel?

* Quest Academy, a private school on Phillips Boulevard serving students from grades three to 12.

* Quarter horse races at Fairplex Park during the L.A. County Fair.

* Quinceanera, the 15th-birthday celebration for Latinas, made possible by Pomona party, clothing and disc jockey businesses.

Which Q will quantify Pomona's quintessence, you query? I hope you won't become quarrelsome when I say it's none of the above.

Instead, our Q is the Quartermaster Depot, the World War II-era name for what is now Cal Poly Pomona. Thanks to Betty Peters for the suggestion.

The depot was one of seven facilities in the nation where the U.S. military, to fight the Nazis, trained its secret weapon: horses.

Yes, horses.

Somehow we won the war anyway.

"It sounds like something out of the Civil War, doesn't it?" said Melissa Paul, curator of Cal Poly's Arabian Horse Library.

The Quartermaster's Remount Service was founded in 1775 to breed, train and supply horses to Army troops in the field and was still galloping along in the thick of the 20th century.

Mechanization was in its nascent stages in World War I, when 571,000 horses and mules carried supplies to U.S. troops.

The expectation was that World War II would be no different, Mary Jane Parkinson wrote in "The Kellogg Arabian Ranch: The First 60 Years," her history of the Cal Poly property.

American strategists learned the Germans had 791,000 horses, compared to our 750.

You've heard of the missile gap? This was a horse gap.

Spurred (har!) into action, the Remount Service looked for fresh horses and a site for a new depot in the West, which it found in good ol' Pomona on what had been cereal magnate W.K. Kellogg's 800-acre Arabian horse ranch.

The War Department took control in August 1943 and proved a better steward than the state university system, which had let the property decline after Kellogg donated it in 1932.

Under the Remount Service, horses again became the central mission and Sunday horse shows for the public continued.

Improvements were made, too. Block walls, landscaping and irrigation were installed by German and Italian prisoners of war, who were held at the Pomona fairgrounds.

No, they didn't eat rations of cotton candy and corn dogs.

Col. F.W. Koester, who had led the Army's War Dog center in San Carlos, was made Pomona's commanding officer, perhaps indicating that horses were a promotion from dogs.

But as it turned out, jeeps and trucks transported personnel and supplies in this war, not horses.

After the war, the Army got out of the horse business. It closed the Pomona Quartermaster Depot in June 1948.

"After more than four and a half years," Parkinson wrote of Kellogg's ranch, "the military air was gone; no more inspections from Quartermaster generals and colonels, no more military decorations ceremonies at the flagpole, no more Quartermaster insignia over the main entry to the stables, and no more salutes in the archways."

The ranch was nearly sold as surplus and its prized horses auctioned off until halted by a public outcry. The property, with the blessing of Kellogg, then 88, was deeded in 1949 to the state, which established what became Cal Poly.

Much of the wartime activity in Pomona remains a mystery.

"We have very little detail on what happened. We just don't have the records," said Paul, the library curator.

A sheaf of declassified documents a mere inch thick accounts for those five years. Author Parkinson managed to pry them from the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act in 1990.

Among the tidbits deemed hush-hush for nearly a half-century: a 1942 inventory of Kellogg's 81 horses, with their names, and the one-page 1943 depot budget listing $36,340 in expenses, including the chief clerk's salary of $2,300.

Keep that on the QT.

(David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday in nearly quotidian fashion.)

La Verne really must be on the cutting edge. The Onion reports that a time traveler from the 22nd century held a press conference in March to inform mankind that the "ice cream of the future" will supplant all other desserts.

"Put down your crude melting desserts of churned animal's milk and embrace the glorious world of high-tech flash-frozen treats," the silver-suited Wolcott proclaimed.

Thanks to reader Steve-O for the timely link.