Onetime Rhino Records clerk reminisces

Joel Bellman, now an aide to L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, has penned a great piece for LAObserved about working as a clerk at Rhino Records in Claremont from 1977 to 1980.

An excerpt:

“The pay was modest – the first day, my wages included a second-hand copy of Neil Young’s ‘American Stars ‘n’ Bars’ – but I would gladly have paid them for the privilege. If there was ever a dream job, that was it.

“If you remember the film ‘High Fidelity,’ that was us. Yes, we, too used to run people out if we didn’t like their music, like the poor fellow who came in one day looking for a Village People album. ‘We don’t carry that kind of stuff,’ I sneered. ‘Why don’t you try The Wherehouse.’ And if they ever argued with us about our trade-in appraisal – they were dead. We almost bodily threw one grumbler out of the store – to the lusty cheers of the other patrons.”

Read the whole piece here.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Plusone Linkedin Digg Reddit Stumbleupon Tumblr Email

On the trail of the Buffalo Inn

61554-buffaloinn 003.jpg

Upland’s Buffalo Inn is a restaurant and watering hole at 1814 W. Foothill Blvd., located in a sort of compound of old buildings and thick trees around an expansive patio. It’s hard to get more than a sense of it from the exterior, as even enlarging the thumbnail photo below should make obvious. Their staple item (besides beer) is a burger made from buffalo meat and their housemade potato chips.

The signs say “Established 1929,” and based on the evident age of the structures, it’s quite possible there have been businesses on the property since the Depression, although they weren’t the Buffalo Inn, which opened circa 1976.

Previous businesses known to have been on the site, based on phone directory listings: the Green Frog (1974-75), Hazel’s Tavern (1971-73), Ellis Tavern (1967-69), Ray’s Place (1964), Roy and Kitty’s Cafe (1954) and El Montecito Cafe (1945-51). Notice the many gaps when there was no phone listing. Either the place felt no need to be in the phone book or the property was used only as a residence then.

Kelly Zackmann of Ontario’s Ovitt Library found the above for me but said she “pretty much lost the trail in 1945,” unable to find anything definitive before that date. Could be the restaurant’s owner or employees know more. No newspaper seems to have produced a written history of the site, at least nothing that’s on file at the Ontario or Upland libraries.

If you know anything about the site’s history, or just want to comment on the Buffalo Inn, please do so.

61556-buffaloinn 004-thumb-596x184-61555.jpg
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Plusone Linkedin Digg Reddit Stumbleupon Tumblr Email

Reading log: July 2012

61529-books 056.jpg
61530-books 055.jpg

Books acquired: none

Books read: “A Memory of Murder,” “A Medicine for Melancholy,” Ray Bradbury; “At the Mountains of Madness,” H.P. Lovecraft; “Mail-Order Mysteries,” Kirk Demarais; “The Mad Morality,” Vernard Eller; “Of Mice and Men,” John Steinbeck; “The Marx Brothers at the Movies,” Paul Zimmerman and Burt Goldblatt; “The Mask of Fu Manchu,” Sax Rohmer.

Mm-mm! July’s reading was made up of books with a couple of M’s in the title. As organizing principles go, that’s moderately mad, but it was as good a reason as any to get to a clutch of eight (!) books that have lingered unread on my shelves for far too long. (Alas, I ran out of time to read four more: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “From Metal to Mozart.”)

My selections encompassed two Ray Bradbury collections, one compiling his early pulp detective fiction, the other a 1959 book of fantasy and mainstream stories; an H.P. Lovecraft horror collection; an amusing book revealing what you really got if you responded to mail-order ads in comic books for U-Control Ghosts, Sea Monkeys and the like; a book about the 10 Commandments and modern morality illustrated with satirical examples from Mad magazine and written by a La Verne professor of religion; a Steinbeck classic almost everyone has read; a film-by-film guide to the Marx Brothers; and the fifth in the Fu Manchu series of thrillers.

“Of Mice and Men” was, naturally, the best of the above, although I liked them all to varying degrees. “Mail-Order Mysteries” was especially entertaining to this longtime comics fan and made me glad I never wasted my money on any of the novelties. The Mad book was perhaps the oddest of the plethora of Mad mass-market paperbacks, a sort of “Gospel According to Peanuts” effort. I wrote an obituary about the author a few years ago but hadn’t read his book until now.

I’d read the Steinbeck and “A Medicine for Melancholy,” albeit three decades ago; the others I’d never read. “Mail-Order” was a Christmas gift last year, most of the rest were purchased this century (the Fu was bought at the LA Comics Show in 2001) and the Marx Brothers book has, embarrassingly, been in my collection since my teens.

What have you folks been reading?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Plusone Linkedin Digg Reddit Stumbleupon Tumblr Email