Notable People I Have Met ~ Part Eleven
Don Callender ~ Marie Callender's founder
I was always a rather small cog in the wheel of American journalism, yet I was lucky in meeting notable and accomplished people. I sought them out whenever the opportunity arose, wanting more than anything to hear the stories of how these extraordinary people succeeded and how their thought processes worked.
I was lucky at the very beginning of my journalism career. I’d only written a few stories during my internship in 1984 at The Orange County Register when the editor suggested I write a story about a newly remodeled Marie Callender’s restaurant in Tustin, California, nearing completion. After contacting the restaurant manager, she mentioned that the founder of the restaurant chain, Don Callender, would be at the restaurant in a few days and I could interview him then. I jumped at the chance.
When I walked into the restaurant for my lunch meeting with the 57-year-old Don Callender, he eyed me suspiciously until I told him I was the reporter from The Orange County Register he was expecting. He said, “When I saw your shiny shoes I thought: Oh no, here’s another one of these guys from the city." He said shiny-shoed city inspectors were making it difficult for him to open the remodeled restaurant.
The luncheon interview lasted several hours. He was eager to tell me about the origins of his 112-restaurant chain, how it began with his mother, Marie, making pies for restaurants. “My mother was a good cook at home,” Callender said. “She made good pastries and she was working for a place that had a little lunch counter and she made pies.”
Callender was generous with his time as we ate lunch, telling me how his parents, Cal and Marie Callender, began a wholesale pie business in 1947 to help supplement the trailer park family’s meager income. They operated out of a rented 20-by-20-foot Quonset hut in Long Beach. Callender delivered his mother’s pies on his bicycle.
“I grew up on dirt streets and outhouses,” Callender told me. “We started with a rolling pin and 700 bucks. I used to go to work at 11 o’clock at night and work till 5 the next afternoon.”
The first Marie Callender’s coffee and pie shop opened in 1964, in Orange. In 1986, Callender sold the chain of 120 restaurants to Ramada Inc. for a reported $80 million.
Callender said his success was born of a strong work ethic and a close-knit family. “Every time you see a kid in a workplace with his parents, I guarantee you, you’ll see a happy kid. They’ve got a sense of worth.”
~ by Russ Allison Loar
~ Photo by Mark Rightmire for The Orange County Register
© All Rights Reserved
My Father Among The Chinese

~ Story and artwork by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Renegade
It was not hard to be renegade in the sleepy Los Angeles suburb of West Covina during the 1960s.
Emerging from the conservative ‘50s,
all you had to be was a disagreeable teenager, especially in this
Anglo-Saxonite community where most of the local power brokers attended Rotary
Club pancake breakfasts with an alarming regularity. Come to think of it,
regularity was also a big deal during this era.
My home town was very much like
the place portrayed in the movie, “American Graffiti.” It was a teenage car
culture, and after I turned 16, I had a driver’s license. Not long after, I had
a car. My parents were upper middle class, so I did not have to actually earn
the money to buy a car. And my mother was eager to be free of having to take me
places, and then, pick me up and bring me home. Her life was busy enough, what
with Women's Club luncheons to plan, bridge parties, country club appearances
and the ongoing burden of supervising housekeepers and gardeners – all this along
with a husband who actually expected her to make dinner on a regular basis.
Yes, regularity was a pretty big deal during this era.
Nowadays there are lots of
restrictions on young drivers, but when I got my license, I was free, turned
loose on the streets without any restrictions or guidelines. Just a few hours
of driver’s ed. But I was a pretty good driver. I’d had experience, what with
all those times I took my parents’ cars out on the road when they were away for
a weekend trip. Yes, I remember learning how every intersection was not
necessarily a four-way stop as I propelled my mother’s lumbering, razor-finned
Cadillac straight toward a passing car who, much to my surprise, had no stop
sign. I hit the brake pedal just in time.
Then there was that lesson
about road rage, what we used to call, “mad” or “angry.” I thought driving was
a competition, and that the object was to beat the other drivers. After all, I
wasn’t actually going anywhere. So I jammed down the gas pedal and managed to
pull the great white whale in front of this other guy in an old, compact car
who had tried his best not to let me into his lane. While I was waiting behind
another car at a stop sign, he got out and walked up to my car, signaled for me
to roll down my window, which I did, then punched me in the face.
By the time I had my own car, a
dark green 1965 Ford Mustang – the fastback model – I was seasoned. I’d make my
car too fast to catch, and I certainly would never roll down my window again
for anybody.
In those days it seemed like most of my friends and rivals were working on their cars, customizing old Chevys, putting in big carburetors, high performance shifters, custom exhaust systems, giant racing slicks – even whole new engines. This was long before the state-mandated smog check. Nobody checked the condition of our cars when we renewed their registrations, so all modifications went undetected. I was not one of the more talented kid mechanics around, although I could gap a spark plug. I was a musician, a guitar player, and I did not like getting my fingers stained with grease. So I took the money I saved from teaching guitar lessons and working in a local pizza parlor and went to a speed shop in a neighboring city to let the experts juice up my horsepower. The first thing they did was rip out all the smog prevention equipment.
“You don’t need all this
stuff,” I remember the mechanic saying. Years later, when I tried to trade the
car in on a new model, the local Ford dealer would disagree. “You’ve got no
smog equipment! We’re going to have to replace it all just to put the car on
the lot.”
Oops!
Except for a little cash for
dating and guitar strings, I’d put all my money into my car – a nice racket for
the speed shop – and after a while I began racing my car on Saturdays at the
nearby Irwindale Speedway along with all the other high school amateurs. But as
a renegade teenager, the real thrill was street racing. It was like being a
gunslinger in the Old West, just prowling around town, looking to challenge
somebody to a shootout.
Yes, I had my share of speeding
tickets, but I was never caught racing. Most of us weren’t. There were not that
many police officers cruising around town in those days.
There was always the occasional
race during the day, when I’d just happen to pull up next to another kid in a
hot car after school. Who was faster? We just had to find out! But weekend
nights were the real prime racing time. It was like jousting, trying to prove
our nascent manhood to our girlfriends, or to somebody else’s girlfriend.
Sometimes the races were
organized.
Some guy with greasy hair had a
new Camaro 280z and swore he could take me. Bets were made and the next
Saturday night my friends blocked off both ends of a sleepy suburban street
about a half-mile long while we lined up our cars. About twenty high school
kids gathered at the finish line. Camaro boy couldn’t catch me, even though his
car may have been faster. I was always incredibly quick off the starting line.
That’s what won me the race set
up by the speed shop at Irwindale Raceway. There was another kid, a rich kid
whose father owned a shopping center, who was already out of high school, who
came to the speed shop with a Mustang pretty much like mine. The speed shop
mechanics figured this guy would be good competition for me. After they’d done
their best to expand his horsepower, we set a date.
The early part of the afternoons at Irwindale were spent doing practice runs, called “qualifying.” You had to turn a good enough time in your particular class to compete in the early evening, before the actual professionals did their stuff for the audience who sat in bleachers on either side of the quarter-mile track.
We both edged our cars into
starting position, our engines almost window-shatteringly loud because we’d
opened up our “headers” (high performance exhaust systems) to bypass the
mufflers. From experience, I knew the slight lag time of my car – from the time
I hit the gas pedal to the car’s forward surge – allowed me to start a half
second before the green light flashed.
We waited, then the first
yellow light flashed on, moving down toward the green light. The moment Rick’s
brain told him the light was green, I’d already jumped out from the starting
line. He was momentarily stunned, and even though he turned a faster time, he
never caught me. It wasn’t really about how fast you went, it was about who got
there first. Mind over horsepower. I made it to the finish line first, won the
trophy and renewed admiration from my girlfriend.
Yes, it was a moment.
Of course now as a responsible
adult I am appalled at my behavior, risking accident and injury on the streets
of my sleepy suburban town. Perhaps that’s why it made so much sense for all of
us to go just outside of town to the Chicken Ranch.
There was a long, straight road
inside the Chicken Ranch property, made for trucks to pick up eggs and
chickens, I suppose. Nobody stayed with the chickens at night, especially not
on Saturday nights. This particular night had not been the first time high
school hot rods had raced there, but it was my first time.
There were dozens of competitors from area high schools and junior colleges, and dozens more who just came to watch. It is a solemn testament to the short-range saturation of the teenage brain that none of us had entertained a single thought about potential consequences. Rubber burned and smoked and engines spit and roared as pair after pair of racers hurtled down the improvised racetrack. After I made my run, the growing chaos of beer-swilling youth amazingly enough triggered some fledgling sense of adult apprehension, and so I left. As I exited the entrance to the Chicken Ranch, I was passed by a long line of police cars.
That was the last race ever
held at the Chicken Ranch. It was my senior year, and before long, I’d own a
more practical car, have a more practical girlfriend, and grow a little less
renegade as the wild anarchy of my teenage years passed. After all, I had to
prepare for the wild anarchy of my twenties.
~ by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Collections
I’ve never lived anywhere very
long without cats. My grandmother collected stray cats, and so did I, having
about a dozen when I lived next to a farm.
I collected small metal cars
and loved to drive them around cities I made from colored blocks.
When I was 17 years old I raced
my Ford mustang at Irwindale Raceway and won a few trophies.
I collected 45 rpm records,
songs I heard on the radio. I listened to them over and over again. Each week
when I went to the music store for my trumpet lesson, I bought a new “single” to
add to my collection. I pretended I was a disc jockey and would announce each record
I played.
One summer I won a contest on
radio station KFWB by being the first caller. I talked to disc jockey Gary
Owens and he sent me a Gary Owens coloring book and KFWB bumper sticker.
I collected family photographs,
all the way back to stiffly posed portraits of great-grandparents, arranging
them in albums. I collected my family, my parents and grandparents, my sisters
and brothers, my wife and the many years of our marriage, the companionship of
my sons, the infectious laughter of my blonde-haired, blue-eyed granddaughter.
I collect memories, and as I
grow old they reveal meanings I’d never fully understood. I collect the acts of
kindness I’ve received and try to pass them on to others. I collect wisdom and
continue to learn and relearn the lessons I’ve been taught from those still
living and those who have passed on, their words still speaking to me.
I’ve collected my many
shortcomings, my failures and my sins, for which I ask forgiveness in my many
prayers.
I collect the joy and the sadness in
this world, the tragedies and victories of the spirit, the damnations and the
revelations. Sometimes it’s all too much and so I pack some of my collections
away in boxes, knowing I can always unpack them if need be, knowing I’ll never
look inside some of those boxes again, knowing all things change and life
should move forward, mindfully forward.
My house is full of things useful and decorous, impractical and silly, remnants of a long life. I look at these objects and they remind me who I’ve been, who I still am. Someday I’ll leave all my collections behind, passed onto others to forge new meanings, so grateful for having lived here on Earth awhile.
~ Text and photograph by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved