We’d first met in 1950. I was bumming around from one dead-end job to another, still using the war as an excuse for screwing up. She was a rich man’s daughter who had the good sense to know she’d been spoiled rotten. bobby-socksWe were both in Canter’s Deli at three in the morning one aimless Friday night. She was dressed in rolled-up jeans and bobby sox with a bunch of giggling girlfriends. I was on my lonesome, hunched over a cold coffee and a slice of apple pie covered in the gloop that was once a scoop of ice cream. She reached over to my booth and asked to borrow the sugar. I said something smart and she said something smarter. She joined me at my table. Her eyes were blue-green, her sun-kissed blonde hair was in a ponytail. An hour later I was in love.”

Canter’s -2Deli is a Hollywood landmark and has been serving traditional Jewish food and American diner fare 24 hours a day since it opened in Boyle Heights in 1931. In 1948 it followed a Jewish migration to West Hollywood and relocated to Fairfax Ave. In 1953 it moved again, up a block into larger premises, and looks pretty much the same today as it did back then. I visited the place many times during my first few trips to LA in the 1990s and often sat in a booth with friends after a night of clubbing or bar-hopping, and it was easy to imagine a scene in the old Canter’s where a couple could meet for the first time in the balmy small hours of a weekend morning…