The California Lunch Room—Where Stylish Woman Shop

Fiction 500 recently ran a contest for short  stories. The prompt for the 500-word story was a picture of a house bearing the sign, California Lunch Room. I didn't win but from the judge's comments, I seem to have made an impression.

 

The California Lunch Room, Where Stylish Women Shop

This is a picture of my first business venture—where it all began.

I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life—a creative genius if you will, whose ideas have always been both on the forefront and on the edge.

I came up with the metric clock when metrics were all the rave. Everyone felt it was only a matter of time before the whole world would go metric. Soda was being marketed by the liter and foodstuff (I wish I’d invented that word) was coming to us by the grams. Yardsticks suddenly became meter sticks and the whole world seemed to be aglow in ten and the powers of ten.

I didn’t care one way or the other but I did see an opportunity.

No one was looking into the time situation. No one was breaking the day down into the morning ten hours and the evening ten hours. No one was looking into hours composed of a hundred minutes, minutes made up of a hundred seconds, or seconds broken into milliseconds—okay they were doing that but why not the other stuff, too, I wondered.

Unfortunately, that idea went right into the 500-liter trashcan.

But I never gave up. I simply went looking for a better idea.

The good thing about ideas is they usually come at you a kilometer-a-centihour.

I was watching the Michigan/Ohio State game on TV one cold Saturday afternoon. Being inside I wasn’t affected by the cold but more importantly my brain was able to keep functioning. None of the frozen brains in Ann Arbor that day were even pretending to still be functioning. 

That’s when I invented the ear sock.

You are probably saying, “What about earmuffs? We already have earmuffs to keep our ears warm.”

Get real. No one wears earmuffs. They’re embarrassing for men and most women find them unattractive. 

As I watched the tuba player march across the field to famously dot the “i” in Ohio, I noticed the tuba had a covering over it, a sock if you will, with Ohio written across it. An idea was born.

College students would be able to purchase my ear socks with their school logos imprinted on it and not only keep their ears warm but also support their team.

Ah, but getting ideas is easy. Backers are another story.

So what about the California Lunch Room? Was it ever a restaurant?

That would have been too easy.

Back in 1947 I was a newly discharged soldier with enough ideas in my head to drive a sane man crazy. I bought this little house and began selling my newest invention—Tobacco gloves.

Everyone smoked in those days but no one liked having yellow fingers. My glove was the answer to a stylish woman’s nightmare. With my gloves she could smoke like a chimney but her hands would always look like pure white porcelain.

Of course to make money I still had to sell snacks, candy and caps and eventually even lunches.