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Some clouds in the morning will give way to mainly sunny skies for the afternoon. High 81F. Winds NW at 15 to 25 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph..
Clear. Low around 55F. NNW winds at 10 to 20 mph, decreasing to 5 to 10 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.
From left, Bob Malouf, Kern County Museum director Mike McCoy and William Malouf stand by the donated Chet's Club sign at this spring's "Bakersfield Sound" exhibit.
Chet's Club in the late 1950s.
Chet's Club in the early 1970s.
Chet's Club in the early 1970s.
The back door into Chet's Club, after a recent fire
Herb Malouf, owner of Chet's Club, with regulars at the late, great Edison Highway card room.
Herb Malouf, left, with son William, a rock drummer in the late 70s whose locks did not always make in welcome in his father's own Bakersfield bar.
From left, Bob Malouf, Kern County Museum director Mike McCoy and William Malouf stand by the donated Chet's Club sign at this spring's "Bakersfield Sound" exhibit.
Chet's Club in the late 1950s.
Chet's Club in the early 1970s.
Chet's Club in the early 1970s.
The back door into Chet's Club, after a recent fire
Herb Malouf, owner of Chet's Club, with regulars at the late, great Edison Highway card room.
Herb Malouf, left, with son William, a rock drummer in the late 70s whose locks did not always make in welcome in his father's own Bakersfield bar.
Most of us would look at the blackened, fire-hose-soddened remains of a past-its-prime roadside building in a derelict corner of the city and shrug. We’d see it for what it was: a carcass on the gravelly shoulder of an evolving state highway system.
The Malouf brothers, however, can stand before the smoldering shell of what was once Chet’s Club, a postwar roadhouse and card room, and still hear the low roar of card-room chatter.
They were raised inside that card room, right there on Edison Highway, alongside the repair shops, antique stores and honky-tonks, and the memories are locked in their DNA. Their World War II veteran father, a cabinet maker and antique dealer named Herb Malouf, bought the saloon in or about 1954 from Chester Thompson, aka Chet, and for three decades Malouf made his living catering to the workingman’s affection for lowball poker, Olympia beer, Malouf’s legendary chili and the club’s proximity to the most famous live-country-music dance hall east of Chester Avenue, the adjacent Lucky Spot.
Last week, Chet’s Club, closed since 1985, met the same fate as the Lucky Spot: It was gutted by flames. The cause remains under investigation.
William Malouf, 65, and his wife, Tara, watched firefighters carry out their grim work from their home in Los Angeles via laptop, courtesy of a livestreamed webcast. William’s older brother, Bob Malouf, who owns the building, was on the scene, sharing the bitter play-by-play by phone.
“I woke up yesterday morning,” William Malouf, who is in the recording studio equipment business, told me Thursday. “I said, ‘I hope that was just a dream.’”
The reality has now had some time to sink in.
Chet’s Club was once a landmark, identifiable from some distance by its distinctive red-and-white neon sign, along U.S. 466/State Route 58 — the same road, an extension of U.S. Route 66, that in the previous decade brought Dust Bowl migrants to the gold-paved streets of California’s Central Valley.
Chet’s Club bustled with eight lowball tables until Charlie Dodge was elected sheriff in 1966 and, as part of a crackdown that included an attempted chastening of the Sad Sack brothel further east on Edison, mandated that Chet’s cut back to four tables and cordon them off from the pool table and bar area with new interior walls and Old West-style swinging doors.
Besides its locally renowned chili — beans or no beans — Chet’s Club had colorful characters aplenty, more than enough to cast a blue-collar “Cheers.”
There was Hershel Dykes, who ran the card-room “cage” with humor and rapt attention to detail, which was required with so many professional card players in the house every night.
There were the celebrities, big and less consequential. Actors from the motion picture industry would drive up from L.A. to Chet’s, where they could enjoy some anonymity. Robert Fuller, one of the stars of TV’s ‘Wagon Train’ was a semi-regular, as was Randy Sparks, who founded the New Christy Minstrels and famously suggested that folk singer John Deutschendorf change his name to John Denver.
Local stars hung out as well — most famously, singer Merle Haggard, who cut his teeth singing at the Lucky Spot when house band leader Johnny Barnett stepped away from the stage. Musicians Bill Woods, Jelly Sanders, Fuzzy Owen, Lewis Talley, Bonnie Owens and Gene Moles were regulars, too, often using Chet’s Club as a green room of sorts, drinking coffee and supping on chili between sets and after shows.
There was Bill Gruggett, the former chief engineer for Mosrite Guitars who later started his own company; Gruggett Guitars were well-regarded and today are collectors’ items.
Malouf would often spot Gruggett’s perfect, familiar pompadour through the card room’s thick smoke. “I came by a few Gruggett guitars thanks to him,” Malouf said. “He would come up to the old man and say, ‘Herb, I got this guitar and I gotta get some more money to play cards.’”
There was Charles Coates, who’d been a circus performer of sorts in the 1930s — a “Beat the Champ” fighter with an Army boxing pedigree who would take on all comers. Herb Malouf, a P-38 fighter pilot who flew nearly 200 missions during the war and consequently was fearless in civilian life, didn’t often need backup in dealing with rowdy customers, but if he did, Coates was ready, willing and effective.
Lester Bliss, owner of a fishing supply store called Bliss Baits, was a partner and regular presence at Chet’s for several years. No truth to the rumor he sold worms from behind the bar.
Another regular, Paul DeLia, lived in a trailer and relished his vague gangster vibe. “He's like a mobster guy who had owned a garbage truck company for a while and was very affluent. He used to send me letters signed ‘your agent, Clyde,’” Malouf said. "He’d always say, ‘Billy, I got a new caper for you.’ Smart man, short fuse."
A Chet's Club regular Malouf knew only as “Barb” owned a scrap metal yard and had been bitten so many times by black widows he claimed to have become immune to their venom. Barb had a pockmarked face, a raspy voice and an unlikely encyclopedic knowledge of classical music. He hated the Beatles, however, which invariably opened him up to taunts. Malouf would introduce him to people as a Beatles fan and then, he said, “duck!"
Herb Malouf had interests and talents beyond lowball and chili. He and brother Ted opened the Malouf Cabinet Shop after the war and built much of the cabinetry in the card room, including the bar. Herb also ran Edison Antiques, on the immediate west side of Chet’s Club. Antique shoppers and dealers often stopped by the bar, where Herb held court.
The chili con carne was a character unto itself. William Malouf, who played in an L.A.-based New Wave rock band called Fourty-five, remembers cruising down Sunset Boulevard with bandmates when the urge for a bowlful of Chet’s chili hit them all. They drove all the way to Bakersfield, plopped down on barstools and ordered the specialty of the house. Malouf could hear the regulars murmuring about his long rock-star hairstyle, out of place in that corner of Bakersfield, and momentarily wondered about his personal safety.
“But then,” Malouf said, “you’d hear, ‘Naw, that's Herb’s boy. Don’t kill him.’”
The chili brought in customers from far and wide, including hobos (as they were then called) who would hop off the rail cars on the tracks directly across Edison Highway from Chet’s and come in for a bowlful, on the house.
“My father was just like that,” Malouf said. “We didn't see him a lot at Christmas and Thanksgiving because he was down there at Chet’s Club, preparing a big turkey dinner on the counter for all the guys who had nowhere to go. My mom didn't appreciate it, but they did.”
The ambiance might have alarmed some people.
“I was driving around in a ’57 Cadillac convertible one time and I had this guy in the car with me,” Malouf said. “I asked him if he was hungry. He says yes, I say, ‘Let's go grab some chili,’ and I pull up to Chet’s. He says, ‘Are you kidding?’
“Edison Highway back then was just more populated — you didn't feel any more secure.”
And now, with the loss of another of its great, if forgotten landmarks, Edison Highway is even more desolate.
At least a piece of Chet’s is secure. The Malouf brothers fortuitously donated the old, huge metal sign to the Kern County Museum two years ago. It’s now one of the most striking artifacts in the museum’s recently opened Bakersfield Sound exhibit. The Maloufs only wish they’d donated the bar their father built to the museum as well.
Parting with the sign, and seeing it exhibited with such prominence and respect, surely helps now that the building itself is wasted. But it will be a process nonetheless.
“The separation anxiety, I never got over that,” Malouf said of the bar’s closing in 1985. “But when it burned, the finality hit home.”
He doesn’t delude himself thinking Chet’s Club might have one day staged a comeback.
“Some areas,” he said, “their time is just up.”
Robert Price is a journalist for KGET-TV. His column appears here on Sundays; the views expressed are his own. Reach him at robertprice@kget.com or via Twitter: @stubblebuzz.
Positive Cases Among Kern Residents: 247,229
Recovered and Presumed Recovered Residents: 241,371
Percentage of all cases that are unvaccinated: 76.19
Percentage of all hospitalizations that are unvaccinated: 83.37
Source: Kern County Public Health Services Department
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