Vintage Matches

The most appropriate name for owner and place is that of the last eating stop on Wilshire's downtown end. The Vagabond's House is Joe Chastek's pride and joy and Joe is the purest vagabond you'll ever meet. He may not even be there when this is published, for Joe has seen the world through many different colors of glass and each new one is more interesting than the last. He ran away from home in Minneapolis when he was twelve, stowed away on a freighter to the Orient, made a small pile in photographs in Singapore, started a brokerage firm in Honolulu, helped organize the Philippine Stock Exchange, returned to the United States with a big pile and lost most of it when his automobile business was swept away in a Los Angeles River flood, and made some of it back in a night club or two. When he was still a kid in Minneapolis he knew an older boy who had a hot dog stand, and he swore then he'd have one of his own some day. The Vagabond's House is Joe Chastek's hot dog stand. Although you probably couldn't get a hot dog in the Vagabond's House if you tried, you can get eight different kinds of curry?all of them recommended. There are other things on the menu, but curry is the one to eat if you are sampling. And it goes with the scenery. There are about a thousand feet of bamboo in the place and enough coiled rope and rope-wound posts and rope decorations to hang all the customers. It's excellent decoration, and ingenious too. Bamboo costs fifty cents a running foot over the counter. Joe persuaded the park authorities to sell him all he wanted from Lincoln Park?forty-foot poles for forty cents apiece and a bottle of whisky for the caretaker who turned his back and told him to help himself. The forty-inch swordbill over the bar he got from a sailor who brought it in one night and offered to trade it for a five dollar bill and a bottle of liquor. The excellent display of mounted wild animal heads are on loan from a friend who found that the alcoholic fumes from the bar kept the moths away and thus preserved them better than he could in his two-room apartment?the rhino,, zebra and water buffalo made it a little crowded.

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