Today’s EaterLA brings news of the closure of the last Good Earth restaurant in California. This brings to mind a story…
When I was in college at UCLA in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I used to hang around the UCLA Computer Club (3514 Boelter Hall — we would receive mail addressed to “the messiest room on the 3rd floor, Boelter Hall”). Club members would regularly walk down to Westwood to get dinner — this was when Westwood was a much more vibrant college town than it is today (alas).
At this time, there were two general interest bookstores in Westwood: the Pickwick Bookstore near Westwood and LeConte, and College Books (or was it University Books) near Westwood and Weyburn. College Books originally had a basement from which they sold textbooks, but by the early 1980s they had lease out that space to the Good Earth. The Good Earth was one of the restaurants regularly frequented by clubbies (there was also a Thai place behind Ships, but that’s a different story). The Good Earth seemingly had nuts of some variety in every dish one could order.
One day we went to the Good Earth for dinner. As I recall, someone ordered their meal with no nuts. After this, everyone started requesting no nuts, eventually resulting in our singing “nuts, nuts, nuts, nuts” in the manner of the Monty Python spam routine.
I guess you had to be there.
Pretty sure that was University Books… David Kay used to like the Good Earth, if I recall correctly.
In the 1960s it was called College Book Company. They competed with the student store for textbooks and often had a good supply of used textbooks. Sometimes they had textbooks and the student store either didn’t have them or had run out. By the early 1970s, they had a hard time competing on textbooks except for used textbooks.
The one interesting tidbit about College Books is that they were the place where I wrote my first check after getting my first checking account. I think I found the check when I was moving from West LA out to the valley in 1989.