Marni Gaylord

Decades of ideas

The idea was older than the bar.

She was a Bruin twice over — Wilson High School first, then UCLA — and passed the feeling on to her children.

At UCLA she wanted to open a bar in Westwood and call it The Library, so that students could tell their parents, completely credibly, that they were on their way to the library. She never built that one.

She spent her early career on the production crew of Cheers, and what she took from it wasn't television. It was the idea of a room where everyone knows your name. Hers was a small, characteristic twist on it: she wanted a bar where everyone knew her name.

In the early 2000s she wanted to use what she knew about wine to open a wine bar, years before anyone else in the neighborhood was doing it. That one didn't happen either.

What she opened, eventually, on Pacific Coast Highway, was all of them at once.

What she made

One building, doing four things at once.

Twenty-odd screens for the games. A stage for real bands, three nights a week. Two pool tables in the back. A kitchen that cooks properly, with a different special every day of the week. A dance floor for line dancing is on the way.

It is not a sports bar with a stage bolted on, and it never was. Every part of it was something she wanted, and she wanted all of them.

Just like her

Multifaceted, on purpose.

She made her own television show at fifteen, and interviewed Bob Hope on it. She was a production assistant on Cheers while she was at UCLA, where she built her own major. She produced at ABC. By twenty-seven she was a Vice President at Fox Kids Network, running advertising and on-air promotion, and in 1997 she won a ProMax Gold Medallion for her work marketing The Simpsons.

In 1999 she started her own production company. Her work ran through Disney Channel, FX, Universal, Warner Brothers, and The Matrix. Then she came home to Long Beach and ran her family's law firm through a pandemic. Then she opened a bar.

She did several things at once as a matter of habit. She'd get ready while watching the morning news. She'd work while playing solitaire, or, depending on who you ask, play solitaire while working. The building came out the same way she was: more than one thing at a time, and better for it.

In the room

You could hear her across it.

At its best this place is loud, and she was the loudest good thing in it. She greeted people from across the bar. She came to your table. She asked how you were and waited for the answer.

She wanted somewhere people could come and put their worries down for a couple of hours — a room full of friendly faces, hers among them. Protective of its own, she'd say, and welcoming all the same.

Her people

She called them family chats.

Staff meetings, technically. Nobody called them that. They were family chats, and they were exactly what they sound like — the team opening up to each other and turning up for each other, in both directions, through everything.

That is still how this place is run, and it is not changing.