Humpty Dumpty Never Went to The Broken Egg

My favorite breakfast place is the Los Gatos Cafe. They make really unique hash browns with lots of onions and something that makes the potatoes yellow but very tasty. The breakfast meats are always thick and hearty and the girls are always in a good mood, being very charming and smiling a lot.

But, beyond all that, I go there for another reason, a nostalgic reason. In the good old, old days, the place was known as the “Broken Egg.” In the early 1970s, I started every day at the Broken Egg. It, too, had a bevy of cute girls carrying the round coffee filled globes with black, plastic spouts with an endless supply of cute charm and dark, thick “go-juice.”

It seemed that nearly everyone in Los Gatos started their day at the Broken Egg, us young wood chucks with our carpenter’s belts hanging over the backs of our chairs, or the up and coming computer engineers in their three-piece suits and their shiny new Porches just outside the front door.

Back in the day when everyone smoked cigarettes, restaurants would supply matchbooks with their logos to customers. I found this picture of one on Ebay.

The Egg’s owner—everyone knew that the Egg was, of course, the Broken Egg— Bert, had started the Broken Egg tradition over in Santa Cruz at the corner of Front Street and Soquel Avenue.

It was strictly an omelet house and it never served the traditional American bacon-and-egg breakfast, just omelets, hard-boiled eggs, all sorts of toast, including egg soaked French variety, and a few salads.

You could pretty much get anything and everything you wanted in your Broken Egg omelet and they always tended to make you feel healthy and all filled up. These well-made omelets were big and always very rich. I especially loved having oodles of avocado in mine, dressed with a light sprinkling of Tabasco sauce. Even for as big an eater as I am, it was always hard to finish one of Bert’s omelets.

The Santa Cruz store was a huge success in the early '70s and Bert ended up opening another Broken Egg in Los Gatos, and one in Carmel and a few others, as I understand, in a variety of South Bay, Monterey Bay area towns.

As far as I’m concerned, the Los Gatos version of the Broken Egg was rather unique. I would make a point of getting there before 7 a.m., as would many of the other young males in town.

While none of us guys who wanted to learn the building trades wanted to admit that we were total neophytes in the trades, we all knew who the professionals were in our town. Mainly they were the guys who grew up in Los Gatos, whose fathers, even their grandfathers, were tradesmen and had imbued our contemporaries with trade skills and secrets from the day they started breathing.

These were the few guys that all the rest of us wanted to work for. We wanted that “on the job training” that these few “experts” could give us. You had to work hard, strong and cheap to become a regular worker for these special guys, but the work was worth it. Many of us actually evolved into legitimate and successful building contractors.

The competition to gain these professionals' trust and allegiance was hard-won and usually started in the early morning at the Broken Egg. Unbeknown to us stubborn and headstrong individuals, the Egg was, essentially, a union hall, but without the union.

None of us wanted to take the mundane and “normal” career path, where you joined a trade union and paid their dues and played by their rules in exchange for learning the trade they protected for their members. We were all smug and self-confident enough to think we could bypass such traditional methods and practices.

However, in that we would all go to the Egg so early in the morning to find out how many guys that the few professionals might need during that particular day, to hammer nails, or wield a jack hammer or slop cement, well, each of us “woodchucks” would patiently and calmly wait to be chosen for a day’s work by the pro’s. Unless you worked enthusiastically, and paid close attention to your instructions and minded you manners, you could pretty much expect not to get chosen for the good work every day of the week that you wanted it.

After several years of this culling out process at the Egg, regular crews started forming and each of the pros would have a solid core of guys that he would rely on to do his bidding and get things done the way he wanted. As the situation matured and grew stable, the Egg maintained its importance by providing a host of day laborers who we all knew and were familiar with, should we need supplemental workers for larger or more complex projects.

Just as with a union, this became somewhat of a brotherhood and as there was plenty of work for everyone, the nasty edge of competitiveness was seldom brought to bear. In fact, what I do remember is there was usually a good, solid tone of cooperation and harmony between the guys in this unofficial brotherhood.

We got lots done in those days, and most of the time, we had fun doing it. We’d drink our coffee at the Broken Egg in the mornings, divvy out the work to the different crews, work hard up in the mountains for the day and spend an hour or two at Mountain Charley’s or Number One Broadway to listen to our good music and socialize with our buds and all of our pretty girls. I don’t have many sour or bad memories of those days.

I still run into the boys when having breakfast at the Egg’s new incarnation, the Los Gatos Cafe, or for lunch at C. B. Hannegan’s and we still smile at each other, not even thinking about the mellow echos of those fine days gone by. The reverberations are just embedded in the grain of our wood.