Me n' Bob: My Lifelong Love Affair with Bob's Big Boy

The checkered overalls! The perpetual optimism! The POMPADOUR!

Bob in all his sartorial splendor atop our balcony in Malibu. Photo by Ellery Eskelin.

As a girl growing up in Pasadena, California, going to the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant after a ballet performance was a huge deal. Feeling very adult, very special in my stage makeup, I’d bounce up the walkway in my pinafore dress and frilly ankle socks, and there he’d be, the statue of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft.

I was mesmerized.

Seeing him aroused an immediate feeling of kinship. “Smile!” my ballet teacher would screech at me, no matter how sick with nerves I was. And here was Bob making a smile look so effortless. But did a sad heart lurk beneath the red-and-white checkered overalls? Was the smile genuine or did he, too, harbor resentment at having to always present a happy face?

Bob’s disturbingly large forehead. Photo by Ellery Eskelin.

As dusk gathered over the hills, I ate ice cream inside the Big Boy restaurant, a rare treat for me, and often found myself staring through the plate glass window at Bob. Lighted from below, his smile took on a sinister aspect. It looked ironic. Maybe he didn’t mean it. Maybe he was held hostage, forced to lure in the unsuspecting and ply them with double-decker hamburgers and hand-turned shakes.

More than anything else, it was this duality, this hidden life of the Bob’s Big Boy that kept me spellbound over the years. Even now, I have a small collection of Bob piggybanks and a BOBblehead (har har) that made the trip with me from Houston to Italy. My boyfriend, John, a native New Yorker who spent the majority of his life in Europe, does not understand the sincerity of my attachment to Bob. I try to explain (***cough*** justify ***cough***) my unseemly obsession, but I always come up short.

To me, Bob is the quintessential American lie: super-friendly on the outside, but ready to sell you crap food at a cheap price. The carefully sculpted pompadour, which obviously resembles soft-serve ice cream (take that, subliminal advertising!) is strangely at odds with the enormous belly. He’s vain, but not willing to make any dietary concessions.

Come as you are! We make no judgments here. Have another slice of pie.

The Bob’s Big Boy started as a Depression Era hamburger stand and became a nationwide chain of booth-seat restaurants.

Despite the kitsch, Bob is capitalism run amok. He’s the brightly lit carnival at the end of a dark road. He’s old-timey Coca-Cola with the cocaine in it. Year after year, as we grow up, have kids of our own, and then dwindle into obsolescence, Bob never changes. He’s a fossilized meat patty trapped inside the couch cushions when a takeout dinner turns into a make-out sesh. He’s always there, proffering the double-decker hamburger in coy invitation: a sesame-seed bun top, Big Boy sauce, quarter-pound beef patty, more Big Boy sauce, a toasted mid-bun, quarter-pound beef patty, one slice American cheese, lettuce, a generous slathering of Big Boy sauce, 1 1/2 inch toasted bun bottom.

All day long, he sings his siren song: eat me.

When I was young, living the dream on Malibu Beach, and possessed of far more money than sense, I actually bought a Bob’s Big Boy statue. In some dusty corner of a West Hollywood memorabilia shop, I’d seen him half-hidden in the shadows, and my heart pounded in recognition. At long last, Bob would live with me. We could be together forever, me and him, an eight-foot Bob’s Big Boy.

It took a crane to lift him up to our beachfront balcony. He soon became a famous local fixture, a point of reference even: “Two doors down from the Bob.” “Five houses up from the Bob.” In the chill of early morning fog, people would point their cameras up at him while he posed, grinning.

Have a burger.

Have a burger.

HAVE A BURGER.

My cousin Dionne Eskelin, who died long before her time—Rest in Power—really captured Bob’s “lesser known” side.

Getting Bob off the balcony when we moved to a canyon house in the Agora Hills was no small feat, but we did it. So, too, loading him onto an open trailer and hauling him back to Houston a year later. I was pregnant then, my belly as round and taut as Bob’s. What a sight that must have been, me with two chihuahuas and a beach-ball belly, Bob on the flatbed, hurtling through the desert with his perpetual smile.

The only thing I’ve ever truly regretted in life is selling my Bob. We had no money. My kids’ dad had lost his job and slept all day in a pill coma that I didn’t know about. Unable to summon any alternatives, I made the sad trek to another seller of kitschy memorabilia and sold my Bob at a loss. My loss. Every time I drove by and saw him in front of the store, a lump rose in my throat.

Assorted Bobs, including the initial Depression Era Bob on up to the swingin’ fifties Bob.

So what does the Big Boy mean to me?

Bob is my longing for the past—a past that never actually existed, except in TV commercials and Big Boy restaurants. He’s the part of me that sensed the seamy underside of the American dream, but was yet too young to give it words. He’s comfort food, even though the food is going to kill you eventually. He’s a constant that never changes in a world spinning like a carousel of knives.

He makes himself one face to hide another. He’s incapable of Machiavellian cunning, but isn’t above hustling you for pocket change. He’s goofy. Sweet. Earnest. A liar. The Bob is all of us, repurposed with a George Jetson snap-on ‘do.

Do you have a Bob fetish? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Leave your comment below.