LOOKING BACK

Young Chang

Wilhelmina Hershey, who went by Mina, loved to cook and had a penchant

for hamburgers back in the late 1920s. What began as her culinary whim

and side-job dream is known today, after many different names, as The

Village Inn.

She and her husband, Anton Hershey, worked in the Little Market on

Balboa Island. He eventually started a nursery in one of the empty lots

across the street. She decided she wanted a small room where she could

whip up and sell hamburgers, according to a history of the Inn written by

Jim Jennings, a Balboa Island resident.

The couple started a small business with the nursery and called it

Hershey’s Cafe. A liquor license and many patrons later, Tony Hershey let

the cafe spill into his nursery and renamed the place German Beer Garden,

according to Jennings’ history.

Two brothers, Art and Vaux White, leased what was by then Hershey’s

Cafe and Beer Garden from the Hersheys in the late 1930s. The new owners

changed the restaurant’s moniker yet again to Park Avenue Cafe, then to

White’s Cafe.

After the lease expired in 1957, Frank Usedom and his wife leased the

restaurant and named it The Village Inn (but the name game doesn’t stop

there). Bob Yardley, a name locals still remember, took over in 1975.

Newport Beach resident Judge Robert Gardner refers to the restaurant as

Bob Yardley’s Village Inn in his book, “Bawdy Balboa.”

But in the early ‘90s, the Hersheys’ daughter Ruth sold the property.

Under new landowners, the restaurant’s named changed to V.I.P., according

to Jennings’ account.

Longtime Newport resident Gay Wassall-Kelly calls the restaurant back

then a “local watering hole.”

“They had great dining and it was just one of these nice, dark, old

restaurants with booths and everything that everyone hung out in,” she

said. “And people from the peninsula would come over and they would come

over to the island and go back and forth.”

Lance Wagner bought the land in 1998 and changed the name back to The

Village Inn. Two years ago, Aric Toll and his family took over and are

still the owners today.

* Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a historical

Look Back? Let us know. Contact Young Chang by fax at (949) 646-4170;

e-mail at young.chang@latimes.com; or mail her at c/o Daily Pilot, 330 W.

Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627.