GOOD OLD DAYS:The Goofoffers Club: coffee and companionship

When it came down to it, there were just two requirements to be a member of the Goofoffers Club: coffee drinking and a physical. Well, sort of.

“I was a good friend of Dick Richards, and we used to meet for coffee before we opened our stores. We just had a lot of people who joined us over the years,” former Via Lido Drugs owner and Newport Beach resident Dean Reavie said.

The tradition between old buddies Richards and Reavie became the foundation of the Goofoffers Club, which was very informally founded in 1957.

“We all had our own coffee mugs on a big rack. If you went to a few meetings, then one day they’d make you an official member by having you choose your own coffee mug,” said Jim de Boom, longtime club member. “Mine had a gold handle and a picture of a guy leaning back with his feet up on a pile of money.”

The physical was less rigorous than the caffeine intake.

“I remember the physical,” Reavie said. “We used to have a little pocket mirror, and in order to take in a member we’d have them breathe on a pocket mirror, and if it left steam, then they passed the physical.”

The club, which met from about 9:30 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. Monday through Friday, grew from its founding four or five members to between 60 to 80 by its end in the 1990s.

The early-morning meetings started on Lido Isle and later moved to other restaurants, including the Omelette Parlor on East 17th Street and The Cannery in Newport. The club attracted a following of local men with diverse interests, from business to politics. Unifying them was a love of good jokes, good stories and shooting the breeze together.

“We’d have a little discussion about some current event or something going on in the community, but it was all pretty loose. It was just an excuse to get together and eat breakfast,” Richard Leuhrs, Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce president who attended a few Goofoffers meetings, said.

“We didn’t accomplish much, but we enjoyed each other. We told a lot of lies and some good jokes. We had no causes whatsoever. We did it for our own pleasure and our own sociality,” Reavie said.

The club even drew celebrity members during its nearly 40 years in operation, from John Wayne and Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon.

Reavie recalled a meeting in which John Wayne, living up to the club’s playful name, pointed a bottle of liquid soap at Reavie and squirted it on his face.

“This long tube of soap came squirting at me … it got a real reaction out of me. Well, we did have a lot of fun. The stories got better and better as we grew older.”

Bill Ficker, a Newport Beach resident since 1953 and member of the Goofoffers for the duration of the club’s existence, remembers the club as the ideal gathering place for old friends.

“The Goofoffers was a club that everybody could belong to. It wasn’t exclusive, and you didn’t have to have any particular interest. Whether you sailed or trout-fished or rode horses or only paid attention to business, everybody was treated the same at the Goofoffers Club,” Ficker said.