Goofoffers reunite

Longtime Newport Beach resident Richard Grupe remembers when Dick Richard decided to start serving coffee to the group of men who always seemed to be waiting at the flower shop for their wives to finish grocery shopping at Richard’s Lido Market in Lido Village about 1956.

“It started with the idea that we should get cups at the mug shop in Corona del Mar,” Grupe said. “Richard got the idea that men who were waiting for their wives ought to have something to do.”

The men enjoyed swapping stories and talking local politics over coffee. Dubbed the “Goofoffers,” for their predilection for chit-chat, more than 1,000 men were members of the group over the years — some of them Newport’s most influential men. Members of the group will gather for a reunion 7:30 a.m. today at Woody’s Diner, 3461 Via Lido, near the original location of the coffee shop.

“It was kind of the movers-and-shaker people in town,” said Bill Warmington, a former Goofoffer and longtime Newport Beach resident. “A lot of the men were influential in the beginnings of Newport.”

The group included, at one time or another, real estate magnate Donald Bren’s father, Milton, screen legends John Wayne, Andy Devine and Joey Bishop, and President Richard Nixon.

“It was just a way you could talk about anything and everything,” Warmington said. “Who did what in Catalina last weekend, what’s going on with the county board of supervisors. It was a general coffee klatch.”

Grupe had never seen Wayne madder than when his gold-gilded Goofoffers coffee mug went missing from Richard’s Lido Coffee Shop, but the rest of the guys all chipped in and bought him a new one.

None of the mugs were locked up back then, they all sat out in the open on a rack at the coffee shop, Grupe said. Coffee was served on the honor system. A dime would get a customer endless refills, although the occasional man would get caught only leaving a penny.

Wayne drove a beat-up station wagon around town and the two men would occasionally talk USC football over breakfast at the coffee shop, Grupe said

Grupe still has Wayne’s old mug with the late actor’s name painted on it. The Goofoffer mugs bear a drawing of a man leaning back in his chair, “goofing off,” Grupe said.

“He was really a great guy, a great hulk of a man,” Grupe said of Wayne, who wasn’t a regular at Richard’s but came in every so often to eat the dollar breakfast special, which included eggs, sausage, and German potatoes.

Nixon also was a member of the group, and although Grupe never saw him there, Nixon’s mug was there along with the rest.

“I’m told Nixon enjoyed having breakfast there when he was staying in San Clemente,” Grupe said.

Pavilions supermarket stands where Richard’s use to be and the coffee shop is long gone, but the Goofoffers have continued on in some shape or form over the years, meeting for breakfast at various diners in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.

Grupe has become the unofficial historian for the group, collecting memorabilia such as the Goofoffers’ membership rolls aluminum skillet once given to him by the cook at the coffee shop.

He hopes today’s reunion will gather together many of the group’s remaining members to swap stories and memories. The most members the group he has ever managed to get together at one time in recent years was 22, he said.

“It was a really fun place to be, where there were great people and they were all down-to-earth,” Grupe said.

The Goofoffers began about 1956 with a small group of men who needed something to do while their wives went shopping at Richard’s Lido Market on Balboa Peninsula.

Market owner Dick Richard provided a rack for the men’s coffee mugs and started a coffee shop.

The club gathered as many as 1,100 to 1,200 members over the years, including some of Newport’s most prominent men.

BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at brianna.bailey@latimes.com.