GOOD OLD DAYS:

Ted Marinos, who turned 85 on Thanksgiving, is the patriarch of what could easily be considered Costa Mesa’s first family. Marinos, a native Texan born to Greek parents, settled in the city shortly after World War II.

His five boisterous daughters grew up in Costa Mesa during its infancy. Between him and four of them, it seems like they can remember just about anything that happened in the city in the last 60 years.

Marinos got together with daughters Nancy Parent, Julia Wood, Polly Bishop and Thalia Marinos Monday for breakfast at Denny’s on Newport Boulevard and 17th Street to reminisce and look through old photos and relics from younger days.

Denny’s holds a special significance to the witty, garrulous Greek. When he moved to Costa Mesa in the 1950s, he was a cook at Denny’s — then called Danny’s Donuts — for three years. He now eats there multiple times a week.

He still has an old menu from the era, which he leafed through before ordering his food (a more-or-less superfluous task, as the waiter knows his order by heart). It was one of a few restaurant jobs that he had in rapid succession as a young man, jokingly claiming to have been “baptized in gravy.” At various times he owned the Wagon Wheel Café (now the Goat Hill Tavern), Ted’s Coffee Shop on Harbor Boulevard and Wilson Street and the coffee shop in the since-closed Mesa Lanes bowling alley on the Eastside.

“I was trying to get ahead in the world, that’s why we moved around a lot,” Marinos said.

He was very involved in the community, both as a businessman and a public servant. He spent 45 years as a Boy Scout leader where he used the fluent Spanish he learned growing up in a Texas border town to reach out to Latino kids on the Westside, for which he was featured in a 1990 Pilot article. At the time he was one of the few Spanish-speaking scout leaders in the county.

“A lot of the parents were afraid to get their kids involved in primarily English-speaking activities at that time,” Bishop said.

“That’s one of the coolest parts of my dad,” Parent said.

The down side of the family’s long tenure and prominence in the community — at least for the daughters — was that their parents knew everyone, making it impossible to get away with anything.

If they lit up a cigarette or rode on the back of a boyfriend’s motorcycle their mom would know before they even said anything, the daughters remember.

“Back in the day it was more free spirited. Everyone knew each other. The community back then was more open. More kids walked the neighborhood,” Wood said.

Out of all of his jobs in Costa Mesa, Marinos spent the most years as the owner of Young’s Pawn Shop (where Triangle Square now sits). He retired in 1983, but he still lives and helps out in the community cooking pancake breakfasts at the Costa Mesa Senior Center and meals at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post.

Thalia, the youngest in the family, is the only daughter who still lives in Costa Mesa.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at alan.blank@latimes.com.