Memories of the Long Beach Petroleum Club make our feet bu

When we think of the Long Beach Petroleum Club, we think of our feet buing.

Our dad and grandad had memberships with the exclusive club and on those brilliant summer days in the earliest 1960s (when it was still considered the ‘50s and everyone had crewcuts and the Beatles hadn’t crossed the pond yet) when we visited the club’s Olympic-size swimming pool, we had to hop shoeless across the black-tar parking lot. This was back in the days when you could buy a pair of flipflops at Sav-On for 19 cents.

The Petroleum Club wasn’t the most prestigious club in town. That title belonged, and still belongs, to Virginia Country Club, just a mile and change to the north. Pop always wanted a membership to Virginia, and we promised we’d buy him one when we made enough money, but we accidentally got into joualism and botched our attempt at a seven-figure salary which would pretty much be required to get into the place, along with our mom making the grade with the members’ wives.

Anyhow, the Petroleum Club was just fine for us. A simpler, yet to us swanky, place where we could swim all day and on Sunday nights take in the buffet with its sprawling dessert table to which, inexplicably, our parents (probably thanks to a day’s worth of highballs) let us make repeated trips. You know what’s a good dessert? Lemon meringue pie with chocolate cake covered with butterscotch pudding. Probably you could cover it with something else. Strawberry syrup or a donut, we don’t care what you do, we’re just saying what we did.

By the end of the 1960s our folks had bought a house with a pool, and we were getting on in the years (teen) and sort of did a Puff, the Magic Dragon thing with the Petroleum Club. We’ve only been a couple of times since on one sort of business or another.

It’s old-school swankiness is still there at the club at 3636 Linden Ave., just up the street from Jongewaard’s Bake-N-Broil and not terribly far from where our grandad’s tuxedo shop used to be – apparently he joined the club in the hope of selling tuxedos to oilmen.

And we can think of no better place than the Petroleum Club for the chosen watering hole for the Bixby Knolls’ traveling Good Spirits Club’s fourth cocktail events from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday.

As befitting the locale, the featured cocktails at this month’s meet are mostly built around the theme of oil, or petroleum if you need to be hit over the head with it.

Your mixologist will be pouring such petro-centric refreshments as the Roughneck, Black Gold, Texas Tea, the 3636 Special, the Wasp and the Motorman.

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Those who insist on letting food get in the way of drinking, appetizers will be available for purchase.

The true, or purported, purpose of the event is for people to socialize (lubricated by the themed drinks) and to discover the increasingly myriad hot spots of Bixby Knolls, which means you’re likely to run into the Brains of Bixby, Blair Cohn, if you make the wise decision to attend.

We’re pretty sure the pool’s closed for the occasion – drinking and diving don’t mix. But wear shoes anyway. You won’t be sorry.

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter.