Musso & Franks is a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood that's been in business seemingly forever. One of the best stories my family has about it is an episode in the mid-'70s when my father, a naval aviator, was on a short leave visiting my mother, a nurse at the North Hollywood Medical Center, and they stopped in at Musso’s after visiting Griffith Park and walking from the observatory to the top of Mt. Lee, then taking in the tourist sights along Hollywood Blvd. They didn’t have a reservation and were told they could wait and see if there was a cancellation.
As they were waiting, a waiter came over and said a gentleman had asked them to join him. It was Telly Savalas. A few minutes later, David Carradine came over and joined them, and then Robert Vaughn stopped by. My dad knew Carradine from having done some stunt work on his TV show Shane when he was in college and Vaughn from working on Bullitt as a budding stuntman with Solar Productions under the tutelage of Bud Ekins.
They ended up having a three-hour dinner, paid for by Savalas, who said he had invited them over because he hated to see a young couple looking as tired and forlorn as they did.
We have a photo somewhere of my great-grandfather and a bunch of Saratoga T4M torpedo bomber crewmen celebrating at Musso’s in 1929 after they had gotten back from their success at Fleet Problem IX, where they surprised the defenders of the Panama Canal and were deemed to have destroyed its locks. They all look very happy. 