This essay won Second Place in the “Sports Commentary” category of the 2023 Los Angeles Press Club Awards. Read more about this here.
As a kid growing up in Echo Park in the 1970s, I would walk to Dodger Stadium with my brother or kids in the neighborhood. For three dollars, we could purchase an upper deck seat and for an additional three dollars, we could get a Coke and hot dog. We would arrive before the game and have the players sign our balls, which I still have today. We often ran into food service workers we knew: Some had been employed at my grandmother’s restaurant, the Nayarit, which she opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1951, and some at Barragan’s, another neighborhood anchor opened by a former Nayarit employee, Ramon Barragan.
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