Tonight’s episode of Huell Howser’s California’s Gold television show was a rerun of his visit to windblown Mojave Desert town Amboy. Amboy has always just been barely hanging in there ever since I-40 bypassed that stretch of US-66, but Route 66 tourism and the occasional movie appearance guaranteed at least a little business over the years.
I first learned of Amboy in early 1984 after a couple of us drove all night around the southern Mojave and wandered into Roy’s Cafe around 6 in the morning and had breakfast served to us by a old gent who seemed to be as old as the desert itself. The food was, well, adequate, and the guy liked to spray Raid everywhere, but for the middle of absolute nowhere it was hella good and Roy’s decor hadn’t changed much (if at all) in fifty years. Buster Burris was the gentleman in question and had lived in Amboy since moving there in the 1930s. The Howser show interviewed Buster, and I got to wondering if he was still alive and what Amboy’s status is.
Buster finally sold the town in 1995 and moved to Twentynine Palms where he eventually passed away in 2001. The new Amboy owners put the town up for sale in February of this year (asking price $1.8 million), but no news on a buyer yet.
A little something I snagged from that first 1984 visit:
For several years running, I had Thanksgiving dinner at the Two Sisters restaurant in Inyokern and was thinking about it again this year but apparently it closed after several decades. It’s too bad because the interior and the menu at Two Sisters probably hadn’t changed at all since it opened. I can’t think of a finer example of “vintage eating” around especially with the Thanksgiving buffet which could have been identical to a typical meal from 1960. Information on the place is pretty sketchy, but apparently the last surviving sister sold the place a couple years ago.
