So much in Los Angeles changes fast. Treasure the good things that don't.
"Hello, Doris!" goes the chorus of regulars at the Original Farmers Market, when they stop by to see Doris Perez, who has been there as long as they know.
Her first job was at the Desert Date Shop, with its saltwater taffy, plump medjools and deglet noors — though, truth be told, not many who visit remember her from way back then.
They do from Du-par's, where she worked pies for 38 years, selling thousands each Thanksgiving Day from the parking lot when the rest of the market was closed.
When Du-par's changed hands and shut its doors for an overhaul, Perez jumped ship to Magee's House of Nuts.
Since 2005, she's been dishing up macadamias and cashews and almonds at the stall with the giant peanut grinder.
Maybe you've seen her there, standing all of 4 foot 11¿¿ — short white hair, glasses, an Irish lilt in her ever-cheerful voice.
Maybe she's said, "Wouldn't you like to try some?" as you've gazed at the grinder's lush peanut butter, being endlessly stirred.
A few weeks ago, on Oct. 23, Perez marked her 50th anniversary at the market — though she isn't one to brag and she's kept it mostly under her hat.
On a recent Saturday morning, after flipping on the lights and tying a black apron over her crisp white shirt, the 78-year-old, who has 4 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, set to work arranging the jams, knickknacks and nut butters in precise stacks and V-patterns on almost every inch of countertop.
"Top of the morning!" said a kind-looking man in a khaki windbreaker just as she was finishing up.
"And the rest of the day to you!" she chimed back to Peter O'Malley.
The former Dodgers owner, old-fashioned and courtly, likes to stop in to see Perez as his father, Walter, did before him. (Walter was partial to Du-par's chicken pies, she says: "He used to buy them by the dozen.")
"We just came by to say hello. Can we buy you a cup of coffee?" O'Malley asked, his wife Annette by his side.
"She's the best. We love her. We truly love her," Peter O'Malley said, which led Annette to reminisce about the St. Patrick's Day when her husband was heading out to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick stag dinner. Perez said, "You're going to be alone tonight," and gave her a big bag of salted nuts for company.
It's the people like Perez, the O'Malleys said, who have kept them coming back to the market. Remember Agnes? And Joe, who liked to sneak the kids candy? And Charlie in the shop that is now Monsieur Marcel, who once found a bracelet of Annette's behind a freezer six months after she'd lost it?
"She's the only one we know now," Annette O'Malley said of Perez. But half a century? That was big news to them.
It even snuck up on Perez a little.
Who could have guessed it would happen this way? She had planned to be in America for a year. She'd arrived as Doris Leech in 1959 to be a nanny to two little ones: Byron and Francine, they were called. At night, she and other young women from back home — from Ireland and Scotland and Wales — would get together to stave off the loneliness at the Cart Inn on Hollywood Boulevard or Hody's Coffee Shop at Hollywood and Vine.
At Hody's, Perez met a Mexican-born cook named Jose Fries Perez, though everyone called him Joe.
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