Cock 'n Bull sharing the corner with Hornburg Jaguar in the early 1980s - Hornburg later expanded into the Cock 'n Bull space
Cock ‘n Bull sharing the corner with Hornburg Jaguar in the early 1980s – Hornburg later expanded into the Cock ‘n Bull space

The End

Richard Bare was among the dozens of current and former regulars who were on hand on October 22, 1987 for the Cock ‘n Bull’s “wake.” It started at 11 a.m. and continued until closing time. “We toasted each other and the good times we’d had there,” he wrote. They exchanged memories of the old days possibly for the last time. Like the time British actor Charlie Victor, in his cups, climbed into the suit of armor that stood in the back of the dining room as a lark. When he tried to take it off, he found he couldn’t, so he stood at attention for a few more hours. “Every time I’d walk by,” Bare said, “I’d see out of the comer of my eye one of the arms move a little bit. It was eerie.”

KNBC News entered the bar early in the afternoon with cameras rolling. The reporter zeroed in on Richard Bare. “Welcome to the Cock n’ Bull,” Bare said, smiling. “They asked me what was the best memory I had,” Bare wrote, “and I said meeting three of my wives here.” He also recalled the night they painted “V for Victory” on the wall above the dartboard during World War II.

“Bad behavior was rare,” KCBS commentator Bill Stout told his viewers, “You didn’t have to worry about some guy throwing up on your shoe or punching you in the mouth. The place had class.”

At around six o’clock, the mourners conducted a ceremony of sorts. They removed a wooden plaque bearing the names of regulars who had died – most prominently including “Dragnet” creator and star, Jack Webb – from a wall in the bar. They marched it en masse down the Strip to Scandia, a Scandinavian restaurant that had been popular with the Rat Pack in the ‘60s. The owner hung it on the wall of his bar and bought everyone a round of drinks.

They planned to make Scandia their new meeting place from that time on. But “Scandia never filled the shoes of the old Cock ‘n Bull,” Bare said. “It went out of business a year or so later.”

It was a sad day for dozens of the tavern’s famous and not-so-famous regulars. “The Bull had outlived its competition in the neighborhood,” Richard Bare wrote, “and spanned succeeding eras of nightclubs, coffeehouses, and discotheques, topless bars and rock clubs-most of which had come and gone.”

And so fell a survivor of the golden age of Hollywood on the Strip. The Cock ‘n Bull, 1937-1987. RIP.