Birthday parties were in full swing at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour on Hawthorne Blvd. in Torrance at 12:39 p.m. on Friday, April 9, 1982. At that moment, diners looked on in shock and disbelief as a small plane crashed and exploded into flames just in front of the popular restaurant.
Bob Farrell and Ken McCarthy had opened the first Farrell’s in Portland, Oregon, in 1963, and the chain grew quickly. The partners adopted an old-fashioned, good-timey theme both for the restaurants, which featured player pianos, and its servers, who wore early 1900s-style employee uniforms and straw hats.
The restaurants served regular meals, but specialized in ice cream. Lots of ice cream. They offered free sundaes to patrons on their birthdays, but became best known for seeming to promote the gluttonous consumption of ice cream. Employees would bring the largest dessert on the menu, the Zoo, to the table on a wooden stretcher-like carrier, accompanied by ambulance sirens and great fanfare.
The restaurant’s wholesome atmosphere and emphasis on large portions of food made it a big favorite among families, and the chain grew rapidly. The Marriott Corp. took notice, and acquired Farrell’s in 1972, when the chain had 58 total locations. By the mid-1970s, there were more than 130 Farrell’s restaurants nationwide.
Strangely, Farrell’s seemed to have more than its share of tragedies associated with it. The most devastating of these occurred in Sacramento on Sept. 24, 1972. On that Sunday afternoon, the pilot of a vintage F-86 Sabrejet fighter plane crashed into the Sacramento Farrell’s after an unsuccessful takeoff attempt.
There were more than 100 people inside the Farrell’s when the plane struck it. 22 people died, 12 of them children. The pilot survived.
Ten years later, Farrell’s patrons looked on in horror as a private plane carrying three passengers crashed right in front of the restaurant at 23705 Hawthorne Blvd.
The aircraft, a Cessna Cardinal 177, had just taken off after a brief refueling stop at Torrance Municipal Airport following a return trip from Catalina Island. Los Angeles Fire Dept. Capt. Donald Morgan, 44, was piloting the plane, which also carried his 17-year-old daughter, Michelle, and her 19-year-old fiance Joseph Bagley. All three perished in the crash.
Witnesses at the airport heard the airport’s engine sputtering on takeoff, and the control tower radioed the plane to check on it, but received no response.
Farrell’s waitress Iris Sicuro also heard the plane sputtering shortly before it landed on Hawthorne Blvd., which luckily was devoid of cars at that moment.
“It exploded into a big ball of fire,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “The flames were shooting up past the (restaurant) windows. We opened the front door, but the heat was too intense to go out just then.”
Miraculously, no one on the ground was injured, including the 30-40 lunchtime customers and staff inside the restaurant at the time. Flames reportedly shot more than 100 feet in the air, and several nearby parked cars were destroyed.
About two hours after the crash, Michelle Morgan’s brother Jim arrived at the crash site after hearing about it on the radio. “Oh God, it’s them!” he cried out upon realizing who the victims were.
Michelle, a junior at Torrance High School, was memorialized when the school’s Student Memorial Fund sponsored a 5K race in her honor in 1983. The surviving family members, her mother and two brothers Jim and Bart, ran in the race.
During the early 1980s, Marriott sold off the chain to a group of private investors, who changed the restaurant’s concept to more of an everyday family restaurant without the nostalgic trappings and emphasis on ice cream. Many of the restaurants began to close.
By 1986, the Torrance Farrell’s had closed. That year, Ed Debevic’s, a 1950s-style burger joint, announced plans to operate at its 23705 Hawthorne Blvd. location. They served up burgers and updated nostalgia until 1991. The site’s current occupant, the El Pollo Inka Peruvian restaurant, opened there in 1995.
As for Farrell’s, by 1990, nearly all of its locations had closed. The moribund chain was revived in 2008, when Paul Kramer’s Parlour Enterprises acquired rights to the name.
His new company, headquartered in Lake Forest in Orange County, began opening locations in 2009 in California and Hawaii.
The new chain, though much smaller than the original, operated with some success for several years, with founder Bob Farrell on board in an advisory role.
In 2011, there were rumors that Kramer was considering opening a Farrell’s at the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, to be located at the former site of Jerry’s Deli. It never happened; the company ultimately decided against it.
Bob Farrell died in 2015 at 87. The new company’s fortunes began to ebb later in the 2010s, and the final Farrell’s location in Brea, Ca. closed in 2019.
Sources:
“The Age of Aries in Torrance, California, April 9, 1982,” Check-Six.com website.
Daily Breeze files.
Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour Facebook pages.
Los Angeles Times files.
“Two Plane Crashes, Tragedy, and Ice Cream Sundaes: Was Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour Cursed or Just Unlucky?”, by Erica Landis, Wide Open Eats blog, Aug. 30, 2021.
Wikipedia.
