By Alex Roth
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
July 21, 2002
A few weeks ago, a waitress at Dad's Cafe and Steakhouse in Poway noticed a middle-aged couple taking pictures in front of the restaurant, like tourists posing in front of Niagara Falls.
The couple said they were visiting from New York and had been following David Westerfield's murder trial on television. They wanted everyone back home to know they'd made a trip to the famous nightspot.
"People come here just to gawk," said Patrick Lipe, the co-owner of Dad's, as he sat in one of the bar's burgundy vinyl booths. "Our phone has rung so many times from people asking directions to this place."
Dad's is a magnet for strangers these days. They come from all parts of San Diego and beyond. On Friday night, the crowd included a woman from Maine who traveled across the country just to visit Dad's and several other locales that have become notorious in the case of Westerfield, 50, who is accused of kidnapping and killing 7-year-old Danielle van Dam.
Some people walk in, look around and walk out. Not long ago, one guy prowled around the parking lot snapping photos of the restaurant from several angles, telling Lipe he was taking the pictures for posterity.
Some stay long enough to order a beer or a meal, and pepper the staff with questions about where Danielle's mother, Brenda, was dancing, and which barstool Westerfield was sitting on, and where Barbara and Denise were playing pool on the last night the second-grader was seen alive.
Lipe usually obliges by giving what he wearily describes as "the 5-cent tour." Here's the spot where van Dam and Westerfield may or may not have shared a dance. In the corner is where Barbara Easton stuck her hand down Yvette Wetli's blouse. In front is the smoking lounge where Duane the fisherman spotted Keith and Rich looking drunk and stoned on the night of Feb. 1.
Lipe, a burly man with graying red hair, says he's happy for the extra business but uneasy about the reasons for it. He understands that the restaurant is now linked in the public consciousness with a child's horrifying death.
He also worries that the Westerfield trial – with its soap-opera-like testimony about marijuana smoking, wife-swapping, vodka-swilling and dirty dancing – has created a misperception about the bar.
Lipe wants people to understand that Dad's is a family place, the kind of homey nightspot where the staff has been known to hand out fresh-baked cookies on Friday and Saturday nights. The restaurant sponsors two Little League teams.
Lipe has gone so far as to cancel the weekly swing-dance lessons to avoid subjecting the establishment to further ridicule.
"The publicity is a good thing," he said. "I'm not saying it's a bad thing. But that little girl is never coming back."
There has been testimony during the trial that Brenda van Dam and her friends smoked pot in the bar's parking lot that night, and that she tried to invite some strangers back to her house. There has also been testimony that van Dam and her husband have swapped sex partners with their friends.
Westerfield, a design engineer who lived two doors from the van Dams, was also in Dad's that night. He wasn't a regular customer, and neither was van Dam or her friends.
Newcomers drawn to Dad's by the unseemly testimony are quick to discover that it's a pretty ordinary place.
"They expect to see wives making out with other men, men making out with their friends' wives," said Sean Brown, who manages the bar. "But that doesn't happen. This is an upper-middle-class, conservative neighborhood."
Dad's, which used to be Kaminski Park Sports Bar & Grill, is in the middle of downtown Poway, a city of 48,000, where the median price for a single-family home is $480,000 and where 83 percent of the population is white. The city's highly ranked schools are a huge draw.
Dad's is popular because it offers something for everybody. Little League coaches bring their teams here on weekends to play videos of their games on the large-screen television. Children's crayon drawings hang on the walls next to sports pennants.
Retirees come at lunch with their Dad's "2 fer 1" meal coupons, and many of them agree that you can't find a better plate of tri-tip in Poway.
The bar has country line-dancing on Thursday and Sunday nights, and live rock bands on Fridays and Saturdays. During football season, people watch games on the bar's 19 television sets. For players on the city's 180 adult softball teams, Dad's is a place to go after a game to drink a few pitchers of beer.
There are the regulars, like Bill Wallner, a 58-year-old insurance underwriter who estimates he's spent 280 of the last 365 days at the bar. That number would be higher except he took a vacation to Canada for several months. Like Norm from the sitcom "Cheers," he has his own barstool.
From his perch, Wallner – whose nickname, Mojo, is derived from a computer trivia game at Dad's that he's played an estimated 10,000 times – says he's witnessed people wandering into the place hoping to get a glimpse of some of the characters who testified at the trial.
A few months ago, Wallner was on his barstool when a crew from "America's Most Wanted" arrived to film a re-enactment of the events of Feb. 1.
"Four hours they were here, all for about 35 seconds of TV," he said. "It was kind of funny."
Some of the regulars have stopped coming because of the bar's newfound notoriety. Those who do come tend to congregate in the back, near the rear exit, where they bemoan all the new faces over the past few months.
"I'm ready for them to go home and leave us alone," said Martie Kahn, 40, a Hewlett-Packard employee who has been a regular at the bar for about six years. "We want to have our place back."
There's been other negative fallout as well. One Little League squad canceled a team function at Dad's out of concern the restaurant might not be an appropriate place for children.
Then there are the bizarre little incidents that only the glare of gavel-to-gavel television coverage can produce. A few days after Brown, the bartender, used the word "conversate" several times on the witness stand, he received an anonymous hate letter expressing outrage because he hadn't spoken proper English.
Lipe admits the attention has been so good for business that he's thought about opening up a chain of Dad's restaurants in the area. But he's reluctant to appear as though he's capitalizing on a tragedy.
"I should have opened up 10 more restaurants already," he said. "But I have a thing called a conscience that's kicking my butt."
There were the 48-year-old twin sisters who own a hair salon in Rancho Bernardo and have listened to radio coverage of the case every day.
"My mother said, 'Don't go do any dirty dancing,' " one of the sisters, Sylvia Nargi, said as the duo prepared to enter the bar's front door.
Also in the crowd was Carol McCullagh, who lives in Old Town, Maine, with her husband and six children. She has been following the case on Court TV and decided to accompany her husband on a business trip to San Diego so she could visit Dad's bar, Westerfield's house and the spot off Dehesa Road east of El Cajon where Danielle's nude body was found on Feb. 27.
"Something about little Danielle just drew me in," she said.
Out in the smoking lounge of the bar, Sally Goodman sat and stewed. She manages a nearby liquor store and has been coming to the bar for years. She's had it with all the "lookie-loos."
She said she walked into the bar a few days ago and barely recognized a soul.
"I knew three people," she said. "Normally I would know 10, 15, 20 people. It's disgusting."
Nursing a beer at the other end of the bar, Kahn, another regular, says she feels the same way.
"This is kind of like our place," she said. "All of a sudden we have all these outsiders taking over. My thinking is, " 'OK, you came in. You saw. Now go away.' "