The Bob Cobb story-Part 1

Note: My next book, No. 6, may focus on Bob Cobb, the owner of the legendary Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood and a Billings man who played a key role in the city getting a professional baseball team 78 years ago. I’ve written a chunk of text for a possible manuscript, and I’ll be sharing that during coming weeks. Your comments are welcome!

By 1944, at the latest, Bob Cobb nursed a dream. He saw the advantages that Billings possessed, which could make it Montana’s leading city, and he wanted his hometown to take action to achieve its potential.

Cobb, who had grown up in Billings, Montana, had moved to Los Angeles when he was 18 and had become a Southern California success story. He owned the Brown Derby Restaurant, the legendary Hollywood eatery that was the place to see and be seen for the city’s movie stars, film directors, and other celebrities. And he was also vice-president of the Hollywood Stars, a baseball team in the Pacific Coast League.

But Cobb hadn’t forgotten Billings or the potential of the fast-growing city nestled in a valley beneath the landmark sandstone cliffs, the Rimrocks, to the north and the Yellowstone River to the south.

So, in September 1944, on one of several of his trips back home, Cobb expressed appreciation for Billings’ potential.

“My old hometown has a great future ahead of it,” he said. “It can’t escape it.”

Cobb’s interview with the Billings Gazette, which became an article published on September 30, 1944, took place despite the onset of his illness. He was in bed in his room at the Northern Hotel, trying to shake a cold.

Wearing bedclothes, he greeted a reporter with a smile and discussed his plans for a month-long holiday. He said he would spend the entire time in Billings and the surrounding areas, “hunting and what have you.”

Cobb tapped his memory to a time when, as a boy, “I used to peddle papers for the Billings Gazette.” From that early show of enterprise, Cobb became a youngster who “knew the alleys of this town as well as I knew the streets.”

But Cobb, a native of Missouri who moved to Billings with his parents when he was one, realized that he needed and wanted more than the Magic City offered. He was making eight dollars a month and then found a job in a local bank, making “50-odd dollars a month.” He bucked for a raise of eight dollars a month, but his boss refused.

So, “I started out for the coast,” he said.

Although he, like millions of others in the 1920s and 1930s, answered the siren call of the Golden State, Cobb didn’t cut his ties with where he grew up.

“Billings is the old hometown for me,” he said.

And he realized the potential of the city that was then Montana’s third largest in population, behind Butte and Great Falls, and which would pass both to become a metropolis today of about 120,000 people and the center of a trade area that has almost 500,000 people.

Sizing up Billings in 1944, Cobb said, “What with the shipping, oil, agricultural and geographical advantages, Billings cannot help but be the biggest and most productive in the state.”

He said he looked forward to seeing it become “center of the state’s industry and the attraction for out-of-state visitors.”