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Lost Doggie Diner Head Resurrected, Sort Of

Doggie Diner head.

Typically we’d flag a tip like this as a shaggy dog tale, if it wasn’t for the photographic evidence and the veracity of its source. It’s from Bruce Kennedy, who’s been amassing an unprecedented cluster of giant fiberglass figures next to his business in Hayward, California. Bruce wrote to us: “Hayward’s long lost [Doggie Diner] head was found today when a local car club stopped by Bell Plastics for a visit. It needs a little work.”

Bruce chatted with us about how this artifact of the defunct chain once graced the outside of his town’s Doggie Diner. When the diner was shuttered, the Hell’s Angels in an adjacent hangout/bar went nuts. They liked the diner, and in a misdirected pursuit of revenge they decided to take it out on the head. They commandeered the giant fiberglass dachshund in a chef’s hat, yanked it off its pole, and moved it to an uninhabited island along San Francisco bay for target practice. Whether this blast-fest happened as a single tragic event isn’t clear, but the head was left riddled with hundreds of bullet holes.

“And they’d machine-gunned it,” said Bruce.

The surviving part of the head was recovered and ended up in the possession of one of the motorcycle gang members, who kept it in private seclusion for many years. The biker grew to love the head, in a way, and eventually returned to the island massacre site and gathered fragments — finding part of the chef’s hat, metal parts, and fiberglass fragments, and the doggie’s bow tie.

The owner saw Bruce’s website, which featured his restored Doggie Diner heads, and decided to load his Hayward Doggie into the bed of his vintage pick-up truck for the day’s car club travels.

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