Group Turns Daily Coffee Break Into 10-Year Friendship : Lifestyles: Beach walkers who say they have little in common share java and swap tales at a seaside snack shop, seven mornings a week.

PORT HUENEME —  A morning mist wraps around the beige brick hut when Joanne Metzger sits down with a cup of coffee at a small inside table.

Howard Stern rants over the snack bar’s radio, muffling the low groan of a foghorn. Metzger, 58, waits, sipping her steaming java.

It’s just before 8 a.m. She’s the first to arrive.

“Here comes the guy who’s responsible for our fog,” Metzger says, as 71-year-old Bob Plessner pads up to the Pier snack bar with his beagle, Lady.

“I came down here to listen to the sea gulls cough,” Plessner says.

The conversation is already speeding from the weather to politics to family by the time Spike Spackman arrives.

They claim they have nothing in common, but for a decade, the same group of about 10 residents--most finished with their careers and taking life at a slower pace--have been meeting at this snack bar on Port Hueneme Beach. They while away an hour or so, seven days a week.

No can say for sure why a retired grocer, apartment manager, former welder, homemaker and a handful of others started coming here. Ten years ago, it was just a matter of ducking in for coffee after walks along the shoreline. The pit stop eventually became habit.

Now, usually between 8 and 9 a.m., the residents crowd around the two tables in the snack bar’s tiny bait and tackle shop, drinking Folger’s Blend from Styrofoam cups.

“We talk and lie and fight the war over again,” says 87-year-old Mack McKay, a former welder with Missouri Pacific Railroad who served in the Navy during World War II.

Like McKay, who is undergoing radiation therapy for cancer, many say meeting at the Pier is a chance to put life on hold for an hour and to enjoy some good conversation and camaraderie.

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Many leave their spouses at home for what is more than a coffee klatch. It’s really an open forum to grouse about loud neighbors, test theories about life, and reminisce.

This day, Spackman, who has four grown daughters, is suggesting ways to figure out when children have really become adults.

“All at once, the collect calls stop,” says the 67-year-old manager of a Port Hueneme condominium complex. “Then you know they’ve gotten somewhere in life.”

But Plessner disagrees.

“The problems only stop once you go to the maggot ranch,” says Plessner, the group cynic.

The residents acknowledge each other’s wedding anniversaries and birthday parties--sometimes lighting a candle on top of a cupcake. But in keeping with the group’s informal nature, they have never bothered to think up a name for themselves. And most don’t know each other’s last names.

“One of my friends calls them the Coffee Crew,” says Pete Morrison, son of the Pier’s owners, who often works the morning shift when the residents amble in for coffee.

Morrison’s mother, Valorie, says the members of the Coffee Crew are among her favorite customers.

“These are the kind of guys that if you walk by, they take their hats off,” she says.

Unlike many bakeries and diners where similar groups gather every morning across America, the odor wafting through the Pier is that of salty sea air, not warm bread.

Sand grains are sprinkled across the damp cement floor. Fishing rods for sale jut from the baby-blue walls of the cramped seating area. And a large poster advertising Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax--a surfboard wax--hangs over the cash register.

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But residents say they’re not looking for comfort or a tony interior.

“It’s a good meeting place, especially when we used to walk out on the pier,” says McKay, as he tosses popcorn kernels to a swarming flock of pigeons. “And you get a refill on your coffee.”

Bound perhaps only by similar age and an appreciation for lively conversation, the members of the crew spend little time pondering why the coffee break has become a daily ritual.

“Our lifestyles and backgrounds are totally different, all of us,” says Metzger, a homemaker. “I guess we just liked coming down to the beach.”