Some days, there's no better friend than your favorite bar stool. After more than 20 years as a regular at Ventura's Bombay Bar and Grill, Jeff Cameron has made a lot of four-legged, wood-backed buddies there.

"My hiney's been in every one of those chairs and I like 'em," Cameron, 61, said.

So when the Bombay Bar and Grill sold the old chairs a few months ago and replaced them with red-cushioned, wood-backed new ones, Cameron asked to keep one of his old friends.

"I met, married and divorced a girl while in those chairs," he said. "It's been faithful."

Bombay co-owner Dominka Montgomery, who was remodeling the 25-year-old bar, was happy to donate a chair to one of her most faithful customers. Cameron, a graphic designer, took his buddy the bar stool up to his Santa Barbara office, where he uses it as his office chair.

"It's all wood and flat, but, oddly, that's the shape of my hiney," Cameron said. "I'm going to put a little brass plaque on it."

For any other Bombay regulars who had to bid farewell to the Bombay bar stools, their new owner wants you to know they have a new home and are making friends with lots of new rear ends.

"We opened a week ago and we're slammed every night," said Pam Kaye, co-owner of the Blacksmith Brewery in Stevensville, Mont.

Kaye said that when she saw the bar stools advertised on eBay, she thought they would go perfectly in the 100-year-old brick-and-steel barn they were turning into a bar. It's all about history in Stevensville, the town founded on the state's oldest settlement.

"We found these chairs and they were 20 bucks apiece," Kaye said. "They were old-style and I thought they had character."

The problem was, she couldn't figure out any way to ship them up to Montana.

Here's when it's handy to live in a town of about 1,500 people.

Like in most small towns, everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Lots of locals knew Kaye was interested in buying the chairs, so one day a young friend ran over to the bar and said, "Hey, I'm going to Ventura and I just heard over at the coffee shop that those chairs have just about 35 minutes left to bid on them," Kaye said.

Kaye and the Blacksmith Brewery co-owner quickly got online and bid on the chairs. The young man went down to Ventura, picked up the chairs and brought them back.

Just a few remain at the Bombay.

"We kept some because we need extra seating on football nights," Montgomery said.

Kaye began preparing her new old chairs for her brewery's grand opening.

"I was cleaning them all and picking the bubble gum off the bottom of one of them and I was thinking, ‘Do people still stick bubble gum on the bottoms of bar stools?'" Kaye said.

One of the stools had the name "Joe" scratched in it.

"And I thought, ‘If these bar stools could talk '" Kaye said.

That's when she realized the bar stools might have some old drinking buddies that might miss them, so she contacted The Star to let folks know where they are.

"If you want to come up and warm up your bar stool, come on up to Montana and see 'em!" Kaye said.