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| Coupons from my father's DDU training manual |
I was a fifth-grader
at Longfellow Elementary, yet I don’t recall learning anything about Henry Wadsworth or reciting “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
After my
dad returned from Boston and then moved us to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma—where he
opened a Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 66—my ex-classmates wrote to me. I still have the
missives written on paper reserved for grade-schoolers learning to improve
their penmanship, if not their spelling and punctuation. Greg, for example, wrote,
“You are lucky because your dad works in a dunkin donuts (sic) shop, when ever
(sic) you want a donut you got one. Boy, you are going to live in paradise!”
Dad made
cutting donuts look easy to a ten-year old. On rare occasions, he would place
the chrome ringlet-maker in my right hand. I anticipated chopping the dough
into perfect circles, just like my father had learned at DDU. I swung my right
arm and wrist downward at the doughy blob and anticipated the impact, that flick
of the wrist Dad had executed to free the soon-to-be donut from its mother ship.
Thwap. A doughy glob would get stuck in
the donut-cutter. (I had latent talent that wouldn’t manifest itself for
another decade or so, but that’s another story). Dad then blended the mutant’s
remains into the big batch and repeated the process he had learned in Boston.
I could
also watch my father through the gigantic rectangular window separating the
customers from the master donut maker. He’d roll dough flat, sprinkle cinnamon on
top, reshape the mass into a roll—and then with a whack, whack, whack—he’d chop off chunks that would become coffee
rolls.
My dad
wore splattered batter instead of blush. Cakeup, not makeup. He shouldered the
burden: the long, long hours required to feed customers and to earn a living
for a growing family.
Less than two years later, we moved back to Colorado—to Fort
Collins, where my dad would own an automotive business for more than three
dozen years and I would learn that I preferred donut grease to muffler grime.
In 2013, less than a year before Oklahoma City’s Dunkin’
Donut franchisee Misha Goli would announce the expansion of the brand there, he
and I chatted about our dads and donuts. His father, Massoud, had also attended
DDU and baked... and baked. Misha, a ten-year old in 1992, wanted no part of
that. He was all about customer service.
He said, “I used to get the milk crates—I couldn’t reach the
cash register because I was too short. So I would always get the milk crate and
put that under the cash register, jump up and grab the register with one arm
and use the other hand to try to push the buttons and ring the customers up as
they were coming in.”
He also remembers that giant rectangular window through
which customers could watch bakers in action. “The windows aren’t there anymore,”
Misha said. He was quick to add that the family and community spirit is still
alive, however.
His father has retired and still lives in Oklahoma. My dad
passed away last October, in Fort Collins—a week before Dunkin’ Donuts opened a store there and while I was home here in Boston.
My wife and I flew back to Colorado, and in my dad’s basement
she found his Dunkin’ Donuts training manual with that old school logo, letters
rounded into a fuchsia-colored coffee cup.
