“Put yer back into it! Make sure yeh reach waaaaay back and git that cruller behin’ the rear wheels of the ‘frigerator, next to the cockroach.”
And, so began the summer of ’66. I was looking for something to tide me over until high school graduation when the Navy planned to ship me off to Vietnam. Maybe bagging groceries, or working in a car wash. Eventually, I settled on the exciting world of commercial fast food.
I wasn’t expecting much. Which was good because The Big Donut wasn’t expecting much out of me, either. So, together we settled on part-time, $1.35 an hour, and all the donuts I could eat.
The Big Donut was a tiny shop that reeked of Crisco, sugar, and fat, sitting watch over the Baptists that poured out of church across the street. It took less than an hour to figure out that all the clothes I wore to work would be permanently impregnated with the stench of glazed donuts. In point, the mornings when I walked into my high school homeroom after working an early shift, people would crinkle their noses, look around and ask, “Does anyone smell cinnamon rolls?”
Never Eat Crumb Donuts
Sam was the day manager at The Big Donut. A wily guy in his mid-20s who looked like something straight out of a Hollywood script: tall, slender with a slicked-back DA, a pack of Kools rolled up in his T-shirt sleeves and a cigarette dangling from his lips. I never figured out why Sam was managing The Big Donut. Jail time might have had something to do with it. Maybe not. But anytime you find someone older than seventeen working in a donut shop, it makes you wonder.
During a week of rigorous training, Sam put me through my paces. “This here is the fryer. This here’s the mixer. That thang over there is the cash register, ‘an these here are the donut boxes. I’ll teach ‘ye how to fold ’em after you’ve been here fir a while. For now, why don’t yeh go ahead and sweep the shop floor.”
So, I found a broom and started sweeping. “Make sure ‘yeh git w-a-a-y back there, unerneath the freezer.” I pushed the broom as far as I could reach and rescued a variety of renegade pastries that were hard as a rock and had been hiding there since the Eisenhower Administration. One thing they all had in common was a liberal coating of dust, grease, refrigeration coolant, and unidentifiable parts of dead insects. I dragged them all out and started walking them over to the trash can.
“Hey, hey hey! Hold it right there!” barked Sam. “Where are yeh goin’ with them?”
“Well, I’m gonna throw them into the trash.”
“No, no, no. Don’t do that. Toss ’em into that bag in the corner.” That went on for several weeks.
One day, Sam said, “Hey, one of the bakeries is comin’ by to pick up that 20-lb. bag in the corner labeled “crumb donuts.” When he gets here, give it to ‘em.”
By this time, the bag was filled to the brim with all sorts of old frosted and glazed donuts, cinnamon rolls, apple fritters, French twists and crullers that hadn’t sold over the past month, as well as the dust bunnies and miscellaneous items I rescued from underneath the freezer.
“What do they do with all these old donuts?”
“Well, they empty everythin’ in the bag inta a large grinder, mix it all up with a bunch of sugar, cinnamon, and other thangs, toss it around, and sell it back to us to use as coating for our crumb donuts.”
To this day, I haven’t eaten another crumb donut.
Me Employee, You Customer
The Big Donut featured three customer service windows: two drive-through and one walk-up. The beauty of drive-through windows (and possibly why they were invented in the first place) is by the time the customers figured out how hopelessly we’d mangled their orders, they were long gone and it just wasn’t worth it to drive all the way back to complain to the manager — who, lucky for us was never there.
Like any other job, there were times when it was busy, but most of the time it was slow. So, we filled the downtime by coming up with exciting pranks to play on unsuspecting customers.
The windows featured ¾ inch Plexiglass sliding doors that slid up and down on tracks like guillotines from the French Revolution. They helped keep the flies out and were our protection from the general public. We operated them by pushing our hips against a bar that triggered a hydraulic lift: push the bar to raise the window. Step away to let it slam shut.
I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed the sense of power the hydraulic windows gave me. We purposely put all of the napkin holders inside, behind the plexiglass windows. Whenever difficult customers reached through the window to grab a napkin, I’d step away, severing their hand at the wrist. Well, not really, but I could always dream.
Fun with the Carnival King
The centerpiece of The Big Donut was the Carnival King liquid propane flat bottom donut fryer. This bad boy featured 54,000 BTU, a 30 lb. oil capacity, stainless steel front, mesh strainer and besides cranking out thousands of cake donuts, crullers, and apple fritters, it helped us create a few “off the menu” items the manufacturer had never dreamed of. But, we’ll get to that later.
I Never Met a Jelly Donut I Liked
Like any other job, there were times when it was busy, but most of the time it was slow. So, we filled the downtime by coming up with exciting pranks to play on unsuspecting customers. Including our infamous exploding jelly donuts.
The way we were supposed to make jelly donuts was a two-step process. First, we’d squirt globs of dough into the fryer and watch them cook, occasionally turning them over to make sure they were golden-brown on both sides. After they were done frying, we’d pull them out, and move them onto a draining rack. When the donuts had cooled, we’d squirt one two-ounce shot of jelly into them using a specially-designed syringe that sat on top of a five-gallon drum of jelly. One squirt per donut. Finally, we’d dust the donuts with powdered sugar and transfer them to a rack in view of the public.
But on this particular day, I came up with something different to reward our special customers. Customers who bitched about being short-changed, the coffee being stale, and never having any napkins.
Our special jelly donuts started out like all the others. But instead of getting one squirt of jelly, we’d pump fifteen or twenty squirts into them, until they were bursting at 120 PSI — about the same pressure as a bicycle tire in the Tour de France. There was so much internal pressure from the jelly, we had to plug the holes with dough just to keep it from escaping.
One day a cute sixteen-year-old girl stopped by the shop with her friends after church service. She stood at the window in her sparkling-white Easter dress, laughing and giggling with her friends. Finally, she pointed to one of our special jelly donuts sitting on the back of the rack.
The instant she bit into the donut, it exploded into a gigantic Rorschach pattern across the entire front of her dress. She dropped the remnants of the donut, trying to shake great gobs of jelly off her hands and arms like ignited napalm. No matter what she tried, it just spread further.
By this time, her “friends” were doubled-over laughing — almost as much as the rest of us behind the Plexiglass. Of course, there weren’t any napkins on the outside counter. They were inside with us.
You would think the challenge would be getting a cockroach to swim, but you’d be wrong. They were blessed with innate survival skills.
Bored with exploding jelly donuts, we upped the ante by slipping other surprises inside. Sometimes it might be a paper clip. Other times a penny. But, our favorites came with a rubber band tucked inside. We thought about graduating to small screws and thumbtacks, but even we had our limits.
When Things Were Slow
The Carnival King also came in handy for preparing a large variety of festive menu items reserved for the staff. Every Friday was “Fondue Day” at The Big Donut. We’d bring in special items from home like hamburger meat, hot dogs, baby back ribs, frozen cod fillets, chicken livers, shish kabobs, enchiladas, meatballs and throw them into the bubbling oil, using fondue sticks or pliers. Since it was cost-prohibitive to change the oil in the fryer more than once or twice a year, our special contributions ended up giving our donuts a “distinctive flavor” that kept customers coming back time after time.
Once a month we’d stage The Big Donut Olympics in the Carnival King. We’d spend the previous week trapping cockroaches, centipedes, and other non-flying insects from the back of the shop and inside the public restroom. Fortunately, the Carnival King came equipped with “lanes” that were designed to keep the donuts from touching each other while frying and the “athletes” from venturing off their competitive paths.
You would think the challenge would be getting a cockroach to swim, but you’d be wrong. They were blessed with innate survival skills. The instant their tiny shells hit that 350-degree oil, they swam like there was no tomorrow — which, for them, was exactly the case. The races usually weren’t very long, but they were always exciting and a good time was had by all.
These days, a lot of people complain about their jobs; especially when they pay sub-sub-sub minimum wage. But, for us in 1966, The Big Donut was a source of lifetime memories.
We could get away with just about anything because most of the time, Sam never knew what went on while he was gone. Unless of course, a customer complained. Or returned 300 dozen donuts.
Next Time Go To Winchell’s
Every Sunday, a few of us had to go into work at the crack of midnight to make 300 dozen donuts for the Sunday morning Baptist congregation. Most people would scream bloody murder, but we didn’t care. Half the time, we rolled in at the end of a bender. And besides, what else were we going to do at one in the morning? Not to mention we were getting paid $1.35 an hour.
Each week, the leader of the congregation would give Sam specific instructions about what types of donuts to make, and what to avoid. One week, they lectured him, “Whatever you do, don’t put any powdered sugar donuts in the boxes. The blind people get it all over themselves.” So, naturally, we made up the order containing nothing but powdered sugar donuts. What were they going to do? Bring back 300 dozen donuts at 7:30 on a Sunday morning? They did.
We waited the obligatory three months for things to cool down, then gave the parishioners another fun surprise. While getting ready for one of their post-service receptions, one of them cracked open a box of donuts to discover a note we’d left for them scrawled on the inside of the lid:
“Next time go to Winchell’s” with a drawing of an extended middle finger. But even that didn’t get us fired.
The Final Frontier
By some miracle, I lasted over a year at The Big Donut. Most of our high jinx would have gotten us fired today; probably even arrested or sued. But, during the late-1960s, everything was fair game. Besides, anyone who was willing to come into work at midnight for $1.35 an hour was a precious commodity.
These days, a lot of people complain about their jobs; especially when they pay sub-sub-sub minimum wage. But, for us in 1966, The Big Donut was a source of lifetime memories. Even when we weren’t working, we’d congregate in the parking lot sharing a gallon of Red Mountain Fine Wine and All-purpose Wall Cleaner, coming up with new, lurid ways to get back at the public, even though they were paying our salaries. But it didn’t matter. They still kept coming back.
Eventually, some of us went away to military service. Others went away to college. But, as if summoned by some mysterious, gravitational pull, all of us eventually found our way back to The Big Donut. The people I worked with remain my closest friends to this day.
We should all be so lucky to make $1.35 an hour and life-long friends.
