My son Matthew and I were headed for a cup of coffee and a pastry recently when I brought up the subject of doughnuts, and what Centralia was lacking was an old fashioned doughnut shop. You know, a place where you could have an ordinary cup of coffee and a doughnut. Oh sure, Starbucks makes great coffee and their pastry section is near the high end of delicious tidbits (not as good as The Bread Peddler in Olympia, though) but I long for something simpler, something that takes me back a few years or more.
I’d be surprised if there are many among the younger generation who have tasted the epitome of donuts, those fried in a container of vegetable oil. The things you can buy at the pastry counter in grocery stores are round and have a hole in the center alright, but that’s where the similarity ends. And if the end product is still warm from its oil bath, the pleasure can only be increased. For those who cry “They’re so unhealthy cooked that way” I can only reply that the quantity of them I consumed in my younger years didn’t stop me from becoming a Nonagenarian.
I’m sure I wrote a few years ago about watching them being made mechanically in the front window of a store on Broadway in Tacoma back in the 1930s. They’d be sizzling in a large vat of near-boiling oil until a mechanical arm would flip them over at the proper moment, after which a net-like contraption would collect them all. There were very few batches which weren’t sold out at that point. I’d gladly sing a few songs from the 1920s with my ukulele for the chance to savor one or more again.
Changing the subject, when was the last time you heard anyone sing or play a song in waltz tempo? There was something romantic about that old three-quarter time that hasn’t wasn’t matched in all the records I played as a disc jockey back in the beginning of my career in the middle of the last century. I take that back. There’s one I remember, a sappy thing called “Tammy” in 1957 from the movie “Tammy and the Bachelor.” Am I wrong or is Johnny Mathis the last remaining singer to sing a romantic song? Can you remember the last time you even heard a romantic song on the radio?
Here’s another topic for Crotchetyman to gripe about: I recently watched part of a TV fundraising special of the type that both KCTS and KBTC run from time to time. I think we can all remember a time when such promotions were a local event — call it a production — with rows of local citizens answering (or at least pretending to answer) pledges from local viewers. The people doing the pitches displayed a local charm that we’ll probably never see again. I guess those fundraising episodes were just too expensive or too time-consuming to set up: desks had to be arranged on several tier levels and all those phones had to be acquired and connected.
To fill their void, what we have these days are generic programs devoid of any local color being hosted by people we don’t recognize with the only local part of the pitch being the phone numbers listed at the bottom of the TV screen. It’s just one more case where technology has replaced human contact just like smartphones have put everyone into a safe, handheld cubical instead of us experiencing eye to eye contact with another person.
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
