Tim Horton’s? Big deal.
Krispy Kremes? Please.
The best donuts by a mile are those you can’t get around here anymore: Dunkin Donuts.
There used to be DD stores all over the place, but the last one in Oregon — maybe the last one west of the Mississippi — went away about five years ago. It was in south Salem, not far from the home of my longtime colleague Cathy Ingalls, who would regularly stop and bring them for the newsroom.
She still arrives with donuts on occasion, from the same place, which is now known as Daynight Donuts and seems to employ Dunkin Donuts’ recipes. The main difference I notice is that the donuts have just gotten a lot smaller over the years; whereas two of them used to be quite filling, three would actually work better for me nowadays.
When I was a kid in Milwaukie, there was a DD about a mile and a half from my house; it was owned by the father of one of my schoolmates, Clark Blakley, who was a year ahead of me.
When I was in the sixth grade, the Blakley-owned DD sponsored the basketball team I played on, and we ended up with some of the coolest uniforms I’ve ever seen. They were green and white like the Boston Celtics’, said Dunkin Donuts across the chest, and featured shorts that were silky like the trunks worn by Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
Somewhere I have a DD team photo, and I wanted to include it here, but I didn’t really have the energy to search through boxes of keepsakes and find it. So just take my word for it — those unis were sweet.
As for the donuts themselves, my favorites have always been the toasted coconut and chocolate honey-dipped. They are both of the “cake” variety as opposed to the “raised” — hopefully that terminology is correct; I learned it from my mom.
Other DD notes:
– My Australian friend Simon Rowe, who has visited the States a number of times, is so enamored of DD that he actually looked into opening a franchise on his home continent. Alas, he was told that DD preferred to deal with someone who was looking to buy the rights to DD for the entire continent, not just one shop.
– Thanks to Simon, who gave them to me, I have a couple of DD coffee mugs. Of the hundred or so mugs I seem to have, they are among my most favorite.
And of course, now it’s time for Catch of the Day, No. 37, a mid-1960s Dick Radatz model made by a somewhat obscure company called Sonnett. Still, it’s a pretty awesome glove with a web like no other I have ever seen. Radatz, a relief pitcher, was a two-time All-Star and twice led the AL in saves for the Red Sox.
Here’s the glove, which I bought for about $10 at PIA Sports in Corvallis in spring 2011 for about $10:
