Giant Donuts

We have a dearth of donuts in the upper midwest. To the outsider looking in at our nothern climes, this must seem an absurd statement. I mean, we're certainly chubby enough, myself included. The average denizen of a Great Lakes state looks like he or she consumes a cruller with each meal and counts donut holes as a "healthy snack" (they're tiny, after all). Yet, suprisingly, donut shops are as rare as heat waves in Minnesota. We have bakeries, yes, but donut shops? Do the Tom Thumb mini-donut stands at the State Fair count?

Spend a few minutes in rail-thin, image conscious Los Angeles, however, and you can't help but wonder, who is keeping all these donut shops in business? Are they fronts for various insidious operations - drug dealing or exotic pet smuggling, perhaps? Or is a pattern of binging and purging keeping the donut shops stocked with sprinkles?  The collective body mass index in southern California offers no evidence of regular donut consumption, so there must be some other explanation for the abundance of glazed twist entrepreneurs.

My appreciation for the L.A. donut culture has emerged over two decades of visiting my parents, who moved to the Los Angeles area in 1989. I've noticed that unlike Dunkin' Donuts on the east coast or Krispy Kreme in the south, the donut shops in L.A. are mom and pop operations. Every strip mall touts a tiny donut shop, and the L.A. sprawl is teeming with strip malls.  During the summer of 2007, I spent many hours driving past the strip malls between my parents' home in Burbank and the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Panorama City, where my mother lay struggling to recover from the pulminary embolism that would take her life that fall.  To keep my sorrow in check, I made a habit of counting the donut shops on my route. Grief usually got the better of me by number 12 or 13 and I never did tally the total number, but I am certain there were 20 or more donut stores in that 7-mile stretch along Vanowen and Woodman streets. Most of the shops had signs that advertised "Donuts."  Not "Joe's Donuts" or "The Jolly Jelly Donut," but just "Donuts."  One store, about midway into my route, promoted "Chinese Food Donuts."  I remember the welcome distraction this sign always provided me as I contemplated its possible meanings.  Could you buy both Chinese food and donuts in this establishment, or was there really something called a Chinese Food Donut? I never stopped to find the answer.

Although no giant donut franchise like Krispy Kreme or Dunkin' Donuts dominates the L. A. landscape, there are a plethora of actual giant donuts dotting its terrain.  For years the fleeting image of Randy's Donuts tantalized me as I navigated my way to Interstate 405 from one LAX rental car lot or another. Like Brigadoon, Randy's giant donut appeared to me only rarely, perhaps once every three years, and usually when I'd lost my way in Inglewood. It always popped up in my peripheral vision just as I re-discovered the freeway and was merging into death-defying traffic. As the L.A. interstates are not conducive to giant donut-gazing, I never got a good look at Randy's until Gary and I begged directions from a Dollar Rental Car clerk and set off with the express purpose of eating an apple fritter.  The clerk's directions were vague, at best, and when no giant donut rolled into view, I pounded my fist on the steering wheel and cried in frustration.  How could something so big be so elusive? Was it that I didn't believe in the giant donut, and therefore I couldn't see it? Like Tinkerbell, would it only exist if I chanted "I do believe, I do believe?" I fixed my thoughts on a chocolate-glazed old fashioned, and within moments Randy's emerged from the horizon.  I did believe, and at long last I stood in the shadow of the colossal donut. We paused to marvel at its magnificence, licked the powdered sugar from our fingers, and drove off into the California sunset to pursue other dreams.

We went in search of another massive donut during our most recent visit to Los Angeles, and this time we entrusted the navigation to our Garmin GPS device, which took us directly to the Donut Hole in La Puente without once questioning our faith in the existence of gargantuan carbohydrates. The Donut Hole is not just a giant donut, it's a giant drive-through donut.  Think about it - a giant roadside attraction that dispenses sugary treats, and you never have to leave your car! We felt like putting our hands on our hearts and singing the national anthem, we were so overcome with emotion.  Instead we pulled into the giant donut and ordered an assortment of raised and cake delicacies. We inhaled half a dozen donut holes, which were light-as-air, melt-in-your-mouth delicious, and then immediately circled the car back through the Donut Hole to get a dozen more.  After all, as every Minnesotan knows, donut holes are a healthy snack (they're tiny)!

Old Trapper's Lodge Statues

On our way to the Reagan Presidential Library, we made a detour to Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California where, tucked away near the animal barns, a collection of creepy sculptures pays homage to our pioneer past. Created by Burbank motel proprietor John Ehn, this hodgepodge of brutes, saloon girls, cowhands and virtuous frontierswomen once adorned the grounds of his motel, the "Old Trapper's Lodge." Like the old west, Ehn's statues are violent, sad, heroic, bursting with energy and politically incorrect. Very, very politically incorrect.

When it comes to storytelling, however, political incorrectness can beat the crap out of political correctness any day. In Ehn's world, "Pegleg Smith" and "Big Bear" growl their way through a bloody wrestling match that will, no doubt, end badly for both of them. These "Mighty Americans," as the statue's pedestal describes them, would want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare if they lived today, and the figures in the adjacent "Kidnap" statue seem equally uncomfortable with behavioral constraints imposed by "the man." Nearby, an anthropomorphic tombstone eulogizes another American archetype:

IRON FOOT EVA

(1800 - 1830)

 300 LB. GIANTESS

 POETESS-SINGER

 AND

 BLACKSMITH

 KILLED ON

 HER WEDDING

 DAY BY

 UNKNOWN

 RIFLEMAN

Similar tales adorn the faux tombstones blanketing the hillside, and Ehn's lonely, hardened pioneers gaze with detached interest at his imaginary burial mound. They seem resigned to an early, violent death and don't really give a damn that their days are numbered.  They are here now, and they will wring every salty drop of life out of this uncharted wilderness as long as their guns have bullets. They are Americans, after all, and long-term planning just isn't in our DNA.

Keeping with our national predilection for living in the moment, the state of California declared Ehn's collection of statues at the Old Trapper's Lodge to be a "State Cultural Landmark," and then promptly sent the bulldozers to tear them down, according to Roadside America.  It was the late 1980s, and I imagine that Burbank was eager to add another Dollar Store in the name of economic progress. How the statues ended up at Pierce College seems to be a bit of a mystery, but as Gary, his brother Jay and I spent the morning getting acquainted with Ehn's assemblage of gritty go-getters, we gave thanks that this piece of our politically incorrect past had been preserved.

Reagan Presidential Library and Museum

We have planned entire vacations around a visit to a presidential library. Whenever we reveal this fact to strangers, they stop making eye contact with us and twitch uncomfortably.  We then overcompensate by waving our arms enthusiastically and talking even louder and faster about the museums attached to the libraries and how fascinating it is that the exhibits are so biased and that they really reflect the character of the president and his presidency and what fun it is to analyze the museum's interpretation of the president's place in history and to pick apart what they included and what they left out.  And, at this point in the conversation, we find ourselves talking to an empty spot on the floor.

Oh well, I am a civics geek and Gary is pretty much interested in everything. This is not always the best formula for making new friends. 

We recently visited the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Like Reagan himself, the library is virtually content free but very well-executed. Situated along the northwestern perimeter of the San Fernando Valley, the museum offers a breathtaking view of the rugged, western countryside. A larger-than-life statue of Reagan greets you at the front door (he is, of course, sporting a cowboy hat), and a section of the Berlin wall graces the back terrace.  And that's pretty much it.

All kidding aside, the museum devotes most of its storyline to Reagan's formative Hollywood years and to the fall of communism, which Reagan apparently brought about single-handedly. The Hollywood section includes a movie theater featuring clips from some of his more memorable films but, alas, no "Bedtime for Bonzo." We did see an image of Jane Wyman flash across the screen, which turned out to be the only reference to her in the entire museum.  Coincidentally, the restaurant booth in which Ron proposed to Nancy is just outside the theater.  So is George Gipp's Notre Dame sweater. As is an image of Reagan ratting out his friends, er, I mean, doing his patriotic duty by naming names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee when he was president of the Screen Actors' Guild.

His days as a union man came in handy during the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike when he successfully destroyed the union and fired over 11,000 air traffic controllers.  (Funny, there was no mention of Reagan's support of PATCO's demands for better working conditions during the 1980 campaign and PATCO's subsequent endorsement of his candidacy.) We hadn't realized until visiting the museum that this was a good thing for the country and one of Reagan's crowning achievements. I guess I was too young at the time it happened to comprehend how much safer I was once those disgruntled federal employees were out of the picture.

It is obvious by now to our readers (if, in fact, we have any readers) that neither Gary nor I ever voted for Reagan. One of the joys we get out of visiting presidential libraries is making self-righteous snarky comments (in hushed tones, of course, so as not to offend other visitors) when the subject's executive actions are anathema to our political persuasion.  This really only works in the libraries of contemporary presidents, however.  It took some digging while in the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center to come up with appropriate indignation for the exhibit's scant treatment of his decision to pull federal troops out of the South and end Reconstruction. 

And so, without belaboring the point, let's just say that the Reagan Presidential Library brought us much, much joy.  Regardless of personal politics, the museum's Air Force One Pavillion is truly stunning and - you guessed it - contains the actual Air Force One plane used by Reagan, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Clinton and both Bushes. As it was the Christmas season, Santa Claus himself was piloting the plane that day.  We stopped to have our photo (available for purchase in the gift shop below) taken by a pleasant young woman at the entrance, and then toured the famous vessel while pretending to be Harrison Ford, which the staff politely encouraged us to stop.

After exiting Air Force One, we stopped for a snack at the Ronald Reagan Pub (an actual pub imported from Ireland) and shopped for trinkets in the Air Force One gift shop before continuing on to view a full-scale reproduction of the Oval Office and an exhibit about Nancy. We ended our day at another gift shop and then huddled together to assess this library's attributes in comparison to the other presidential libraries we had toured.  There was no doubt in our minds.  Hands down, the Reagan Presidential Library had the best cafe, which is where we had started the day's adventures.  Mmmmm . . . chicken pot pie!