Preggers with a baker's dozen.

Click to enlarge: (Top to bottom) A box cover from Mighty Fine Donuts at 2612 Parade St, in Erie, PA, a map of where you can find Mighty Fine Donuts, and a shot of the store from the street. Map >

Bruggerman's Mighty Fine Donuts is at 2612 Parade St, in Erie, PA.

I went to school with Kurt Bruggerman at Bethel Christian School in Erie when it was at 737 E 26th Street. He was a year ahead of me and probably doesn't remember me. His family ran Bruggerman's Mighty Fine Donuts.

He would occasionally bring a box of donuts to school, and from what it looked like to me, he'd cranked up the donut filling injector to maximum so each custard Long John looked preggers with a baker's dozen.[1]

(I have no idea how you get custard into a Long John; that's my 8th grade imagination talking.)

Kurt worked very hard, he was among the hardest working teens I ever met. (Jimmy Amendola was another; Jimmy had four paper routes and later worked for Super Duper, a grocery super center, off West 26th IIRC.)

Bethel English teacher Mrs Blystone (then Miss Emerson) frequently called him "Kurtis" and played on the word "courteous" in fun. Kurt would smile almost demurely, bat his eyes and hang his head.

I stopped into Mighty Fine Donuts a few years ago when I was home, but Kurt wasn't there that day. He runs the place now and doesn't have to get up to make the donuts anymore.

Good for him.

[2013-06-03]

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[1]
"Preggers" is an old term from the 1950's. I don't know how much currency it had. Holly Golightly uses it in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.

I played with a number of metaphors here over a couple days. The obvious route would have been to find a counterweight to Long John, eg, "Little John" or "Short John," but nothing seemed to work well that way so I ended up using new baking-related vocabulary that had some element of "large" or "many." Serviceable.

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