The Donut Circus

The Donut Circus

My father was a regular at the Donut Circus. For twenty years he rarely missed the daily 5:00 AM gathering of old geezers who also couldn’t sleep or who had hit the sack at 8:00 PM and thus were fully rested at 4:00 AM. Most of the guys who hung out at the Donut Circus were transplants, Yankees who had moved South for warmer weather and less expensive living, or others who had been stationed with the Navy or the original Seals (frogmen) in Fort Pierce, and who liked it then and came back when they retired. They varied in age from late 50’s to older than dirt. Daddy was in-between and pretty much the sole native Floridian. Due to his story-telling proclivities, he became their local-historian-in-residence, which he loved.

The Donut Circus was one of those Mom & Pop places, except the owner was Pop and there was no Mom, and the only food served was donuts, and maybe chili. Coffee and donuts were their mainstays. The Donut Circus catered to the educated working people—linemen from the phone company, sheriff deputies, firefighters, EMS drivers. Twice my father had his picture in the paper as the only patron seated at the Donut Circus counter. (They had a few booths, too, but Daddy was a stool-sitter, probably left over from all those long evenings in bars in his earlier years.) Apparently Daddy was the only customer who didn’t mind having his picture in the paper—the other patrons being policemen or UPS truck drivers, or utility crews who didn’t want evidence of their long coffee breaks showing up in the local paper for their supervisors to see. As a self-employed commercial fisherman, he didn’t have to worry about who saw his picture.

When we visited Fort Pierce, Daddy liked to continue with his 5AM excursions to the Donut Circus. He’d come back home in time to bring us fresh-made donuts for breakfast. Trouble is, I’m not crazy about donuts, and I prefer a more nutritious breakfast, but I always ate one anyway.

When Daddy died, an awful lot of people attending the funeral were unfamiliar to me, and a number of them came up to me to say “You don’t know me. I’m one of your Dad’s Donut Circus buddies. He sure was proud of his girls.” And one of the nicest wreaths was from the owner and the waitresses at the Donut Circus, who had added a coffee mug to the center, a mug with the name “JOE” on the side, painted with what looked like fingernail polish. After the services, one of the gals took the cup back to the Donut Circus and placed it up on a shelf behind the counter where Daddy had sat thousands of times.
Now when my sister and I are in Fort Pierce together, we always go by the Donut Circus. And coffee is always “on the house" for Joe's girls.