Homer Jackson and Melo-Cream Donuts

Dad was part of the Moline food dynasties, starting very early, when the big franchise company let go of their shop. Lagomarcino's was not far away, downtown. He sold to Hasty-Tasty, the only family restaurant in town, and we favored Whitey's Ice Cream, only two blocks from our house. Dairy Queen invented the DQ Blizzard in our home town, and the Medds still manufacture it there.

I was on the ground floor at DQ.

 My first birthday - one candle, one cake, one future baker.

He was born in 1910 and lived to be 85, finally paying for easy access to fresh dessert items, which included cookies, fudge, and the best peanut brittle in the world. He made bread donuts and cake donuts, experimenting with other items, like tiny pies that were easily made and quickly sampled on the way down to the basement. Danish rolls were exquisite.

At age 4 I symbolized the theme of flour power. This was on the annual Melo Cream calendar.

The secret to the products was the highest quality ingredients for whatever was made. If it was the highest quality chocolate, the best coconut, the finest peanuts, the finest flour - he used it rather than cheapen the taste for a little more profit. Besides that, if they were not properly fried, baked, or cooked, the finished items were tossed in the garbage.

We had an apple orchard near our home. I was chased up the tree by some angry Dobermans. Fortunately I took my donut, comic book, and film crew along. This was on the calendar too - no royalties.

Cleaning was as fastidious as the cooking, so I had the opportunity to help make the icings, the glazed donuts, the bread, the cookies, and the perfect peanut brittle. 

Dad experimented with peanut brittle until he could get right combination of hot corn syrup, raw peanuts, and baking soda. Not enough bubbles - harder than concrete. Too many bubbles - yuk. The hot syrup cooked the peanuts as long as everything went well. The end result was easily eaten but impossible to stop. Attempts from other sources were more like tooth breakers and stale besides.

I learned a lot about the best ingredients at Melo Cream long before Deming changed the auto industry. It applied to study and the exchange of ideas. Clowns and faddists are popular for a time, but they are soon forgotten after the thrill is gone.

We had a lot of laughs at the shop. I probably put in more years than anyone else named Jackson. I even recruited the future Mrs. Jackson when Dad wanted me to work Friday nights. I said, "Only if you put Christina on the payroll." He did but miffed her when he said we did not fold boxes enough one Friday. She said, "Let's bury the shop in boxes next Friday." When he came in for work Saturday, before dawn, he saw stacks of boxes covering -

1. The table for rolling out dough;
2. All the floor freezer tops;
3. All the normal places for towers of boxes;
4. The big sink drainage board;
5. The glazing vat, which was covered with boards.
6. Anything else close to horizontal.

He laughed and laughed and laughed, especially when he found out what prompted the towers of boxes. That was often brought up with more laughter.

Notre Dame,1982. The book on grit says PhDs have the highest grit score (5). I think it started at the donut shop and at home. Christina was always encouraging.

Donuts at Christmas

 I was already working on my triceps, rolling out dough, and building a portfolio as a donut model for calendars. No royalties, except what I ate.

The origin of "O Holy Night" invoked memories, singing that beautiful song at our elementary school - Garfield. We were so backward, we called it a grade school then. Multi-syllables are the key to sophistication.

One of our teachers sang the obbligato to "O Holy Night", and she had the voice of an angel. One of her students became famous in the opera world, because of the influence of that teacher. My mother said of the teacher, in a hushed voice, "She was first soprano in the Augustana College Choir."

We were so backward, we had a Christmas program every year at Garfield. Each class would sing actual Christmas hymns and songs with parents and teachers in the audience. I would scan the audience for my mother, who was teaching there. She would always give me a big smile and I smiled back, could not help it.

Moline was a small town. When my father plugged in his electric shaver, the trolley car would slow down. 

We did not know that we were living in a peaceful paradise. Some bad things did intrude, but my mother always explained them to us:

1. "None of your business."
2. "You are not old enough."

Later, I was learning about nutrition at the Melo Cream Donut Shop. Germans have a tradition of eating jelly-filled bread donuts (no hole of course) for Christmas-New Year's. We had to have trays of them ready because once-a-year customers would come in to buy a dozen.

 This was Photoshopped by a Moline friend.

The tradition comes from Germany, so the donuts were called Berliners or Bismarcks, the first after the town where the baker came from, the second after the famous leader. People used both names in Moline.

Making them was not simple. The filling had to have the right texture, so two kinds were mixed together (my task). That gave me a permanent loathing for the finished product, except when I was especially hungry.

The filling was squirted into the donut by a pedal driven device, later by an electrical motor. I was given the opportunity to learn how. After several jelly blow-outs, I was retired from that task. As Marlon Brando said in "On the Waterfront" - I coulda been something, I coulda been a contender.

I was entrusted with icing the heavy donuts and waiting on the customers. Once a year we had customers with German accents. They grinned at the thought of enjoying those donuts. 

People complained they were the most expensive donuts. But these desserts - or the main course - started as yeast dough which had to rise in a huge bowl the first time. Then it was rolled out on a smooth wooden area and cut into little circles of raw dough, placed on wooden boards, finishing in a proofing cabinet. They did not go into the fryer until they were light and puffy with yeast at work. Then they were slid into the hot shortening vat (a great way to get burned) and turned over with wooden sticks. Next they were pulled out on a metal screen and set aside for cooling.

Left-over raw dough went downstairs into the cooler to be used in the next batch of bread dough. That was, according to legend, the best way to have great dough for bread donuts, based on the origins of sourdough bread, where a yeast culture is named and saved, passed from neighbor to neighbor. 

The trip taking the extra dough downstairs was not a chore, even though the wooden steps were worn and tricky, a cooling rack parked over half of it. Downstairs errands were the perfect way to nick a warm Danish on the way down, because they came out of the oven and could not be iced until cool.

 This was another calendar pose, which took place in an apple orchard.

Jackson Wedding - Jackson Family Reunion

Josephine and Benjamin VanPool

I performed the marriage yesterday, which was held at an outdoor chapel in our area. Both families worked on the arrangements, which was a lot of work. Ben's family and friends were there. The Jacksons came in force. Josephine's mother's family also came. In addition, there were friends from the independent Lutheran church that I looked up when the newly weds (Martin and Tammy) moved to the Bentonville area.

At the reception and afterwards, Chris and I got together with my two brothers and sister, spouses, and two nieces. That was a lot of fun. Though they are deeply involved in family histories (D.A.R.) - I hastened to point out that a cousin we all knew passed away two years ago. I do obit searches all the time about Lutheran leaders and authors, so that was only natural to check on. There are classmates and friends of friends, all that.

The top row are the four siblings.
Our father and his brother took over a Melo-Cream Donut Shop. His grandchildren are all concentrating on their favorite health food. Roughly, 1975. Dad got Hawaiian shirts for us to wear!

 Little Ichabod (Marty) foreshadowed his son's looks and grin. His son Alex escorted his mother to her seat at the wedding, then ran around the outside perimeter to get his grandmother Chris and escort her. The audience enjoyed the sprint immensely.

 My sister Candace and our cousins.

Martin and baby Josephine

 Josephine and Danielle - always having fun together.

The Famous Homer Jackson, Melo-Cream Owner, Cubs Fan - Shadow Manager of WQUA

This photo looks so much like grandson Alex, sitting on my lap,
but his father Martin was there, Grandma Chris on the right.
My father arranged these annual calendars and drafted various family members.

My father, Homer N. Jackson, was famous for his Melo-Cream Donut Shop, 1313 Fifth Avenue, Moline, Illinois. The nearby radio station called him the shadow manager, because the official manager Jean LaVern Flambo, listened to his suggestions and implemented them.

Dad was also a tireless but constantly discouraged Cubs fan. Born July 4th, 1910, he lived 85 years hoping for a Cubs World title, the last pennant won in 1945.

He began the business with his brother and later bought him out. The business was owned by the Melo-Cream chain, which still exists, but the Moline outlet had not done well.

Dad had Popeye arms because he mixed large batches of bread dough by hand in the early days. As a young adult in the Great Depression, his idea of work was anything that paid, which included being a laborer in building Wharton Field House. He talked about handling hot bags of concrete mix and loading them. In other words, "You kids have it easy. You are spoiled rotten."

Moline was very prosperous in those days, with income and taxes flowing from John Deere and related industries.

This recent view looks toward Melo-Cream, hidden, on the left.
First Lutheran, on the right. was the mother church
 of the Augustana Synod in that region.

Dad boasted that he outlasted at least 200 bakeries during his decades on Fifth Avenue. People still write to me about his doughnuts - or donuts - as they were spelled for the business (an invention in WWI to feed the soldiers quickly).

Here is the secret to the addictions generated by any prodcut he made - the best ingredients and quality control:

• Chocolate was the best Baker's cocoa nibs, which were melted and mixed into icing.
• He only used cane sugar because bakers knew beet sugar was not quite the same, even if the chemical formula was identical.
• The best flour came from General Mills and a California company, mixed for the best cake donuts.
• The peanuts, walnuts, coconut, and pecans were the largest and best from the suppliers. He paid for the peanuts late because he loved the ferocity of their dunning letters. He let me read some and have a laugh.
• The shortening was also the highest quality and cleaned or changed often. To this day I judge food by the quality and cleanliness of its fat. 
• Overcooked and undercooked products were dumped or sent home to be consumed by the family. The quality was shown by our ability to warm up donuts or danish days later and get that just-made taste. We laughed about getting the discards, but they were pretty good too.
• Spices were top quality, so it was a treat to open the cinnamon barrel or the nutmeg barrel and inhale.
• He used a blend of Maxwell House Coffee and Yuban for full, smooth coffee, drip grind. His rule was - coffee was no good after 15 minutes and had to be tossed.

This was my Melo-Cream calendar picture, about age 4.
I soloed again years later.

That is just a sample. Any given ingredient could be A+, A, B, C, or just plain dreadful and still used in a bakery. We visited one, which was large and profitable. The backroom aroma at that bakery revealed that there was a considerable amount of compromise involved.

When the best ingredients were put together and used with skill, the Melo-Cream donuts and danish were the best anywhere. I have never seen them equaled. When he took over the bread donuts for a time, rolling them out, cutting and frying them himself, the long johns and cinnamon fries  were almost weightless. That was a combination of the perfect mixing, the right rise and proofing, the correct cutting and frying. Some of his employees could get close to this, but no one mastered what he could do.

Dad was also famous for peanut brittle, which was light and crunchy - and fudge, rich in chocolate flavor, walnuts, and chocolate icing. I loved his oatmeal raisin cookies, with chopped walnuts in them. I suggested an improvement for the chocolate chips cookies, and that worked out very well.

Adam Jones was the most original DJ
at WQUA or anywhere else.

Cubs Fan
Dad loved following the Cubs, so going there for games was not a debatable topic. He always marveled at the way a Cubs player could be lackluster until traded to another team, then suddenly become a league champion in his position. The jeremiads continued year after year.

Long after I was gone, the trips to the games continued, often on busses filled with fans and a little beer. WQUA disk jockey Adam Jones said he really enjoyed those trips to the Cubs games with Dad.

This is the year for the Cubs to win the pennant and World Series, so the experts say. I could repeat a few expressions that I heard about those years when the Cubs led their division until the end and choked. But I do hope that Cubs fans will find justice and victory at last, this year.

Some Springdale boys were asking for donations for their all-star team, working the crowd in front of the largest Walmart in Arkansas. I said, "Are you Cubs fans?" One said, "No, Cardinals."

I said, "Oh no! They are the worst." His friend muttered something to him.

Then I added, "A lot of my friends are Cardinal fans too, and I enjoyed their games in St. Louis."

I gave them a donation and that got me some gift cards to Sonic, which I gave them to use. "Build your muscles." They laughed and their adult sponsors behind them laughed with them.

Growing up Melo-Cream meant having no tolerance for
inferior ingredients, no excuse for shirking hard work.

Vic's Diner - Just Around the Corner from Melo Cream Donuts

Melo-Cream Matches on eBay

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vtg-Feature-Matchbook-Melo-Cream-Do-Nut-Co-Superior-Moline-IL-/261068794389?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cc8e9aa15

Melo Cream Memories from an Employee

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "View of Old Moline":

I enjoy reading what you post.

I grew up in Moline and worked at Melo-Cream at 16 (almost 58 now), as did an older sister Cindy and my Mother Donna when she was young. You had a picture posted, one of the girls looks like she could be my mom.
I remember all the pictures on the walls and how Homer Jackson would love taking them(pics). He took the workers to see Brigadoon , the one and only play I ever saw. He and his two hour naps "NOT MORE THEN TWO HOURS" he would say.

He always had the radio tuned to WQUA but when he went down for his nap some how the radio would get turned to KSTT. Homer loved his children and would brag (in a good way) about them. Through the years I have often thought of them and wondered how they are.

Homer would buy us work shoes and had air conditioner put in our apartments.

I'm rambling now but could go on and on. Thank You Homer

Susan Partlow Flanagan

***

GJ - How kind of you to post this, Susan. If you friend me on Facebook you can find a bunch of Melo-Cream photos in my albums. Dave Coopman will have a laugh about KSTT, because that was the cool radio station. It was a pleasure to know the WQUA announcers and Flambo.

Send more memories to post, Susan. I worked there too, but I think before your tenure. Dad was quite a character. He was very stingy and also very generous. He wanted people to be healthy and not suffer from bad, cheap shoes. I used to hear from classmates about what Dad was saying. I would ask, "My father?" He would ask me about everything going on in my adult life and not say anything. He didn't want to spoil me with his responses. But he would go on and on with others, I understand.

Adam Jones was a WQUA announcer, now famous with his wife for their liturgical ceramics business.

Ingredients Matter - Melo Cream Doctrine

Three fathers: Homer Jackson, Greg Jackson, Martin Jackson. We let my wife pose for the calender too.
Martin and Tammy's son, Alexander, looks just like Martin in this pose.

Classmates still talk about Melo Cream doughnuts. When the Hasty Tasty bought out Melo Cream, to keep producing the same doughnuts, the first objection was the cost of the flour.

Doughnut flour can be bought from any wholesaler. My father insisted on a special flour from California. Shipping hundred-pound bags from California to Moline, Illinois, is rather expensive. Hasty Tasty was not amused.

We used the best chocolate for icing. Nibs were melted slowly, with vanilla icing added after. Chemical chocolate was available. Many companies use a form of carob. Remember the husks the pigs ate in the Parable of the Prodigal Son? They were carob. Pig food. We used rich, dark chocolate.

Two kinds of sugar can be used. Beet sugar and cane sugar are exactly the same in their chemical formulations. However, any baker will say, cane is better. A room of beet sugar smells funny. Not bad, just off. We used cane sugar always, and it cost more.

We added such things as pure cinnamon, nutmeg, and flavor enhancers.

Bread doughnuts were made with wet yeast, which we had to buy from Johnson's Bakery. We were too small to be a stop. Dry yeast works too, but wet yeast is better. We added eggs (not dried eggs) and potato flour to the mix. We even kept old dough in the freezer because a lump of old dough made a fresh batch even better. These were extra steps, but they added to the quality of the bread doughnuts.

The nuts we used were superb. We bought the biggest and best pecans and walnuts, not the crumbles. We got boxes of top quality coconut. Raw peanuts were the large size. We fried them, using them ground for Barlow doughnuts and peanut topped doughnuts. Going to the basement for supplies was fun. I could nick a warm danish from the cooling rack at the top of the stairs. Finishing that, I had coconut, walnuts, and pecans to enjoy while searching for that elusive pail of flour. "Have you found it yet?" Quick swallow - "Not yet. I'm looking."

Coffee was another opportunity to save a few pennies. We had a Maxwell House sign up, but we blended it with Yuban for better flavor. Instead of perking cheap coffee, we used a drip maker and the blend - gourmet coffee for 10 cents a cup. When the coffee was a little bit old, we threw it out and made more. More than once I threw it out as a customer protested, "I don't mind. I don't mind."

I am drinking my own home-made gourmet coffee now.

Perfectionism works well in making good food and deserts, but not in making a lot of money. Most people do not know the difference between the best recipe made with painstaking care and a mediocre recipe thrown together by an uncaring slob.

Many people are publishing essays that say, "Thanks for the life lessons, Dad."

I am simply saying, "You ruined me, Dad. I cannot settle for second best."

My father is on the far right, his brother a little bit to his left.
The shop was at 1313 - Fifth Avenue, near WQUA...forever.

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Melo Cream Penny Postcard - Dean Jacquin

Dean Jacquin posed for a Melo Cream penny postcard around 1938.

His mother Charlotte was dad's sister.

I was looking for pictures of Moline when I found this one on a penny postcard page. "That's Cousin Dean!" He graduated from Moline High in 1955. Aunt Charlotte worked at Melo Cream for many years.

The family legend is that dad and his brother bought Melo Cream when the store failed as a franchise, keeping the name. This is apparently the original franchise.

They began without electric mixers, if they were even available, so dad mixed all the batches by hand, giving him Popeye forearms he never lost.

He believed in advertising, so we had Melo Cream hats long before that upstart Krispy Kreme gave them away.

Every year someone was featured on the calendar. One of my melancholy duties was giving away those calendars. People just had to pull out the latest calendar picture from the envelope and say, "Aww." The calendars featured the Jackson cousins as they grew into parents and included grandchildren as they were born.

The phone number on the calendar got longer as Moline grew, starting at three numbers and growing to seven.

To make Melo Cream seem larger, we passed the phone to the intended recipient thus, "Aunt Charlotte, phone for you, line 8."

The phone always had a light dusting of flour and powdered sugar from its proximity to the table where bread doughnuts and danish were readied.

WQUA ads

The staff at WQUA ate free at the counter and gave Melo Cream free ads from time to time. No one was better than Jack Barlow at live ads. People drove to the shop in the middle of night, still in their PJs, robes, and slippers, to buy doughnuts after Jack talked about them.

I remember Jack at WQUA, but I did not know he had a recording career. This MySpace site tells about it.

"Jack Barlow was farming in Muscatine, Iowa, when he was hired as a deejay for the local station, KWPC. That led to a move to Moline, Iowa where he had his own show on WQUA. From there, he moved to WIRE in Indianapolis. That's where he met Darrell Speck, who had moved his family north to Beech Grove, Indiana in 1964 to work in radio and write songs. They co-wrote I Love Country Music with Barlow's friend, singer/songwriter Charlie Stewart."

Now I have to do a separate post on Jack Barlow the singer.

Melo-Cream - Gourmet Doughnuts

This was an early photo, when my uncle was still a partner with dad. Uncle Don Jackson is in the middle in the back. My father, Homer Jackson, is on the right.Aunt Charlotte Jacquin also worked at the shop, 1313 5th Avenue, Moline.

 

This photo, dated in the 1960s, shows the icon wall of WQUA personalities right behind my father's head.

My father and his brother bought Melo Cream when the initial store, part of a franchise, failed. They kept the name and built up the business. My father saw 200 bakeries start and fail in the area. He kept going, even after retiring.

The formula was simple. They made the best products possible. If a batch was less than perfect, it went in the garbage (or we had to eat it at home).

My father got pure cocoa for the chocolate frosting. He bought special flavorings.

The ingredients were always the best. The walnuts, coconut, and pecans were the largest and choicest varieties. Going into the basement meant a chance to take a handful of nuts, to provide some energy for the long trip. If danish rolls were cooling on the rack above the stairs, that worked too.

When my father discovered a better doughnut flour, he paid extra for it to be shipped from California.

Coffee was a mix of Maxwell House and Yuban, to provide more flavor. If the coffee was more than 15 minutes old, it was poured down the drain, much to the horror of customers, who did not want to wait for a fresh pot.

We had a drip system for making coffee, when restaurants were percolating cheap coffee and storing it forever.

My father experimented with new recipes. He made a Jack Barlow doughnut that was a cake doughnut, glazed, with a mixture of ground roasted coconut, graham crackers, and peanuts rolled in. The doughnuts were labor-intensive, because the coconut was roasted at the shop (easy to burn) and the peanuts were cooked and ground there. The end result was a delicious doughnut, even when frozen hard. In fact, someone recommended eating them frozen as a treat - and I did.

Most peanut brittle tends to break teeth off. My father worked out a method for making peanut brittle that tasted great and was easy to eat. He used soda to make it rise up. The trick was cooking it to the right temperature without burning it, pouring it out while still hot.

Melo Cream's coffee counter was the hub of downtown. WQUA staff were there all the time. Police came through. Store owners came in for a break. The John Deere and Arsenal workers bought doughnuts on the way to work.

Melo Cream was the original Facebook. All kinds of news was exchanged back and forth.