Copyright 2008, Susan DeLay
Police officers aren’t the only ones with a connection to doughnuts. In fact, long before cops took breaks at donut shops, there were hundreds of thousands of uniformed soldiers who found comfort in the doughnut. They were the doughboys. And a couple of Salvation Army ensigns made it possible.
Salvation Army Goes to War
When I think of Salvation Army, I think of bell ringers stationed outside department stores at Christmas time encouraging shoppers to drop a few coins into a bucket before they rush home with their treasures. Prior to America’s entry into World War I, the Salvation Army was a place where a hungry soul with no resources could go for a hot meal and a little preachin’ on the side.
But when war broke out in Europe, the Salvation Army sent troops. Committed to serving the soldiers, Commander Evangeline Booth rounded up young Army women and ordered them to the frontlines in France. They were nicknamed Sallies because they were from the SALvation Army.
Sallies helped the doughboys write letters, fetched snacks, played games, and engaged in conversation that helped them talk about their feelings—something men do oh, so well. Or maybe they were there to converse about anything that didn’t have to do with trench warfare, mustard gas, and emotions.
One Sallie did even more. Ensign Helen Purviance, a young woman from Indiana, headed to France in 1917 with a dream to make doughnuts for the boys. It wasn’t an easy task because there were no Ronco donut makers or Waring deep fryers. She used her hands and a wine bottle to pat and roll the dough. If there’s anything that’s readily available in France, it’s wine bottles. Rolling the dough into strips, she twisted them into shape, dropped them into hot oil, and voila: donuts.
Got to Make the Doughnuts
Helen had to stoke a wood fire in a cast iron stove to keep the heat even. Then she dropped the creations one-by-one into a small frying pan that held only seven doughnuts at a time. It was hard work, but what’s an eight-hour shift over a pan of hot grease if it lifts the spirits of the boys?
Drive within a half mile of a bakery and you know the smells are tempting enough to distract you from the worst problem on your mind—even if the distraction lasts only a few seconds. Helen must have known the power of scent because before long, the aroma of fresh, hot doughnuts had attracted the soldiers’ attention. They lined up waited for hours (in all kinds of lousy weather) for a doughnut. It was just like the grand opening of a Krispy Kreme, without the drive-thru window.
Frying doughnuts seven at a time made it difficult for Helen to keep up with the demand. By the end of Day One, she’d managed to hand out only 150 pastries, so many disappointed boys were sent away empty handed. That only increased the demand. Over time, she geared up for full production by increasing supplies and the number of fry cooks. (All of them women, since back then, laboring over a hot stove was women’s work.) Eventually, Ensign Helen and a long list of other Sallies were cranking out up to 9,000 doughnuts a day—all on the front lines of the fighting.
From Sallies to Dollies
The women traded in the “sallies” moniker for the name Doughnut Dollies. There had been plenty of variations of doughnuts prior to 1917, but the Great War was the impetus behind the rise of the Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kremes of the world.
Thanks to one enterprising ensign, the Salvation Army seized an opportunity to extend compassion to men in uniform in the form of hot, sweet doughnuts. And for the two years the U.S. military battled the Kaiser, hundreds of unnamed women awoke day after day with four words on their minds: Gotta Make the Doughnuts—for the Doughboys.
No one knows for sure, but these WWI doughnuts could have influenced countless numbers of veterans to become police officers after the war.
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