My Experience In The Mini-Donut Factory

My Favorite Summer Job

By Anna Mae M. Tollefson

Working in a food stand at a fair can be hard work, but it is also quite fun. Let me show you. As best as I can remember it happened like this:

“Don’t forget the key,” Mary said. “I’ve got it,” LeRoy answered. Thud, thud. . .thud went the doors of the pickup. We moseyed toward the back of the stand, and LeRoy stepped up to unlock and open the door. Mary and I waited while LeRoy looked at the lock for a few moments. It was a dial combination padlock instead of a normal key padlock.

We realized LeRoy’s wife Jane must have accidently put the wrong lock on the door of the stand! So LeRoy called her. “Jane, you put the wrong lock on the door.” She said she didn’t think she had but must have acted without thinking. He asked, “Well, do you know what the combination is?” She could not remember.

He looked at it a little longer, and then said he would be back. He returned a few minutes later with an electric drill from one of his friends to remove the locking mechanism. He also had to use the drill to lock up at night too; we used that for the rest of our stay.

What? You are a little confused about what is going on? Alright, I will back up a bit for you.

In the summer of 2009 Jane Opdahl asked me, “Would you be able to help out at our mini-donut stand?” Jane and LeRoy needed extra help for the particularly busy week of the Fourth of July for their business, the Mini Donut Factory. It was the only week all summer they operated two stands simultaneously at two different events – the Polk County Fair in Fertile and the Bemidji Water Carnival.

They asked me to work at the Bemidji Water Carnival with LeRoy and Mary, my aunt. Jane and two other employees had worked the first two or three days of the Water Carnival, but they were returning to Fertile to run that stand along with many more part-time employees.

Did we have to wear uniforms? No, not really. We wore plain white tee-shirts with the Mini Donut Factory embroidered in red on them and a red neckline and sleeve cuffs. We could wear any type of pants or shorts we wanted, as long as we would be comfortable in them all day.

How did we keep track of how many donuts we had sold? Well I will tell you there is a simple little trick that makes it very easy. We used large paper clips to keep track of how many bags we sold. My aunt and I would put 25 bags in each clip till we ran out of paper clips. There weren’t too many since there were already some bags clipped in the box of loose bags where they stayed until we needed to use them.

That reminds me -- LeRoy and Jane stayed in semi-regular contact throughout the day, usually talking about if their separate donut machines were giving them trouble or not. They also had a light competition going on to see which stand had sold the most donuts; they compared the amount of clips that had been collected at each stand. It was all in fun, but Fertile won the first two days I worked. But, on the Fourth of July, more people came wanting donuts, and we worked longer and harder than the other nights and we beat Fertile!

Oh! I have not told you much about the donuts themselves or how they are made, have I? Well, there was a bowl shaped part of the donut machine that would drop the donut shaped dough in to hot lard, where they would be cooked on one side as the traveled down the length of the machine. About halfway down, they would get flipped over by a built in scoop so the other side would get cooked, and at last be flipped by another scoop out of the cooking lard onto a tray with paper towels and a rack in it. We used a hand scooper to put the donuts into bags for our customers.

Sometimes there would be a few donuts left over on the rack that wouldn’t fit in the bag; we were allowed to eat those ones! They tasted so good; like warm, fluffy, and slightly sweetened bread. I didn’t want to get sick eating too many, so I didn’t eat a lot of donuts, though I really wanted more.

You want to know about the hours? Well, we usually got to the stand about 9 to 10 a.m., but Mary and I did not start working 'til 11 a.m. and we all would finish up by 11 or 12 at night. We had a few breaks throughout the day including meal times, and had a lot of fun conversations during our non-break downtimes, though I cannot tell you what they were about now.

The whole experience was good for me and a lot fun besides. Working in the Mini Donut Factory was my favorite summer job, and even though it was a lot of work, I would readily do it again.