joe’s page
 
 
About Joe
Joe, Betty’s youngest son, remodels the Old West Cinnamon Rolls trailers for the fairs.
 
When not working the fairs, he loves to do adventurous things like scuba dive all over the world and play tennis.  He was invited to participate in the raising of the JF Kennedy PT109.
Fairs & Festivals
Antelope Valley/Lancaster
Arroyo Grande Strawberry                    Fest
Bakersfield Home Show
Bakersfield/Kern County Fair
CA Mid-State Fair (Paso Robles)
Costa Mesa Fair
Del Mar/San Diego County Fair
Indio National Date Festival
King City/Monterey County Fair
Maricopa
Mendocino
Merced
Petaluma County Fair
Phoenix AZ State Fair
Santa Barbara County Fair
Santa Maria Strawberry Festival
Ventura
Yuma County Fair
 
 
 
The Origin of the Cinnamon Roll  There is the long version and the short version of this story, maybe a mid range version as well. The Long version starts out in Egypt around 4000 BC when someone figured out how to leaven bread. Fast forward to the Classical Greek era when an imaginative Greek ‘discovered’ cinnamon on Sri Lanka, and brought it home and used it to flavor wine and burned it as incense - jump to the 13th century with Marco Polo opening up the spice trade to Europe, and then end up at our house in Shell Beach, California sometime in 1972. This gets us to the bread and dough part of the story anyway. But wait, it starts earlier than this, for me anyway. I will always remember coming home from school and being walloped with the smell of fresh dough and later the aroma of fresh bread being baked in our kitchen. This was before Shell Beach when the family lived in Seattle. My Mom always had a thing for fresh bread and would make it often. This being the early 1960’s it was always good old-fashioned white bread, the kind we turn our collective whole grain noses up at these days. By the end of the 60’s health food was rearing innocent eyes imploring the latest generation of Americans to think twice about all the junk they were stuffing down their throats. Which brings me to my sister. Between painting psychedelic flowers on her car and later hitch hiking cross-country to draw portraits on the boardwalk in New Jersey, my sister had caught the growing passion for eating healthier foods. So, back to the autumn of 1972 and our house in Shell Beach, the family was gathered together for the first time in about a year. My sister Linda was cooking up yet another batch of healthy cookies, (if there is such a thing) using ingredients like wheat germ, soy grits, honey and brown sugar. Mom, excited about having the Fam. back in town started cooking up a horde of comfort foods one of which was her famous home made bread. Feeling creative and inspired by all those ‘healthy’ ingredients laying around the kitchen, Mom experimented. Instead of her usual, common, white flour, garden-variety type bread, she threw in unbleached flour, wheat germ, soy grits and other healthier stuff to create something new, something 70’s. And why not, it was the ‘Dawning of the Age Of Aquarius’ after all. We were supposed to be changing our ways. What changed was the taste of the bread. Fresh baked bread tastes fantastic. I don’t care what you make it out of. Mom’s new bread recipe was unbelievable! Especially hot out of the oven. Everybody had a slice with a little butter, then another slice and another until the last bits were being ripped apart the way Piranha attack a bloody beef rib. None of the bread made it to the dinner table. Those loaves never had a chance. My brother John said it first. “This is so good you could sell it!” And as we will see, she did. A MIX IS BORN When my daughters were little they used to say things like, “I want to be a Unicorn, or a Pony, or a Care Bear, or a Princess, even a Castaway on a Tropical island. When my Mom was growing up she used to say stuff like, “I want to own a Factory.” Thus, having received approval and encouragement for her new bread recipe she immediately set out to make it into a dry mix that any one could use at home by just adding water. A small commercial mixer was purchased, (used of course) an old kitchen chair was donated to the project and this had a hole cut in the seat. A big sheet of thick plastic was obtained and this was wrapped into a funnel shape using tape to keep it from unraveling. The small end of the funnel went through the chair seat and the bread mix from the mixer went into the top of the funnel. The new bread mix was clumpy because of the shortening and it would stick in the small end of the funnel. A gentle squeeze would release the blockage and the freed ingredients would fall out into a waiting plastic bag. The bag was filled, weighed and then had a label stapled on. A factory was born! But just before this point a couple of things happened. Mom named the new bread mix, “Old West Home Baked Bread Mix” which is a mouthful by anyone’s standard. She also chose a trademark……. Which was…………..well, me! On every label was a photo of ‘Your Truly’ with the quote below, “Joe say it’s the best bread I ever ate!” Which I probably did say so at least in this case there was truth in advertising. However, to 16 year old me, it was horrifying. Not only was it a terrible photo of me –(it was my recent high school photo and totally recognizable), but it had been printed in town at a print shop where one of the neighborhood kids worked. So in short order I went from a non-entity in my school to someone that students would point at and whisper, “Is that the kid?” Yeah, I was the kid. Meanwhile, Mom kept baking up a storm in the attempt to achieve culinary perfection with her recipe. Our house began to smell like a bakery, a fact, which was not lost on the neighborhood youth. They began showing up at our house more and more frequently. They started asking if there was any of that ‘Joe’ bread around. “Did your Mom make any more Joe bread today?” In a couple of months the name went from ‘Old West Home Baked Bread Mix’ to ‘Joe Bread’ at least in the local vernacular. This name caught on so well that several years later Mom made another version of her mix and named it “Jo Bread”. A Star was born! I’m sure, somewhere in the universe. Myself, I was just hoping the whole thing would go away soon. HOW DO YOU SELL THIS STUFF? All my newfound bread-eating friends were enlisted to distribute leaflets at a penny apiece. That lasted one afternoon (1000 leaflets) and sold one bag of mix. The local Stop and Shop grocery agreed to carry the product, which sold another bag. Williams Brother market added the product to the bottom row in their dry mix section and that sold two more bags. Clearly, more drastic action was called for. Years and another business ago Mom had rented booths in trade shows to sell and display fiberglass wall décor that we made in the basement of our house in Seattle. What had worked then might work again. She decided to take her mix on the road. She made her first booking and then gathered her highly trained team of professionals to make it happen. That was me by the way. She needed me to lift the oven into the back seat of her 1968 Javelin. It was May 5th, 1973 at the Grover City Cinco De Mayo Festival. (This is before Grover City became Grover Beach). She brought a tub of dough and an electric 110 Volt commercial oven. The idea was to give samples of the bread and sell people the mix, but we baked dinner rolls because they baked faster than loaves of bread. We rolled the dough into little balls and put them in the pans, they rose slowly, we baked them for 25 minutes and watched horrified while they were demolished by the ravening hordes mere minutes after coming out of the oven. Two batches later, Mom was starting to get angry. People wanted to eat her bread, but didn’t want to hear about the mix. “If they want to eat my bread their going to have to pay for it!” she stated. We borrowed a magic marker and used a napkin to make a sign. Dinner rolls were now .25¢ cents each. People who wanted a hot roll learned to stand in line and wait. If you didn’t wait the folks who were more patient snatched the rolls up first. Word spread and the lines grew. I developed a new talent for keeping the customers entertained while they waited. I had to; it was unnerving having them stare at you asking every couple of minutes if the rolls were done yet. A profit was made! This was cause for celebration. Mom changed strategies. She realized that there was something magical about the smell and taste of fresh bread hot out of the oven. If she wanted to get people interested in her mix this was how she needed to present the product. With this in mind she began driving around to grocery stores in the county asking if she could set up and bake her rolls in the store. In the midst of all that driving and demonstrating she noticed billboards advertising the Santa Barbara County Fair and the San Luis Obispo County Fair. She remembered our success at the Cinco de Mayo festival and decided to go big time. She booked 10 x 10 foot exhibit spaces at both of these fairs and brought the oven. People at those fairs had never smelled the scent of fresh bread baking in the exhibit buildings they learned right away what it took to get some hot rolls. You got in line and waited. This success encouraged mom to take her bakery to the people. She booked space at the Tulare Fair and at the end of the summer she got a spot at the Kern County Fair. This was really good news for me. Having recently obtained a drivers license I was desperate to own my own car. I had my eyes set on my Dad’s 1966 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88, which had been totaled by the insurance company after it, had been rear-ended while parked on Shell Beach Road. In reality the car still ran great it just had an aerodynamic tilt in the rear. Repeated requests to buy this car from my parents had been turned down flat. It had too much horsepower for an unskilled driver like myself, they said. Mom’s success at the Kern County Fair changed all that. After the first three days of the Fair it was apparent that she had not brought enough mix to last another 9 days. A mix run had to be made and my Dad couldn’t go. The decision was made I was getting an Oldsmobile. For $75.00 I was allowed to buy the car. As the sun set that Friday night, insurance was obtained at the agent’s office in San Luis Obispo. Mix was loaded into the trunk. My Dad marked a road map and told me to keep it slow. I got started driving. “Road trip, road trip, road trip” were the only words going through my head - that and wondering why every single vehicle coming towards me was flashing me with their bright lights. The heavy bags of mix in the trunk were making my headlights angle upwards and I was blinding every car on the road. They hated me. They were blinding me too but that was OK I was learning to close my eyes whenever another car approached. I couldn’t figure out what my parents had been worried about. This driving stuff was a piece of cake. I met up with Mom later that night at the hotel in Bakersfield. The next day I went to work. My first thought walking across the fairgrounds was that a mistake had been made. People didn’t really live in the kind of heat I was experiencing. You must remember I had been raised in Seattle, WA. A year spent living on the beach in central California had not acclimated me for the dry heat of the San Joaquin valley. I stumbled into the building and tried to find Moms booth. I couldn’t see it. There were too many people in the way. As it turned out they were all waiting in line to buy dinner rolls for .35¢. Mom had bumped up the price and no one seemed to care. This was going to be rich. My Mom spotted me and told me to go get a bucket of water so she could make another batch of dough. It was cooler in the building but water sounded like a very good idea. I grabbed the bucket and found a dingy sink in a back room of the building. One thing we knew, dough rises faster with warmer water. The water heater attached to that sink didn’t work, but being the end of summer in Bakersfield, CA. this wasn’t a problem. The water was plenty warm enough. The rest of that day was spent hauling buckets of sun warmed water, mixing it with the mix and then rolling the resulting dough into balls and putting them in muffin pans. That night in a hotel down on Union Ave I collapsed gratefully on the thin mattress and turned the TV on. The aging air conditioner in the window rattled away, doing it’s best to combat the evening’s oppressive heat. My Mom disappeared into the bathroom and locked the door. She was in there so long I began to worry. I started knocking on the door. “What are you doing in there?” I asked. Mom eventually opened the door a crack and peered out into the room. “Be quiet!” She demanded. She looked a little strung out. “Well, what were you doing all that time?” I persisted. “I was counting the money,” she hissed. ‘Ah ha’ I thought, this made a little more sense, though I didn’t see why she needed to hide in the bathroom. Our room door was locked and all the curtains drawn. “How much was it?” I asked eagerly. “Quiet down!” she demanded. Do you want the whole blaming’ hotel to know?” I was a little shocked. This was a level of paranoia I had yet to see from my mom. But I still wanted to know how much money our efforts had generated. “OK, but how much was it?” I said in a quieter but no less eager voice. I was thinking thousands. We had squished, rolled and baked dinner rolls all day. I really had no concept of how much we might have made. Mom’s eyes narrowed and she dropped her voice to an even lower octave. “We made over three hundred dollars,” she said with huge satisfaction. This meant we had baked about one thousand dinner rolls that day. Three hundred dollars! Was that all? That didn’t seem worth hiding in the bathroom to count, but it was probably one of the loftiest sums she had ever made in cash in one day. Taking into consideration that her salary as a High School teacher had been about $600.00 a month this was indeed impressive. However none of these thoughts were running through my mind at the time. Shallow, greedy almost seventeen year old me was just wondering how much of the loot was coming my way. I was smart enough not to ask right then but I found out Sunday night when she sent me back to San Luis Obispo so I would be home in time for school Monday morning. I got twenty bucks and ten more for gas. I had been hoping for a lot more but I really didn’t have any idea how much of a shoestring she was running on at that time. Whatever, I didn’t care. I had a twenty-dollar profit and the keys to a somewhat battered Oldsmobile jingling in my pocket. I was a man with an automobile and I was entering my senior year of High School. What more could I ask for? Apparently gas money. Fair season was over and despite the fact that gas was only about .44¢ a gallon the Dynamic 88 consumed petrol with gusto, especially if you liked to floor it occasionally, which I did. I got a job as a dishwasher at a diner in downtown SLO and waited for the following summer and the fairs to come again. Two Years later The Oldsmobile lasted about six months before it permanently expired despite my modest efforts to mend its ways. Other vehicles followed. I graduated from San Luis Obispo High school and moved into a series of apartments with a series of roommates taking a series of jobs along the way. One of which was being factory manager for Old West Home Baked Bread Mixes. Which meant that whenever Mom needed more bags of mix for her shows I mixed, measured, weighed and loaded them into her Chevy van. The Javelin was history Mom had moved into the wonderful world of commercial transport, sort of. Meanwhile, I was discovering the meaning of life, which at the time meant not getting fired, paying my share of the rent on time and making bread mix when it was needed. Despite my best intentions I did get fired. I was working for an uncle in the concrete business and had to be at work every morning at 5:30 AM. It was only a 20 mile drive to work so this should have been a snap but the fact that I had to push start my Volkswagen in the morning to get it running and that ‘Uncle Mike’ insisted we go clamming on Pismo beach each evening until it was too dark to see had pretty much worn me down. A day off would have helped but Mike’s work ethic pooh-poohed things like 8-hour days and weekends off. If there was work to be had – you worked, until the day when you were an hour and half late to work. In which case Mike’s answer was, “Cement don’t wait for you. I got someone to take your place.” I found myself unemployed and the rent coming due. My mother perhaps alarmed at the prospect of me moving back in with her offered work at fairs. I gratefully accepted. She was letting me drive her newish Chevy van, who wouldn’t want to? Mom had moved up in the business world. She now had a step van with a lift gate with which she towed an Argosy travel trailer that she could live in while at the fair. Equipment like counters, a mixer, ovens and the sink the Health Department insisted we have travelled in the step van. I had a girlfriend now and we were allowed to sleep in the step van in the parking lot where the carnival workers lived. This was show biz! The glamorous life! No. It was actually sleeping in a truck in a dirt parking lot surrounded by a lot of other people sleeping in trucks who were frequently intoxicated, quarrelsome and always noisy. It was 12 – 15 hour workdays with long slow periods coupled with moments of intense activity when you just couldn’t work fast enough. It was a long walk to the bathroom and a longer walk to a shower. This was life at the Alameda County Fair circa 1975. I met carnival workers for the first time aka Carnies’ and in a conversation mentioned that I wasn’t a ‘Carnie’ as I worked in the exhibit building. I was hanging out after work with a group that included other exhibitors who were also living in their stock trucks. Several of these were quick to second my opinion. The prevailing sentiment was that if you were an exhibitor you didn’t want to be mistaken for a carnie. Despite the fact that we were all living in the same parking lot they felt that being an exhibitor was a step above being a carnival worker. Hearing this, a carnival worker in the group gave a wry smile and asked, “If we are Carnies’ – does that make you guy’s Fairies?” There was no good answer to that. San Mateo County Fair; I was getting tired of eating fair food all the time and had bought a gas stove. My girlfriend and I lived in Mom’s van on a wide strip of dirt that bordered a road that was between the fair grounds a canal. There were hundreds of people living there in tents, cars, trucks and sometimes just a sleeping bag next to a bush. I was styling because I had both a cook stove and a truck. I went to work the first day and was shocked to find a new menu item to be served. Apparently Mom had figured out that you could also make cinnamon rolls with her mix. I was suspicious of so much change. Dinner rolls and mini loaves of bread had been the main stay of the product for years. I felt that maybe she was flirting with disaster mixing things up like that. It was also much more complicated. We now had a mini fridge to store the margarine in. We had to have sugar and cinnamon on hand as well. Not to mention a rolling pin and a big worktable. Fortunately I was a cinnamon roll natural. My early years spent getting in Mom’s way while she was baking was finally paying off. I put on an apron and started rolling. From the beginning I was intent not to let my mother make a better roll than me. My first rolls came out perfect! At least the customers told me so. I took their word for it as I was trying so hard to make them right that I forgot to ever taste one. Cinnamon rolls required complete dedication if you wanted them to come out right. I was so intent on making them perfectly that it was years before I ever thought to eat one. It didn’t help having every home baker come and scrutinize my methods and try to tell me what I was doing wrong.