THE HOLE TRUTH

Maine’s image as projected in the national news and entertainment industry is an ongoing source of aggravation. Whether the medium is a fluffy TV show about a mystery writer/sleuth or a serious news report, the depiction of Mainers as terminally quaint people who talk funny has grown beyond tiresome. This week’s New York Times front-pager on the extremely serious issue of priests who have molested children – the one that described residents of Aroostook County as folks with nothing better to do than bet on ice-out at Long Lake – was pretty much the last straw.

So it was with relief and gratitude that we read the story in Wednesday’s Washington Post about doughnuts. Expertly written by Candy Sagon, the story traced the rise of this deepfried foodstuff from mist-shrouded history to the trenches of World War I to the phenomenal success of Krisy Kreme to its current place of honor on the menus of some of the nation’s finest dining establishments.

Mostly, though, the story is about the hole and how it got there. And that is where the real Maine shines through. As all right-thinking individuals know, the first hole was poked in the first doughnut more than a century and a half ago in Clam Cove, now the Glen Cove section of Rockport. Let Ms. Sagon tell it:

“The year was 1847. According to family lore, Hanson Gregory, the teen-age scion of a prosperous Maine shipping family, asking his mother why her fried cakes were so soggy in the middle. She said she didn’t know; the centers just wouldn’t cook through. So, on an impulse, her son took a fork and punched out the center of a couple of uncooked rounds of dough. Here, Mom, fry these. And the all-American doughnut with the hole was born.”

In addition to the truth, the story covers the myth as well. Capt. Gregory (he grew up to be Maine’s youngest sea captain at age 19) created the hole by jamming a fried cake onto a spoke of his ship’s wheel so he could snack while he navigated. He lightened the cake after six of his crew, weighted down by soggy hole-less cakes, fell overboard and sank. He refashioned fried cakes in homage to the life preserver. Capt. Gregory added to the muddle himself when, in an interview around the turn of the century in The Boston Post, he asserted that he solved soggy-center problem at sea with a tin pepper mill, not in his mother’s kitchen with a fork.

Pretenders sprang up and by 1941 the controversy was so great that the American Donut Corp. sponsored a debate on the hole’s origin at New York’s Astor Hotel. Capt. Gregory’s cousin, Fred Crockett, presented incontrovertible evidence and successfully defended his family and his state.

Mr. Crockett, now 91, lives in Rockport. He begins each day with coffee and a cake doughnut, plain. He stands by the the kitchen-and-the-fork version. “The rest are just crazy stories,” he told Ms. Sagon.

To some, this may be merely another quaint tale. To astute readers, such as those of this newspaper and The Washington Post, it is a story of innovation and ingenuity. Of a daunting problem identified and effectively solved. Of the real Maine. Thanks for telling it, Ms. Sagon.