The Polly Prim Bakery
My father pursued several careers during his life, from selling candy to soldiers on an army base when he was a little boy, to accountant at the age of seventeen in Flagstaff, Arizona, to scenario writer for one of the film studios in Hollywood, then back to being an accountant for the Eatmore Ice Cream company in downtown Los Gatos—which is where he settled after marrying my mother.
All
this was before he bought Los Gatos Sewing Machines on Main Street,
changed the name to Los Gatos Office Equipment & Supply, and moved
it to 111 N. Santa Cruz Avenue a few years later.
As an accountant, my father had sharp eyes. He discovered that
his boss was stealing from the company and reported it, so after
Beatrice Foods bought Eatmore, they wanted to promote him into a roving
troubleshooter to certify that all the local offices were reporting
their numbers on the up and up. But Ray didn’t want the job; he was
starting a family, my mother had her hands full with her own kids and as
many as four or five other children at any one time who boarded with
us. He needed to stay local.
My father started looking for other opportunities that would keep him in Los Gatos. What he really wanted was his own business. He did people’s income taxes as a side gig, which gave him a unique window into everyone’s financial situation.
I can remember all the people coming
through our living room while my father sat with them at our dining room
table with a hand-crank adding machine, several pencils, a tax return,
and shoeboxes full of receipts and check stubs. And there was always
some man or woman—the taxpayer—sitting patiently at his side, ready to
answer his questions.
So he wanted to stay local, he wanted his own business, and he did a lot of tax work. The owner of the Polly Prim Bakery was making good money (for a small business), so even though my father had never baked anything in his life, he bought the bakery and—just like that—became the main baker for a town of about four thousand people.
And it worked out
well for our family. There was day-old bread and Danish pastry that the
kids could take to school and swap for a decent lunch (even a hungry kid
can eat only so much Danish pastry). In fact, some of the other parents
were creating lunches tailored to match what the Robertson kids wanted.
World War II had ended some years back, but there were still shortages. Bakers couldn’t get sugar easily, or high-grade cooking oil. Bakers all over America were using honey instead of sugar, and nobody was frying doughnuts. That did not stop my father. In addition to the creamery where Ray had worked, there was also an almond packing plant run by a fellow named Sewall Brown, who was in Kiwanis with my father. Ray asked him about the possibility of buying almond oil, and Brown assured him it was safe to use for cooking, even though it was used mainly to pack machine parts.
Ray
bought a fifty-gallon drum. He then also bought a fifty-gallon drum of
sweetened condensed milk from the creamery where he’d worked (it was
actually right across the street). He then boiled that condensed milk
down even further, and I’m not sure how, but he managed to extract
enough sugar content to make sweet doughnuts that were fried in the
almond oil. He hired a young man who he put to this task; they called
him the “Doughnut King.”
So the Polly Prim Bakery had sweet rolls and honest-to-goodness doughnuts that didn’t taste like honey. And they were evidently good enough that the other bakers (in other towns), couldn’t compete. Ray started wholesaling his sweet concoctions to bakers in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara, running his van twice a week to make deliveries. He also upgraded the bakery tremendously, replacing the old brick ovens with modern steel ovens, and installed all kinds of appliances, partly because he knew that to succeed he would have to keep his labor costs to a minimum.
There
was a night baker, the Doughnut King, either my sister or someone else
at the front counter, and himself. Now, I know that story wasn’t about
anything I did, but it shows the example I was expected to follow. I
always knew that I would read a ton, go to college, obey the law when
the law agreed with my own conscience (and go to jail when it really
didn’t), and be at least somewhat inventive in business—and not let a
little thing like a “lack of ingredients” keep me from doing what I
needed to do. That was one of the “lesson by example” stories I heard
over the years. I was too young to witness what he did directly, but the
stories were there to provide the memory-by-proxy I needed for later.
There’s
a postscript to my father’s story—or actually two postscripts and a
couple of memories. As my mother told me years later, Ray had commented
to her about the metal measuring cups that were in use at that time—how
it was so difficult to tell how much flour or sugar they contained
because the measure marks were embossed into the metal, and more
readable from the outside. You couldn’t see both the inside and the
outside at the same time. He thought measuring cups should be made of
glass instead.
Pyrex
introduced a line of glass measuring cups before my father became a
baker, but he evidently wasn’t aware of them. And they might not have
done him any good anyway, since (as a professional baker) he was using
quarts and gallons rather than cups for most of his ingredients. He was
probably referring to my mother’s measuring cups—thinking out loud that
they were of poor design.
My
mother was certainly no cook, and she didn’t bake much either, but my
father didn’t know that when they got married and built the house on
Englewood. So my mother’s kitchen had a few things other kitchens might
not have had. Such as two double-deep zinc-lined drawers: one holding
about 30 pounds of sugar, the other about 20 pounds of flour. Ray also
made sure our kitchen had a drying cupboard with a multi-tiered lazy
susan for all the cakes she was expected to bake, which was ridiculous
since nobody baked that much. Of course, this would have been before my
father had realized the evil of drying cupboards.
When a professional baker creates cakes, he does so in batches, and then he frosts them en masse, all lined up on a counter. But between the baking and the frosting, there is a rest period. If you attempt to frost a hot cake the frosting will melt, and you’ll have a very ugly cake. My father learned the hard way that cakes are best frosted when they are cold and dry. Too much moisture and the action of frosting the cake will pull crumbs into the frosting, and again you have a mess.
In actual practice I don’t think such cakes were all that dry; probably just a little drier right at the surface where it was important for the crumb to hold together. So Ray might have been making an unwarranted assumption, thinking that most bakers would have left cakes in the drying cupboard for longer than necessary.
And
that “drying cupboard” in our kitchen at home? Edith used it to hold a
wide variety of kitchen-related items, such as salt and pepper, sugar,
vitamins, pancake syrup. It ended up being a sort of catch-all for
anything for which she had no proper storage place.
As for baking, that only happened after Ray had sold the Polly Prim. Prior to that, she would have just asked him to bring something home if she wanted to serve dessert. She did have one favorite story, however. At some point, she was making a cake for which she had a recipe—probably given to her by somebody at church—but she suspected there was a missing ingredient. It was the leavening agent, probably baking powder. In any case, she was in the middle of mixing her ingredients and she phoned Ray at work (it would have been the office supply business) how much he thought she should put in.
She
always smiled when she told this story. “He had to work the problem
backward, from memory, writing it out on a scrap of paper. I could hear
him over the phone, muttering to himself as he worked the problem, If
I’m baking twenty cakes using 8 1/2 pounds of flour, I use 5/8 cup of
baking powder..” She was tickled by the thought of Ray’s backward
engineering 1.5 teaspoons for one cake out of a commercial recipe for 20
that he’d committed to memory through daily use.
I have one “insider” memory of that bakery. I was quite young, and one day I ended up in the back of the Polly Prim with Ray, and I got it into my little head that I wanted to help him with his work. So I asked what I could do, and Ray seemed nonplussed by the question, perhaps wondering how his two-year-old kid was going to help him bake four hundred loaves of bread and twenty cakes that day. But I insisted.
Finally he said, “You can get me one of those pans.” And he pointed to a large roll-around rack of identical baking pans that looked (to my eyes) about eighty feet high. There were probably thirty or forty pans, all about three inches apart (so they could hold cupcakes even while on the rack, I suppose).
Ray had gone back to whatever he was doing, frosting a row of
cakes or something. When I didn’t bring him a pan, he looked up and
noticed I was just standing there, very unhappy. He asked me what the
problem was. I pointed up at the rack and cried out, “But—which one?”
A few years after Alicia had started Robertson Publishing, an author named Steve Sporleder came into the shop. His family had owned Sporleder Shell, a filling station over on Los Gatos-Saratoga Road near the Almond Grove district. He’d written a book of stories about Los Gatos called Gallivanting in the Gem City. During their first meeting, the conversation took a surprising twist at the short story Tilson and Milky. Steve had described a local baker who gave some doughnuts to these two friends early one morning in the alley behind North Santa Cruz Avenue.
We figured out what year this had to have taken place, and decided that the baker in question was probably Ray Robertson. It was interesting to read about my father in a book written by someone I’d never met before.
I wear a Hamilton tank watch, nearly identical to the one Ray wore on his left wrist, in remembrance.
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