Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 5, 1993 TAG: 9308050209
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MICHAEL STOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Inside a 10-foot trailer next to the coach, Mel Turner already is up to his elbows in lard.
For more than six hours Turner, his wife, Rosa, and their nephew, Alex Renfro, have been frenziedly making doughnuts for more than 10,000 Family Motor Coach Association Members in town for their summer convention.
By daybreak, Mel Turner and his crew of family will have made more than 12,000 doughnuts in that tiny trailer, along with 215 gallons of instant coffee and 55 gallons of cocoa.
"It's a lot of smoke and a lot of smell," Turner said. "It smells good at first, but after a while . . . I wash my clothes twice to get the smell out."
Most of the year Turner works in the service department of Blue Bird Wanderlodge's Fort Valley, Ga., plant, one of the largest motor-coach makers in the country.
Twice a year though, he goes on the road making doughnuts at FMCA's national conventions, where Blue Bird has provided complimentary coffee and doughnuts for 30 years.
"It's a big giveaway, but it gets us a lot of exposure," Turner said.
The trio makes doughnuts nightly from about 9 p.m to 7 a.m., running a machine nonstop that plops two new dunkers onto a conveyor belt every six seconds.
The machine is called Humper, Turner said, not because it produces 100 dozen doughnuts an hour but because it tires people out after working on it all night.
Renfro constantly adds doughnut mix to water that's precisely 75 degrees, stirring it with a huge commercial mixer and dumping it into the doughnut machine.
"I didn't know how to make doughnuts before this week, and I hope I don't ever have to know after this," the 19-year-old said.
Dough is dropped onto a conveyor that runs through a vat of bubbling, 390-degree lard and in about one minute, hot doughnuts are done.
Rosa Turner then dips the fried cakes into a mixture of cinnamon and sugar and stacks them in racks.
When he's not shuttling between where the doughnuts are made and where they are served, Mel Turner makes sure the grease stays the proper level and temperature.
Making doughnuts "isn't something I'd like to do full time, but it's a nice change," he said.
More than 750 pounds of lard, 2,000 pounds of doughnut mix and 70 pounds of cinnamon were used to make more than 30,000 doughnuts in Blacksburg this week.
The trio of doughnut makers works at such a hectic pace because they know hungry convention goers will be lined up outside the coach waiting for fresh doughnuts by 6:50 a.m.
"I've never seen so many people go so crazy over doughnuts," Renfro said.
Kyle McCrary, sales manager for Blue Bird, said the doughnut-and-coffee tradition was started at FMCA's first convention in 1963.
"It started off real small," he said. "In fact, for the first few years we bought the doughnuts and brought them in."
After that, Blue Bird bought a small doughnut machine and housed the entire operation in a 37-foot motor home. But as the convention grew, so did the doughnut operation and in 1979 the company bought the 10-foot trailer that's towed behind the coach.
The doughnuts are made in the trailer and served from the motor coach that pulls it from convention to convention.
"It's got a lot of miles on it," said Turner, who's been serving up doughnuts for five years.
McCrary said the doughnut crew used to make a variety of flavors including chocolate, butterscotch and cherry, but the conventions have gotten so large that it's no longer possible.
"Just cinnamon and plain, that's all we've got," said Rosa Turner.
McCrary estimated that it costs Blue Bird about $50,000 a convention to sponsor the coffee hour.
At 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, just as the last doughnut slid out of the grease, more than 1,000 FMCA members already were munching on the doughnuts being handed out by six convention volunteers.
Turner and family began cleaning up and thinking about what they would eat for breakfast before sleeping the day away.
It won't be doughnuts.
"No way," said Rosa Turner. "I used to love doughnuts, but not after making them all this time."
"I'll take eggs and grits if they got 'em," said Mel Turner, like a true Southerner.
by CNB