Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Few things in life are more comforting than breakfast—though it’s tough to say exactly why. Maybe it’s a sense of nostalgia that harks back to childhood, when you’d climb from bed, bleary-eyed and stomach grumbling, before digging into a stack of Mom’s buttermilk pancakes. Maybe it’s something more innate, a basic need for sustenance. Or maybe it’s a feeling of familiarity, when you’re still unsure what the rest of the day holds in store.
Whatever the reason, it was with a sense of comfort that I read this month’s cover feature (p. 70) after reporting on the aftermath of the Joplin tornado (p. 90).
You see, I spent the first 18 years of my life in a small town located a half-hour from Joplin. My birth certificate reads “Freeman Hospital.” Before prom, my date and I went to Travetti’s, an Italian joint once located where Home Depot now stands—or where it did until mid-May, that is. And on the evening of May 22, I received a call from my parents, who had just taken cover inside a Sam’s Club meat locker as an F5 tornado ravaged the city.
When I first returned to Joplin this summer, several weeks after the tornado, it was difficult to comprehend the scale of the damage. Driving along 26th Street, I failed to recognize the remains of the pediatrician’s office that I’d visited for so many years. At my father’s office, a makeshift memorial hung on the bulletin board in honor of a 52-year-old engineer who’d died in the tornado. After shopping at Hobby Lobby—where fluorescent lights glowed and light jazz played, as if nothing had ever changed—I walked into the parking lot and scanned the horizon to see miles of decimated buildings and skeleton-like trees. I wondered: How can a city restore any sense of normalcy when a third of it is gone?
Several months later, staff writer Jeannette Cooperman and I returned to southwest Missouri to answer that question. Our first day in Joplin, a former Marine named Steve Vanderbol graciously took us on a tour of the city, driving his Land Cruiser along the path of the storm. Near the intersection of 23rd and Main streets, he nodded toward a pile of debris. “My great personal loss is up here on the left,” he said. “Dude’s Donuts—my father took me here; I took my son here.”
Six months after the tornado, on the same site where it stood for 50 years, Dude’s Daylight Donuts is rebuilding with hopes of making the new building resemble the old one. “Some people say they won’t eat any donuts till we come back,” says Allen Pendergast, son of the donut shop’s owner.
When so much in life is precarious, the comforts of normalcy matter more than ever. And nothing’s more reassuringly normal than a glazed donut.
