Carol from Falmouth, Massachusetts, is curious about this bit of wisdom from her father: As you travel through life, whatever your goal, keep your eye on the doughnut, and not on the hole. The Mayflower Coffee Shop chain, based in New Jersey and New York in the 1920s and 1930s, had a similar slogan. Word historian Barry Popik has collected other versions, including Between optimist and pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist the doughnut sees, the pessimist the hole. An earlier version: As you ramble through life, Brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eyes upon the doughnut and not upon the hole. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Keep Your Eye on the Donut”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Good morning. Is this Martha?
This is Martha. Who’s this?
This is Carol Rader, and I’m in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
Well, Carol, welcome. I’ve got Grant here right with me.
Hello. Welcome to you, Carol.
Welcome.
When I was in the sixth grade, which was the last year of elementary school, the town I was in, we all had autograph books. Now, this was in the early 50s.
Now, my dad would write in everyone’s autograph book, as you travel through life, whatever your goal, keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.
All I can remember his saying to me at the time was it was just something he heard or he remembered from his childhood.
He was born in 1912, so he had lived in a little time in New Jersey and then some other time in Brooklyn.
That makes a lot of sense to me.
There was a coffee shop chain called the Mayflower Coffee Shop. And their slogan, believe it or not, was exactly that.
Oh!
Yeah.
And they ran from the 1930s to the 1970s. They were based in New Jersey and New York.
You can find some really wonderful information about them. It looks like the classic coffee shop, the kind of place that you now only see in old movies.
And it was based on older kind of catchphrase that you would find in things like high school yearbooks or the doggerel column of ladies’ magazines or just kind of the filler tidbits that would show up on newspapers when they had extra column inches to fill.
And the slightly older version that was found by word historian Barry Poppick, it goes like this. It’s from 1904.
Twixt optimist and pessimist, the difference is a droll. The optimist, the donut sees. The pessimist, the hole.
Aha!
So it’s the same sentiment.
The later version, which is very much like your father’s, as you ramble through life, brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eyes upon the donut and not upon the hole.
Yes.
Now, this would show up then mainly in newspapers and magazines.
Originally, yeah, but then this coffee shop adopted it as their motto, and it would appear on their menus and in their advertisements and other places like that, yeah.
It’s good advice, right?
Well, I put it on graduation cards to this day.
Do you?
Oh, yeah, sure.
Perfect for that.
Yeah, let’s hear it one more time, Carol.
As you travel through life, whatever your goal, keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.
Words to live by.
And I also appreciate your bringing up the idea of autograph books. I had one in sixth grade as well.
It was red and it was kind of soft.
And that was a big deal, right? Passing those around and getting people done.
It was.
And I don’t know where mine got lost to. I haven’t seen it for years.
But, yes, I mean, we would have them pass it around, the teachers, other students, and, again, you know, parents of friends would write in them.
Yeah, that was pre-Instagram.
Well, I love those when I find them. You can often find them scanned at various digital archives because they’re filled with teen slang and college slang.
They’re wonderful to go to, and I can find real live examples of the language used by kids at the time.
So besides the heartfelt message, it’s actually good for language research.
Maybe you’re just scanned on there. You never know.
Carol, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
All right, take care of yourself, Carol. Call us again sometime, all right?
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
I loved those memories, the memories of the, we didn’t have signature books, we had yearbooks.
Right.
But they were still this repository of the wisdom of kids in some ways, usually put together by a class of kids with the guidance of a teacher.
But still a kid’s product of a kid’s mind and the year and the era and the things that kids cared about.
Really important to us.
Yeah.
Did you feel pressure to come up with original things?
Oh, I did.
You know what I did? I would always put mysterious predictions for the future.
Like, beware the man in the green shirt, things like that.
You would have scared me.
And I just hope that a few of them came true and somebody right now is like, how did he know?
There was a man in a green shirt. He did me wrong.
