Originally Posted by
pancakelover
I will be 72 years old this summer [[2015). That means that I was 7 years old in the summer of 1950 and 17 in the summer of 1960. During those years my mom took me shopping downtown many times, and towards the end of those years I spent time downtown with friends going to movies, shopping at Hudson's book shop, etc. And every trip downtown included a visit to one of the Quickee "Donut Shops." Actually they were officially called Quickee Sandwich Shops" and there were a string of at least six of them. Most of the posters on this thread recall just one of them--probably the one they patronized--but in fact there were at least six and possibly seven or eight. It is true that there was one at the southwest corner of State and Griswold. But the one with the neon hand dipping a donut in and out of a cup of coffee--complete with similated steam rising from the cup--was on Grand River between Woodward and Griswold, meaning that it was not actually on Woodward Avenue but very close to it, and just a stone's throw from Hudson's front doors on Woodward. You stepped out of Hudson's on the Woodward side [[or the Grand River side) and walked to the corner of Woodward and Grand River. After the clanging streetcar on Woodward went by and your light turned green, you crossed Woodward and kept walking west and there you were, under the big hand dipping the neon donut into the giant cup.
The Quickee shops were famous for their delicious donuts, of course, but they also served sandwiches and soups. The soups probably changed day by day--I'm sure there were things like pea soup and bean soup in the winter and lighter things in the summer--but they had dynamite chili all year and all the soups were served in heavy crockery bowls. Even as a teen ager I wasn't into coffee, but I always had a mug of their hot chocolate, also served in heavy crockery mugs. No plastic or paper cups and bowls back then, and the spoons were steel, not plastic. The sandwiches, of course, were nothing like the modern deli-type sandwiches we expect now. They were traditional American sandwiches on plain white or whole wheat "Wonder Bread" cut diagonally and wrapped in Saran, but they were cheap. 25 cents for peanut butter and jelly, 35 for tuna salad, and you dropped 45 or 50 for something luxurious like ham and cheese or turkey. And those delicious donuts were huge and freshly made and I remember the price: 7 cents for one donut, and 70 cents for a dozen. Such a deal! And the price never changed--there was no inflation during the 1950s. I suppose the prices went up later but after about 1961 [[the year I went away to college) I probably never went downtown in Detroit again, so I don't know what happened after that.
The box that you carried your dozen donuts home in listed the locations and that's how I remember that there were at least 6 and maybe more downtown. In addition to the one on State at Griswold, believe it or not there was another one just a couple of blocks west on State--I think it was at the corner of Times Square. As teenagers my friends and I went downtown on the Grand River trolley bus, which went down Cass for a couple of blocks, then turned left onto State. We got off the bus there and we were right in front of a Quickee Shop and at that location they actually fried the donuts in the front window so you could watch as you stood on the sidewalk. A young fellow used a great big vat that was suspended from the ceiling, and he squeezed a trigger every couple of seconds to let a ring of batter drop from the thing into hot grease, and a mechanical device kept the donuts slowly moving down a sort of river of hot grease till it reached the end [[about 6 feet away) and another mechanical device turned the donut over and let it move around a corner and return to a place near the fellow, and he scooped the finished donuts out of the grease into a wire basket which another employee collected a few minutes later.
In addition to the two Quickees on State Street and the one on Grand River near Woodward, there were at least three others. There was certainly one further down Griswold in the financial district, maybe around Fort Street, and there was probably one on Broadway near Broadway Market, and probably one on Farmer near Cadillac Square.
Those donuts were the best, and they were big! Some were jelly-filled, others were custard-filled, but the custard-filled ones were only in the winter [[summer heat was too dangerous--they might spoil and make people sick), so if you asked for custard filled donuts in the summer they said "Never in the summer." My favorites were the chocolate frosted fried cakes. By the way, in those days everybody knew the difference between "fried cakes" and "donuts." Authentic donuts were made from yeast dough that rose like bread dough and, after rising, it was fried in hot fat. The resulting donut was light and fluffy and it "tore" when you put stress on it. The "fried cakes" were not a yeast dough that rose. It was just a thick cake batter containing baking powder or soda and it was extruded from a device like the one described above, dropping a ring of dough into the hot fat. Most of the "yeast donuts" were simply glazed, but it was that dough that was used for the jelly-filled and custard-filled ones. The "fried cakes" were more popular and those were either plain, or powdered sugared or cinnamon sugared or plain sugared or iced in different flavors [[chocolate, vanilla, cherry, orange etc.) or glazed and dipped in chopped nuts. My mouth waters when I think of them!