(playful music)
- [Narrator] Mm, donuts.
The guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
But where did the donut get its shape,
and more specifically, who put the hole in the donut?
Two competing theories set the stage
for what would become known as the Great Donut Debate.
(jazzy music)
- [Michael] If you think of the quintessential American
sweet snack, it is in fact the donut.
- [Narrator] That's Michel Krondl.
He wrote this book.
- [Michael] The Donut, History, Recipes, and Lore
from Boston to Berlin.
- [Narrator] Suffice to say Krondl is what you call
a donut expert.
- [Michael] When you have something so central to a culture
as the donut is to American culture,
you wanna tell stories around it.
- [Narrator] We here at Great Big Story are no exception.
(classical music)
First part of our story takes us to 1916,
where a Boston Post reporter interviewed
Hanson Crockett Gregory.
- [Michael] Gregory gives this long interview,
where he explains how he invented it,
which was that he was on board ship
when he was around 15 years old
when he had the clever idea of poking out the middle
so that the whole thing would cook evenly.
This, he claims, made him the Columbus of the donut hole.
- [Narrator] Gregory's story spread like wildfire.
- [Michael] The story was picked up by newspapers
all over the country.
This made him a star.
It was little unclear why they believed
the story of an 85-year-old sailor,
given the reputations sailors have.
- [Narrator] Skepticism aside, donuts grew
more and more popular over the years,
due in large part to a donut dunking fad.
- [Michael] Donut dunking becomes a national obsession.
- [Narrator] In 1941, the National Dunking Association,
yes, a real thing, hosted the Great Donut Debate,
where the question was "Who put the hole in the donut?"
- [Michael] And one side of the debate was the proposal
that Captain Gregory had in fact invented the donut hole
as he had explained, which is as a youth on the ship.
- [Narrator] And on the other side, Chief High Eagle
of Wampanoag Tribe.
- [Michael] Chief High Eagle
had a completely different story.
Many generations ago, a member of his tribe
was pursuing a settler.
And this settler apparently had a donut in her hand,
and this young Indian brave shot an arrow,
which created a hole right in the middle of the donut.
- [Narrator] In the end, the celebrity panel
awarded Gregory with the innovation.
And though we can never prove that Hanson Crockett Gregory
put the first hole in the donut,
the tale lives on.
(playful music)