This National Donut Day, I sat down for a chat with our friend Buzzy Geduld, a wonderful Jewish American and proprietor of The Donut Pub in Manhattan. I should mention that I am a donut fiend and consider myself a true aficionado. Many years after The Donut Pub had been firmly established as my favorite donut shop in Manhattan, I had the pleasure of meeting Buzzy and sharing a photo of myself on my 35th birthday. The image captured me at the end of a celebratory donut crawl, happily sugar-buzzed at his 14th Street establishment. Needless to say, we became fast friends, and I still patronize The Donut Pub as frequently as possible. He makes a mean donut and is a terrific friend.
Buzzy is a true renaissance man, with one foot in donuts, the other in markets, and his heart and soul in service and philanthropy. In addition to establishing The Donut Pub and founding Cougar Capital, LLC, Buzzy serves on the Board of The New York Historical Society, Chairs their Finance Committee, and is a member of their Executive Committee. In addition, he serves on the Board of Jazz at Lincoln Center and Co-Chairs their Investment Committee. Buzzy is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Baruch College and is Vice Chair of their Investment Committee, as well as being a member of the Albert Einstein Medical School Board of Trustees and serving on their Investment Committee.
I sat down with Buzzy in celebration of National Donut Day and ended up also gaining a meaningful tribute to Father’s Day.
Annie: To begin, Buzzy, tell me about your father, who I know remains an inspiration to you. From where did he emigrate, and how did his European Jewish heritage inform your life growing up?
Buzzy: My dad came to America with his entire family. Seven brothers and sisters, his parents and cousins – the whole family. They came over in 1921, from Poland, when he was 16 years old.
He went to public school for one year; they put him in the first grade. He said he could hardly fit behind the desk! But he spoke better English than I do, better than all his relatives. His sisters and brothers, they all had heavy European accents, but he had none. He told me he would stand in front of a mirror and just practice speaking English because it was so important for him to be in America.
That was always very inspirational to me. Once, as a young teenager, I asked him why they all came to America, and he said, “Because the streets are lined with gold.” And he clarified that he meant not gold that jingles in your pocket but a much more important gold known as ‘opportunity.’
He had a love for this country unlike any I’ve ever seen, and he appreciated everything. That was an inspiration for me, so I followed suit and loved this country more than anything. I still do.
My father worked his way up at a luncheonette in Manhattan, starting behind the counter, then as a waiter, then, when eventually the business came up for sale, he bought it. A little later, the space next door came up for rent, so he took the lease and opened up a bar and restaurant. He worked very hard, and when the building, a two-story building on the corner of 24th Street and Sixth Avenue, came up for sale, he bought it!
Annie: Wow! Gosh.
Buzzy: And the place was named Buzzy’s Bar and Restaurant because he said I brought him good luck. Then, he worked to bring good luck to a lot of people. He worked seven days a week to pay a mortgage – up at five in the morning every day. He would only go in late Sundays. It was inspirational to see the sacrifices he made for us to have a nice home. A nice end to that story: before I was born, my parents, with my brother and sister, rented a one room basement apartment in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. As my father got on his feet, he ended up buying that house, and that’s the house I grew up in.
Annie: What a testament to his hard work. I was just going to ask about your family life growing up.
Buzzy: I had a sister, ten years older, and a brother, eight years older. My parents were not religious per se, you know, going to Temple every Saturday, but we celebrated Shabbat every Friday night. My mother made a special dinner every Friday, lit the Shabbat candles, and recited prayer with us. It was just us three kids and her, as my father was working. It was nothing formal, but we always thanked God.
And our history and connection to Judaism was all around us in our house – evidence of our pride in being Jewish. I learned from my parents, especially my dad — as he had come from a very religious home in Poland — that you don’t have to be in a special place to pray to God, and I’ve followed that my whole life. To this day, I pray every day, and it doesn’t matter if I’m in the shower or lying in bed. So, I still believe that; I think God knows where we are and what we’re doing all the time.
Annie: I love that, and am now a little emotional, actually.
Let’s talk about donuts. When did you have your first donut? Do you remember?
Buzzy: When I had my first donut… it was those powdered sugar donuts you got in a little bag at the supermarket.
Annie: And how did you get into the donut business?
Buzzy: Well, I was not a good student. I really, really disliked school and couldn’t wait to get out and get a job. At first, I thought that I’d like to become a pharmacist and have a luncheonette inside the pharmacy, as was common many years ago. I applied to St. John’s University and Long Island University and was rejected by both. So, I went to Brooklyn College at night. Brooklyn College was as hard to get into as any the Ivy League in those days because everyone in Brooklyn wanted to get in – it was literally free; you just had to pay for your books. I promised my mother I would matriculate into day school after two semesters, but by the end of the second semester, I got a letter telling me I was basically not welcome to come back. I had cut too many classes!
My brother was working on Wall Street, and this was 1960, 1961… and you couldn’t really make a great living there in those days. My father had suggested we think about going into the donut business, and we did. That was the beginning of The Donut Pub!
We opened six stores together. Around 1968, my brother came to me and said that Wall Street was coming back. He had never liked being in the donut business, but me, I loved it. I used to bake! I thought it was the cat’s meow. I didn’t mind cleaning the muffin pans… I just thought it was all fun.
So, my brother said that he was going to go back to Wall Street and didn’t think it would be fair for us to remain partners. We had already sold two of the stores at this point, so we sold two more, and I volunteered for the Army Reserves. I went away to Fort Dix, and as it turned out, they put me into cooking school. So, I became a cook in the Army! And when I left active duty, I sold one more store but kept one – the shop on 14th Street and 7th Avenue – and went back to work there.
I would bake in the early morning, and at around nine o’clock or 10 o’clock, I’d be finished. Without four or five stores to manage, I had nothing to do. In my cook’s whites, I would take the train down to my brother’s office. There were four traders on the desk and twenty-five people in the firm. I’d pull up a chair and post his dispositions. A few months later, John Herzog, who ran the firm at the time, took me for a walk at Trinity Church cemetery, down on Trinity Place, and offered me a job. I told him, “Sure – if I’m a partner in a year, I’ll stay, and if not, I’ll go back to opening more donut shops.” And that’s how I got to Wall Street.
Annie: How interesting. It’s amazing when doors like that open.
Buzzy: Well, it’s all about God, right?
Annie: Yes, and your dad! Your father was the one who suggested the donut business; was that because there was an existing business for sale or did he simply see opportunity there?
Buzzy: Donut shops were beginning to open. Suddenly, there was a proliferation of donut shops, and he thought this would be the future – as it turned out, he was very right.
Annie: He was, indeed. And then, after you became very successful on Wall Street, why did you keep the one shop?
Buzzy: Well, at the time I went to Wall Street and was offered the job, I was making no money. My salary was under a hundred dollars – it was nothing. It was just enough to pay my rent. So, I would go to the donut shop on Saturdays and Sundays and work. And when I started to make a living on Wall Street – in the early/mid-Seventies, I thought it was a good luck charm. And I always wanted to be able to say to a boss if I needed to, “Screw you,” and know I had another way to make money.
Annie: Can I quote you on that?
Buzzy: Absolutely.
And I felt very comfortable. Having The Donut Pub gave me confidence that I didn’t have to suck up to anybody and could just be who I wanted to be — and as time went by and things on Wall Street got better, and the firm grew, and I became a partner — it remained my good luck job.
And we would send donuts to our institutional clients in New York. Five days a week, we would hit five to eight clients a day. It was incredible, inexpensive advertising, and the minute those dozens were delivered to trading desks we did business with, our phone would ring off the hook with clients saying, “Hey, this is great, these are fabulous!”
When I went to work at Merrill Lynch in 2000, I got a call from some bean counter after about a month, and he said, “How important are these donuts to you?” And I said, “Well, this is effective advertising.” He asked what it cost per year to send the donuts, and I did the math – it was $37,000 a year. I figured when I told him that, he’d jump out of his skin, so I was prepared. I told him I knew it was typical to take clients and prospects on $300,000 golf trips but that I conjured more business sending five dozen donuts to JP Morgan’s desk than those expensive weekends did. “Nonetheless,” he said, “it’s not the Merrill way, so we can’t do it anymore.” I had just started working at Merrill and wasn’t going to rock the boat, but to this day, I can be in a restaurant, and someone will walk over to my table and say, “Excuse me, I used to work at Alliance Capital. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but boy, did we love those donuts!” Donuts bring smiles to people’s faces.
Annie: I agree with you one hundred percent. Donuts are simply delightful! I feel there’s no one who can resist the appeal of a donut, even if they somehow have the willpower to not eat one. I don’t believe there is anyone who looks at a donut and thinks…
Buzzy: “Eww.”
Annie: Right! They are just happy things.
Buzzy: I’m at the shop on Saturday mornings, and if you could see parents come in on the weekends with their kids, and the look on a kid’s face when they walk in and see 50 different choices… the kids are just lit up, pointing to the donuts they want, taking a bite and smiling ear to ear.
I have to tell you, I get such pleasure from it still. And it’s an inexpensive luxury. Sometimes, I’ll talk to customers and ask how they like their donuts, and they are always just so happy. Where else can you find that kind of joy in a treat for so little money?
Annie: Well, it’s true, and I think you and I talked about this a while back, that the donut shop is also a kind of equalizing force, where you have people of all stripes and incomes enjoying the same thing in the same way, and for the same reasons, together.
How many donuts do you think you eat in a week?
Buzzy: Well, I can tell you it’s not like the old days. In the old days, I used to sit down with a half dozen donuts and a glass of milk, watch a movie at home, and I would eat the centers. I would eat the center of the jelly donut, then the center of a Boston cream donut, then the tops of chocolate rings with sprinkles. Nowadays, when I’m there on Saturdays, I take two things home with me. I take a black and white cookie, which is my all-time favorite thing, and a French cruller.
Annie: I’m pretty sure that after this conversation, my lunch break is going to involve a trip to The Donut Pub.
Buzzy: On Saturday evenings, after I’ve been out for dinner, I still have a glass of milk and the French cruller when I get home. And Sunday evenings, I have my black and white cookie.
Annie: Who is the coolest or most interesting person you’ve ever sold a donut to?
Buzzy: There was an artist who became my best friend, who had a studio next door to me. And every morning, he and his girlfriend would come in at around nine o’clock when I would be taking a break from baking. I’d come out and have a cup of coffee with them. He was a professor of art at Queen’s College to earn money so he could paint. And we became, I mean, really – best friends. To me, he was a celebrity. Back in those days, he helped young men go to Canada to avoid the draft, while I was a believer in LBJ and thought the war was something we needed to do. We would argue every morning, but not like people today, where you can’t have a conversation without veins bursting and people screaming. We would pleasantly debate every day about the war. And he became my closest friend. His name was Charles Cajori – unfortunately, he passed a few years ago, but I still have his art in my apartment, which is nice because it reminds me of him. He taught me that it’s okay to disagree and to never be afraid of speaking up.
Annie: Was there a Jewish American when you were growing up who particularly influenced you?
Buzzy: That would be my father, and his strong belief — as I said before, not in in formal religious ceremony — but in God. What he taught me was that you must view each person for who they are, that there are good and bad people within every culture and religion, and not to put labels on people. And that to me, I believe, is how God wants us to be – to feel and act that way. So, I’d say that my father was very influential — in a moral way and in a religious way — more than anybody else.
Annie: Your generosity is legendary, as is your desire to help and boost other people. I want you to tell me – how does the donut exemplify your philosophy?
Buzzy: The donut is something that people love. And I can’t tell you how many schools and other organizations we support when they host their fundraisers by sending donuts for their guests to enjoy or gift certificates for their auctions.
I think donuts make people happy, and honestly, it’s not just about writing a check — which I’m also happy to do if it’s an organization I believe is worthwhile — but I also use donuts to help organizations, and people appreciate that.
I’m on the board at Baruch College, and for midterms and finals, I go there with one hundred dozen mini donuts. I serve donuts, coffee, and hot chocolate to over 400 kids. And if you could see – these kids are going in for their midterms and finals – their joy and the way it takes away some of the pressure they are feeling. These kids work so hard; they’re nervous and worried, and it’s great to be able to make these stressful days a little lighter for them. And I still get joy from serving donuts.
Annie: That’s lovely and a terrific image. I can see the steam escaping from their ears when they see you there with donuts.
And finally, one last question, Buzzy. Do you have anything special coming down the pike? Do you have a new flavor that’s not yet on the shelf?
Buzzy: Yes. But I can’t tell you because then I’d have to harm you.
