Losing dad hurts, but family behind Donut Connection in Harrison carries on
Paul DeAngelis woke up at 4 a.m. every day for 20 years — the first one in his family to get out of bed.
He'd head to the Donut Connection in Harrison, the business that had become his second home and where he started the day by adding yeast to the mounds of dough used to make donuts.
When his wife didn't hear him get up one morning in late December, she knew something was wrong.
"Paulie, wake up! Paulie wake up!" Sandra DeAngelis yelled.
His son, Nick, ran up the steps and found DeAngelis on the floor. He had last seen him the night before as his dad settled into his nightly routine of watching TV, usually a show on the Food Network or Velocity channel.
Nick figures his dad died sometime during the night, most likely in his sleep. He had suffered a heart attack. He was 66.
"Now that he's gone ... it's tough," Nick said. "You don't have your rock, the guy you go to and turn to anytime you have a question about anything."
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I met Nick at the donut shop last week, where he was busy pouring hot coffee in the early afternoon, making pizza (yes, it's not just sweets at the Donut Connection) and chatting up customers.
Nick inherited his dad's gregarious nature, something that makes him well-suited to sustain a business in which being affable is just as important as mastering the precise amount of icing to put on a sprinkled donut.
Nick, 32, remembers exactly when the family took over the shop along Freeport Road about 20 years ago — when he was in sixth grade — based on a memorable episode involving his new school books.
He'd taken to school a container of broccoli-cheddar soup from the shop and carried it in the same backpack as the books.
You guessed it: his social studies book ended up covered in cheesy soup.
"It stunk like broccoli cheddar the rest of the school year," he said about the book, laughing.
Food, it turns out, became an integral part of Nick's relationship with his dad.
The two cooked together every night when Nick got home after working the evening shift at the donut shop.
Listening to him list all the recipes they concocted made me hungry: a pepper wrap with ground chuck, hot sausage and roasted peppers; a zucchini sandwich with fried zucchini, garden tomatoes and vegetables; not to mention pizzas, stir fries and casseroles.
Nick told me his father's loss has been particularly hard on his mom, who met Paul when they were in eighth grade. He used to wait for her outside the classroom and would walk her to the next class. They were married 44 years.
As Nick and I spoke, his mom came out of the kitchen to ask a question about a pizza Nick was preparing.
"It's hard to talk about it," Sandra told me about her husband. "He's missing at home, he's missing here. I've been with him for 44 years married but I've been with him for 50 years altogether. So it's hard. I've been with him since I was 16."
Customers still ask about him.
"He was very well loved," Sandra said. "I don't think he knew how well he was liked. I really don't. People enjoyed his conversation. He was a great talker. He made people feel welcome and he made them feel comfortable and he was witty."
The family has no plans to close the shop, even though it took them weeks after Paul's death to figure out when supplies and ingredients needed to be ordered for restocking. Paul never wrote anything down, you see.
But somehow, the family has managed to move forward — as if Paul were still behind the counter, boxing up donuts or selling lottery tickets.
Nick still talks about his dad in the present tense.
"I don't like to think that's he's gone," he said. "He's still here in spirit. He's still looking over us. That's the way I look at it."
Luis Fábregas is editor of the Tribune-Review's Valley News Dispatch edition. Follow him on Twitter @LuisTrib
