The Weird World of Southern Maid Donuts

Featured donut image by Kyle Johnson Photography

If I were forced to appoint one food item to represent Shreveport, in the way that a cheesesteak represents Philadelphia or clam chowder represents Boston, I’d probably pick a Southern Maid Donut. Which is an odd selection for a practicing locavore, since the Southern Maid story doesn’t begin in Shreveport. But the relationship between Southern Maid and Shreveport dates back more than 80 years.

Southern Maid Donuts was founded in 1937 by J.B. and Rosalea Hargrove, who opened a wholesale bakery in the Fair Park neighborhood of Dallas after high-tailing it from Dust Bowl-battered Oklahoma. Driven by the success of Rosalea’s donut flour recipe, the business expanded quickly, opening franchisee-controlled locations in Houston and Shreveport.

The first Shreveport location of Southern Maid Donuts was opened in March of 1941 by Bruce and Dannie Jones, a married couple who’d moved to Shreveport from Dallas with a $250 loan and a dream to build a donut factory. Lessons from Bruce’s previous job, traveling with the Beckman-Gerrity Circus, would come in surprisingly handy in his new line of work.

By 1946, the Joneses had outgrown their original digs at 1922 Texas Avenue—where they’d shared a block with a tiny liquor store called Herby-K’s—and moved into a larger space at 2700 Greenwood Road. Southern Maid delivery trucks departed this location, loaded down with hot donuts, each day at 4 p.m. For Shreveporters, this seemingly inconsequential logistical decision has forever connected the idea of warm donuts with the late afternoon. Anywhere else in America, 4 p.m. is just another stop on the dial. In Shreveport, 4 p.m. is when you’re supposed to eat a donut.

But the story of Southern Maid in Shreveport is really the story of Bruce Jones, an eccentric huckster, a live music fanatic, and a natural-born showman. He could train a dog to walk a tightrope. He personally hand-fed Elvis Presley a donut. He was a 32nd Degree Master Freemason born in Ringgold, Texas in 1901, and a harbinger of many hucksters and dreamers to come in the Twentieth Century. He was a Shreveporter.

Much has been made of the famous spokespeople who’ve endorsed Southern Maid Donuts in Shreveport over the years. Those spokespeople have included Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, who literally sang the praises of Southern Maid during KWKH’s legendary Louisiana Hayride broadcast. As a major sponsor of the Louisiana Hayride, Bruce Jones often appeared in live-to-air segments that required him to present stars like Cash, Presley, Faron Young, Kitty Wells and Bob Wills with a box of donuts.

He must have fallen in love with radio, with the idea of a mass audience. By 1955, he was hosting his own weekday morning radio show on KENT, Donuts to Dollars, and calling himself “The Donut King.”  

But any conversation about Southern Maid’s advertising must begin with Miss Merry Mary. Beginning in the late 1950s, the white miniature poodle—owned by Dannie and trained to perform circus acts by Bruce—regularly appeared on television and at public events as the Southern Maid mascot.

Miss Merry Mary, walking upright and wearing a colorful bonnet and coat, pushed a baby carriage filled with Southern Maid Donuts onstage during KTBS 3’s locally-produced Search for Talent television program each Sunday night. Though Miss Merry Mary stopped making promotional appearances by the mid-1960s, she still appears on Southern Maid Donuts merchandise sold by the Hearne Avenue location in Shreveport.

Because Southern Maid locations are independently operated franchise businesses, they are able to make their own packaging decisions. For all we know, the Hearne Avenue location may be the only Southern Maid Donuts in the world selling t-shirts and donut boxes bearing the image of Miss Merry Mary.

So, why does the Hearne Avenue location still emblazon its packaging with the portrait of a poodle that died in 1976? They feel they have no choice. When manager (and grandson of Bruce) Mike Jones attempted to redesign the box in 1991, the company was hit by a wave of public outrage that it clearly did not see coming.

“Everybody had a fit,” Josephine Jones told The Times in a 1995 interview. “People would call and say ‘Why did you stop using the dog?’”

In a 1991 interview, the ever-colorful Mike Jones was asked to comment on the design of the box.

“I couldn’t stand that dog,” he said.

Believe it or not, Miss Merry Mary wasn’t the only upright-walking dog in the Jones’s household. Bruce Jones also raised and trained a trio of solid white German shepherds—Tex, Rin and Chinook—that he would bring out to gin up a crowd at store openings, donut giveaways, fundraisers, and radio broadcasts.  

While Bruce was always an eccentric and a showman, it is also possible that these sorts of stunts were conceived and encouraged by his business associate, Hub Brandao. Brandao, whose surname appears anglicized as Brando in later newspaper mentions, was a local television personality, trombone player, advertising agency owner, journalist, rock band leader, and beauty pageant organizer who handled advertising for Southern Maid Donuts throughout the 1950s. His son is sports broadcasting legend and Shreveport booster Tim Brando.

Bruce Jones knew how to do two things as well as anyone has ever done them: fry donuts and train animals to act like people. So it makes perfect sense that those two interests would converge in the lobby of his donut shop, where Jones kept a pair of identical, jet-black mynah birds to greet—and occasionally heckle—customers.

Jones appears to have had many talking mynah birds over the years, and locals recount having seen them in various Southern Maid locations around town. But “Billy,” who I believe may have been Jones’s first talking bird, seems to have been held in especially high regard. Jones took out large ads encouraging customers to come to 2700 Greenwood Road and meet Billy, who appeared alongside Jones on the Donuts to Dollars radio program.

“He talks! He whistles! He’s practically human!” shouts one advertisement. “Don’t miss this sensational bird!”

If there is a crossroads where the haves and have-nots of Shreveport intermingle, the current home of the Southern Maid Donuts opened by Bruce and Dannie Jones is it. At 4 p.m., each day except Tuesday, we are all just people waiting on our number to be called at 3505 Hearne Avenue. Some of us are lawyers, some of us are running from the law, some of us are rich and many of us are poor, but we are all eager to sink our teeth into a piping hot, impossibly light and crisp Southern Maid Donut. We are all going to be covered in glaze crumbs by the time that we get home.

Mike Jones still runs the show, or at least he did the last time that I stopped in. The glorious neon, thankfully, still tempts the taste buds of I-20 motorists with the promise of hot hot hot donuts. Miss Merry Mary’s confused little poodle eyes still stare out from donut boxes stacked on the counter while framed photographs of Faron Young, Slim Whitman and Red Sovine grin towards the Texas state line. In Garland, Texas, the Hargrove family now oversees a donut empire that has grown to more than 100 locations.

But there’s precious little information about the Hargroves on the website of Southern Maid Donuts. Instead, the site’s fantastic “History” page mostly tells the story of a booming mid-century town in Louisiana, an outlandish entrepreneur named Bruce C. Jones, and the people (and animals) that he brought together for a couple of downright strange and entirely American decades.

Bruce Jones died on October 4, 1966. His obituary named “the employees of Southern Maid Donuts” as his honorary pallbearers. 

Postscript

It was probably around 2008, which would have made me 28 years old. I had taken the Friday off of work to go “junking” through Webster Parish with my mom, and we’d pulled over to pick through items at a garage sale near Cotton Valley. I found myself transfixed by an old-fashioned baby carriage, which had been tossed atop a trailer piled high with lamps and tools and bicycle parts. Out of morbid curiosity, I peeked into the baby carriage.

The old-timer running the sale sidled up next to me.

“You know what that is?,” he asked.

“It’s an old baby carriage, right?”

“That’s a special baby carriage,” he said, sitting down at a folding card table that displayed a sun-bleached collection of Star Wars trading cards. “That baby carriage there was the one that used to be pushed onstage every Sunday night by an old poodle dog on channel three, selling Southern Maid Donuts.”

I wasn’t really interested in food history at the time.

“How much you gotta have for it?”

The old-timer thought it over.

“How about sixty dollars?”

I must have visibly recoiled. Sixty dollars was a lot of money to me then, as it is today.

“It’s really cool,” I said, walking away. “It’ll make the right person real happy to find that.”

“Just gotta find somebody who remembers,” the old guy said. “You like Star Wars?”

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