Mom was right about everything...about coffee

I'm at the Hilton Garden Inn in downtown Worcester, MA. A huge hotel, amidst many large buildings, many of which seem vacant, though there are a few people here in this lobby. This morning, despite the nearly deserted neighborhood, the sound of an occasional vehicle roars down Major Taylor Boulevard, easily reaching my 4th floor room.

It's time to get up. It's time to coffee.

And here is the Keurig, with "pods" from The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. I think of my mom. She was right. So very right about hotel coffee pods and The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. In case the name isn't familiar to you, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is a fixture in the L.A. café-scape, and they have been roasting beans and brewing fine coffee for quite some time. I've really only seen the shops in L.A. Now, by golly, they're in hotels in middle Massachusetts.

Mom was buying The Coffee Bean's freshly roasted beans in the 1970s (and maybe the 1960s), well before Starbucks took over America, latte by latte, in the late 1990s, and converted the masses to a strong, freshly brewed cuppa java. She knew about good coffee.

At least 50 years ago, Mom was creating prototypes of hotel coffee packets, sewing them by hand. When you spend countless nights on the road, dependent on motel or gas station coffee, I can imagine my mom's desperate quest for a decent cup of coffee, probably using The Coffee Bean's ground coffee. She knew we needed good coffee first thing in the morning, wherever we were.

She knew.

Was it the time she spent in Paris in the 1950s? Was it working in show business? Was it Dad?

There's nothing quite like coffee in show business. I don't know if I can capture it, but there is always coffee, whether backstage or on set or in the editing house. The long hours require it. It's how you start your day, then it becomes a mid-morning break, then again a necessity in the afternoon. If you're making a pot at 9pm or later, it's perhaps the only comfort during long grinding hours. Then you add active alcoholics chasing away a hangover, or alcoholics in recovery – who are the fiercest of coffee drinkers – and yes, it's coffee all the time.

I recently read that The Coffee Bean was originally a direct-to-business service, and I wonder if my mom's early Hollywood days as an assistant at ABC or at David Susskind's office led her to The Coffee Bean. The first shop opened in 1963 in Brentwood, and founder Herbert Hyman was a pioneer in quality coffee roasting and procurement of regional beans. (Here is an obituary of Herbert Hyman, with a great history of his influence on coffee culture.) Mom and Dad weren't the only show-business folks to worship at his humble temple to coffee.

I have the vaguest of memories going to the shop with my mom to order coffee, probably early 1980s. Not a cup of coffee. No specialty drinks in those days, either. She would order whole coffee beans in bulk to be shipped to Connecticut. My parents had their own blend, the "Robards Blend" which was 1/2 Mocha Java and 1/2 French Roast. Once arrived, the beans were frozen and taken out as needed, pound by pound.

Sometimes Mom would send Jake or me down to the walk-in freezer in the creepy basement to get the beans. That bare light bulb kind of creepy basement. I'd have to run from one light bulb to the next, pull the string to turn it on and create an island of safety before advancing to the next dark bulb. Around a darker corner was the walk-in freezer, with a huge latch handle.

All that was in the huge freezer was coffee beans and some bluefish we caught one summer. The greatest fear was being locked in there somehow. Or that something was in there. I could have Jake come with me, but I wouldn't put it past him to close the door on me. So, alone, I'd take a deep breath, open the door, leave it ajar, and run in and grab a bag of beans as fast as I could and get outta there, slam door run up the stairs skipping steps. Made it alive.

"Did you turn out the lights down there?" Um, yes?

Each morning, Jake and I would vie for the privilege of grinding the beans. The sound, the smell, that rich aroma of raw ground beans was the best. We weren't drinking coffee then. Didn't even like the taste. But we loved the ritual.

For my dad, an alcoholic in recovery who also quit smoking in the late 1980s, the coffee situation was intense: black, always hot, mug ever-present, until the last cup of decaf after dinner. My parents were adamant about having well-sealing insulated carafes to keep the coffee hot. No burned coffee! Enough of that was had backstage or on set.

On an hour-and-a-half drive to New York City, they would take a full fresh carafe in the car, with porcelain mugs. These were the days before giant 20 oz. metal Yetis. Occasionally my dad would drive off with a mug on the hood of his car.

And that photo of my mom in this article? That's on an island somewhere and the coffee cup is from our house. They brought their coffee brewing gear, cups included, to an island. This is the norm I grew up with.

So it's no surprise that coffee is now foundational to me. As I fire up the Keurig, we can all acknowledge that the coffee pods – even if they are from the vaunted Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf – still don't compare to actual fresh well-brewed coffee. Perhaps this is why mom gave up the dream of creating portable coffee sachets? I'll never know for sure.

But hey, Cheers, Mom. You were right. You were right about a lot of things, but for now we're talking about coffee.