Koffee Klatsch creates connections

I’ve never really been able to nail down the origin of the Koffee Klatsch.

As best I can tell, the annual holiday gathering — now gatherings — for coffee and doughnuts started in the 1950s.

The Graphic was launched by my parents as a weekly newspaper in competition with The Commercial Review in 1949. The weekly and the daily were engaged in a 1950s “newspaper war” of competition until 1959, when the weekly bought out the daily and the two were merged together.

My guess is that sometime during those 10 years of competition, the Koffee Klatsch was launched. The name has a corny, faux German sound that seems appropriate to the era.

So a good guess would be that it started in about 1954 or so.

The idea was for the newspaper to invite the business community to come together for coffee and doughnuts at Christmastime. It was both a marketing tool and a community-building tool.

Over the years, the event’s venue has changed a number of times: The Home Café, Quaker Trace, the Portland Elks Lodge, what is now Jay Community Center and Arts Place are the locales that come to mind right away. There might have been others.

Somewhere along the line, someone had the idea of having a Koffee Klatsch in Dunkirk at the offices of The News and Sun as well.

And over the years, the event has evolved.

In the era of mom and pop retailers, the klatsch was essentially a gathering of newspaper advertisers. But these days, with corporate behemoths and distant decision-makers, it reaches a much broader base: Bank employees, dental office workers, government employees, police, street department workers and more.

So, what happens at a Koffee Klatsch? People drink coffee, eat a doughnut they won’t admit to later in the day and tell stories to one another.

Having poured coffee at a few dozen of these events, let me share a few memories:

—Pastor Mark Strietelmeier, now retired from Zion Lutheran Church in Portland, was a Koffee Klatsch regular. He and Cindy would come early and stay awhile. I always kidded him that he had enough caffeine in his system afterwards to go back to his study and draft a dozen sermons.

—Portland attorney John Coldren always asks for milk instead of coffee. After a few years of grumbling, we finally relented. If you prefer milk with your doughnut, you have John to thank.

—A few years back at the Dunkirk event, a guy came in I did not recognize. Then I heard him say, “When he hears my voice, he’ll give me a hug.” He was right. It was my old buddy John T. Phillips — sometime investigator for the prosecutor’s office, sometime deputy sheriff, sometime banker, sometime glass factory worker — whom I had not seen in a decade.

—It’s always interesting to watch political foes or business competitors sit across from one another at the event. There’s something about a free cup of coffee and — even better — a free doughnut that wipes away the tension and the sense of confrontation.

—There are always stories to be shared. A couple weeks back at the Dunkirk Klatsch, I had a good visit with “The Anns.” That would be Ann Kesler and Ann Beeson, two remarkable, witty and charming retired school teachers. Ann Kesler had been married to my good friend, the late Virgal Kesler. Ann Beeson had been married to teacher Fred Beeson, whom I will always regret not knowing as well as I would have liked.

Over coffee — and, yes, a doughnut — the two started sharing stories I’d never heard.

Ann Kesler told of a recent ride on a Delta Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Denver when her son Eric, a commercial pilot with 30 years of experience, was at the controls. And Ann Beeson recounted a flight that her husband Fred had taken with a 4-year-old Eric Kesler to Muncie, after which little Eric decided then and there on his career path. 

The whole thing fit together. It connected.

And that’s what events like the Koffee Klatsch at Arts Place and the one at The News and Sun do. They connect us.

That sounds like a very worthy tradition.