My Mom was a great scratch baker, but we did get the occasional bakery treat when I was growing up — especially if we begged enough as we were walking by the shop!
To this day, I think bakeries are the best-smelling places around. I find that magical combination of spicy ginger, sweet cookies and cakes, and the warm, yeasty smell of baking bread positively intoxicating, and I’m not alone.
My friend Dan Pelletier looks back fondly on his first visits to Henri’s Bakery & Deli in Buckhead. “The smell on entering was worth the trip, regardless of what I purchased,” he said.
However, for those of us who grew up in Athens or attended the University of Georgia, A&A Bakery, located downtown for decades, was, as Frazier Moore put it: “the best-smelling spot on God’s green earth. … Like many or most stores in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was not equipped with AC. So, in good weather the screened front door and open windows and ceiling fans within made sure the heavenly bouquet spread far and wide.”
Nancy Garner Cerrato agreed: “You could smell the bakery long before you walked in the door.” And, added Susan Marie Booth Beck, “I can still smell the delicious fragrances wafting through the air as you walked down Lumpkin Street past the bank and on toward the bakery. If you weren’t hungry before going past that area, you were as soon as the aromas hit your senses! What a fond memory of growing up in Athens, Georgia, in the ’50s and ’60s!”
“Just walking into the smell made us all happy,” Brenda McKinnon Horton said.
At certain hours, Athens probably had the best-smelling downtown around, because, in addition to A&A, there was the Benson’s Bakery plant, where they made sliced sandwich loaves sold in local grocery stores.
Roslyn Marlow Wise worked at the nearby Athens Newspapers office and got off work around 9 p.m. “I remember walking out of the newspaper building and being wrapped in the heavenly aroma of bread baking at Bensons,” she said.
(Benson’s went out of the bread business decades ago, but it still makes fruitcakes and other treats in a plant in Bogart, a little town near Athens. “You can always tell when Benson’s is running the cinnamon roll line,” said Steven Brown, and Wayne Turner said you also can smell Benson’s cakes baking, “especially around Christmas time.”)
Lee Catoe’s grandparents were the owners of A&A, and he worked there from around 1973 until 1987. “Early in the morning,” he recalled, “if you walked outside in downtown Athens (I mean before sunrise), the air smelled like fresh baked goods. … That stillness of the morning filled with that smell will never leave me.”
Sweet memories involving bakeries, especially from childhood, seem to be common. I posted a couple of queries about favorite bakeries in social media groups and received nearly 500 responses.
For me, the earliest bakery memories are from A&A, which originally stood for Arnold and Abney. (I was told we somehow were related to one of those families through my paternal grandmother.) A&A was founded in 1897 and finally closed on New Year’s Eve 1990.
By the time I was around, the bakery was owned by the Stone family, which ran it for nearly 50 years, and the first doughnuts I ever had were some of their glazed beauties that Dad used to bring home — left over from the break room at the C&S Bank branch he managed. In fact, many businesses in town, especially those in the downtown area, bought doughnuts, pastries and other treats at A&A for their employees’ coffee breaks.
“Oh, I have sweet memories of the A&A Bakery!” said Reginald Whitehead. “They had the most mouthwatering doughnuts! My favorite was the glazed, lemon-filled doughnuts. In the ’50s I would leave the Georgia Theatre, where my mother worked the ticket and concession booth, and get doughnuts. The owners were the nicest people, and their doughnuts were always fresh. They are the very reason why I love glazed doughnuts with lemon filling to this very day!”
Richard Garnett remembers he and his father getting up very early “and we would drive down to A&A and get hot doughnuts and bread. We would eat those hot doughnuts and they would literally melt in your mouth. They used lard back then. We would take home some to my ma and sister. Everybody screams about Krispy Kreme now, but they are nothing compared to fresh A&As.”
Boys playing sports at the YMCA nearby would walk over and get a treat afterward, retired Atlanta sportscaster Bill Hartman recalled. Day-old doughnuts were sold for a penny each and Louis Bailey remembers getting a bag of them. “A lot of pastry for very little money.”
While A&A’s doughnuts were extremely popular, so was just about everything else the bakery made. Many families that attended church in the vicinity of downtown Athens swung by A&A after services on Sunday mornings to pick up some treats, and it wasn’t uncommon for kids to skip out on Sunday school to sneak over there.
Charles Myers, whose father was the minister at First United Methodist, recalled he “used to dash over there between Sunday school and church to spend my tithing money on a bag full of cinnamon doughnuts. I’d sit in the farthest corner of the church balcony and gobble them down while my father preached.”
Quinton Jackson remembers that, after waiting in the cold to see the Burney-Harris High School band in the Athens Christmas parade, “my dad would buy us glazed doughnuts and cinnamon buns to take home.”
A&A was popular at UGA, too. My wife Leslie remembers going there for brownies after she started at the university, and A&A cheese straws were a sorority and fraternity mainstay. Michael Simpson remembers stopping by on his way to class for the “best cinnamon roll I ever tasted. Often the rolls were still warm. Delicious beyond belief.”
And Ann Tillman Carswell said girls in her dorm “would make a last-minute dash to A&A, raincoats over our pajamas, for a snack, usually making it back to the dorm, beating curfew, by a couple of minutes. I loved their corn muffins!”
Even after we had graduated, when we were back in town visiting my family, Leslie and I would drop by A&A for some of their delicious, fragrant gingerbread men. As Annette Feather recalled, “Nobody could bake gingerbread men like they could. My daughter knew she had done something extra special when I would bring them home to her.”
Larry Friedman said that when he was at UGA in the mid-’70s, A&A’s gingerbread “was my weakness. Every Friday, following my last class, I would stop in for some and tote them up the hill to Russell Hall.”
And Sis Budd Bettress recalled that, as a child, “I loved the gingerbread men — had to immediately bite off a leg, so they wouldn’t run away!”
A&A also was the local go-to spot for those needing cakes for birthdays. Many a little girl in Athens was feted with A&A’s legendary doll cakes, which featured a real doll in the middle, with the cake and icing shaped and decorated to look like a hoop-skirted ball gown. Helen Barrett Penter thinks they were called Jenni Doll cakes. All the girls in her family got them. Cami Fowler got one for her birthday in 1978. “I have remembered it all this time,” she said. Added Peggy Thrasher Law, who also got a doll cake: “It is such a sweet memory!”
It wasn’t just little girls who got A&A birthday cakes, though. Linda Melton Jones remembers that when she was celebrating her 21st birthday at GiGi’s, an Italian restaurant in Athens, “the waitress was a friend and she called A&A Bakery for a birthday cake and then sent a taxi cab to get it.”
A lot of kids also got “number” birthday cakes from A&A, which were shaped like the numeral for the celebrant’s age, and cakes with UGA football decorations were popular with little boys. Heart-shaped cakes were made for Valentine’s Day.
A&A also did a huge business in wedding cakes for a few generations of Athens brides. Melissa Vickers, whose grandfather, Robbie Lee Stone, ran A&A, remembered him baking her own wedding cake, “decorated by my grandmother, whose icing roses were like I’ve never seen before or since.”
The bakery also did special occasion cakes, such as the five-tiered masterpiece (complete with the famous arch on top) that they baked for the UGA Alumni Society’s 150th birthday in 1984. “My Dad and I worked on that,” Lee Catoe recalled.
Added Vickers: “That UGA birthday cake was a feat of engineering. I remember Sonny (Papa’s son-in-law) sweating bullets about it. That much cake weighs a ton, so there had to be structural supports embedded in all the lower layers. Just trying to get it delivered was a nightmare. I don’t remember if they finished putting it together on-site or not. I’m guessing at least the candles were added.”
And Vickers, who helped make gingerbread men during the summer and on Christmas break when she was growing up, recalled that her grandfather “made cakes that appeared in one of Kenny Rogers’ ‘Gambler’ movies. … There’s a scene that a cake gets thrown at somebody or somebody falls into it. A&A had to make three absolutely identical cakes for multiple shots and retakes!”
Besides cakes, A&A was known for its chocolate and lemon chess pies, Boston cream pies, cheese Danish, frosted cake squares, chocolate eclairs, French coconut pies, sweet potato pies, honey buns, German chocolate bars, Chinese drops (like a wedding cookie), fudgies (similar to brownie bites), red and green sugar holiday cookies (the red were Santas and the green were Christmas trees), lady fingers, cream horns, petits fours and long johns (a long doughnut topped with caramel or cake icing).
Vanessa Briscoe Hay, of the well-known Athens band Pylon, said she “loved the Hello Dolly bars and gingerbread men.” (The former were caramelized bars containing graham cracker, pecans, chocolate morsels and flaked coconut.)
When Kathy Hardeman was a student teacher, she took a class on a field trip to A&A. “We saw them make lady fingers,” she said. “Tons of butter went into each one!”
Ironically, a notable feature of A&A was a large set of grocery scales up front, where customers frequently weighed themselves before loading up. Ken O’Barr, whose father worked at A&A, recalled one time when he was about 5 years old, “I went in with my mom and we took turns getting on the stand-up grocery scale to weigh ourselves. My mom weighed 100 pounds. When that scale went all the way to 100, I absolutely freaked out and ran all over the store telling everyone, “My mom weighs 100 pounds!” because I thought that was outrageous. The customers got a good laugh.”
The downtown bakery wasn’t just about sweets, either. “The main thing I remember about A&A,” Suzanne Carter said, “was salt-rising bread. My grandmother and our entire family absolutely loved it. It made delicious toast with butter and jam — the perfect combination of slightly salty bread with the sweetness of the jelly.” Several other people also mentioned the salt-rising bread.
In addition, A&A made the extra-large buns for the huge Mother Burger at Herbie’s, an all-night Athens restaurant.
A&A owner Stone had gotten his start at age 10 as a delivery boy on a horse-drawn wagon for Benson’s, where he eventually became vice president and bread foreman. After he bought A&A, he ran it for four decades until he had a stroke and had to retire in 1981, when his daughter and son-in-law, Sonny and Priscilla Stone Catoe, took it over.
Vickers said her grandfather, whom she called Papa, “managed to keep the bakery up and running even during sugar rationing days during WWII. Not sure how he managed, but he was smart enough and creative enough to work around any rationing limitations.”
And, she remembered, “Papa used to love to go visit other bakeries when he’d go out of town. I went with him on a few of those visits. He’d sample the bread and chat with the owners. He could identify what was in the bread — and what was lacking.”
Her cousin, Debra Stone Storey Davis, added that their grandfather “was always looking for any improvements he could make to his doughnuts.”
Vickers’ favorites were A&A’s doughnuts (“kinda like Krispy Kremes, but those pale in comparison”) and the brownies. But, she said, “I also loved to get the cake scraps that the icers would trim off the edges and off the top to create flat surfaces. I’d get those and add my own squirts of icing from the tubes they used to decorate with.”
Everyone pitched in at the family business. “I learned to make icing roses for cakes as a child, sitting on a tall stool next to my grandmother,” Debra Davis recalled.
Closer to where I grew up, in Athens’ Five Points district, another bakery, Stone’s Ideal, was run by Herschel Stone, brother of A&A’s Robbie Lee Stone.
Betz Lowery Tillitski remembers her favorites there were lady locks (pastry shells filled with cream filling, also known as cream horns), while her sister preferred their chocolate bonbons.
Several others agreed with her. Nita Woods Walls Norton thought Stone’s had the “best cream horns ever.”
And Glenda Greenhaw, who lived one house up from the bakery on Lumpkin Street, remembered that, at Halloween, “they gave doughnuts to trick-or-treaters. Their cinnamon buns were the best I have ever had. They had raisins in them.”
Several people also mentioned the Five Points bakery’s butter crisp rolls, which Leon Galis said “were to die for. Considering how many I ate (the butter-soaked bottoms first), it’s a wonder I’m still alive.”
Stone’s closed around the end of 1964, but, Tillitski said, “I never forgot that tiny, warm and inviting shop.”
When Stone’s closed, my brothers and I were very sad, but then some signs went up in the window announcing a grand opening for a new bakery. We talked Mom into sending me to get a treat for dessert. When I got there, the door was locked, so I knocked, and someone who looked like a sleepy college student answered. He asked me what I wanted. I told him I was there for the bakery. He smirked and said, “That was a joke.” It had turned into a student apartment. I wasn’t amused.
A few years later, Beechwood Bakery opened in the Athens shopping center of the same name. It also was known for its cream horns, but my main memory of it is from my freshman year at UGA, when I was delivering the local morning paper in the adjacent neighborhood. I had a flat tire and didn’t have a jack, so I hiked back to the bakery, which was the only place open at that early hour. They let me call Dad for help.
I always thought of that, years later, when Dunkin ran TV ads about its employees rising before the sun, with the tag line “Time to make the doughnuts!”
After I had graduated from UGA, I started dating Leslie, who still had a couple of quarters to go, so I spent a lot of time in Athens, even though I lived and worked in Atlanta. A couple of blocks from Leslie’s apartment, I spotted a new German bakery called Black Forest that had opened in a former gas station in the Normaltown area, across the street from the U.S. Navy Supply Corps School (now UGA’s health sciences campus). I remember us going there — the first time I ever had pralines!
But what the bakery really was known for was the cake that shared its name, as well as its apple fritters, apricot coffee cake, cheese Danish, cookies with red and green sprinkles on the edge, elephant ears and cinnamon sugar doughnuts on Saturday mornings. The latter was a particular favorite of Jack Bauerle, now UGA’s retired swimming coach.
And, recalled Nancy Bunker Bowen, “at Christmas, Black Forest made stollen just like my grandmother’s.” Similarly, Amy Green said that when Aldi gets its German specialties in for the holidays, her mind “wanders back” to Black Forest Bakery.
T. Patton Biddle, who used to stop by the shop while walking to work, was charmed by the family’s German accents. “I always left there with a warm feeling in my heart and another in my belly.”
Ingrid Muendlein Moody, daughter of Walter Muendlein, who ran Black Forest, thinks it was the best bakery in town. But, she added, “I’m not going to lie. My dad made a yellow cake, and A&A made a white cake.” She preferred latter, “because it was so sweet.”
Black Forest holds a special place in Ursula Muendlein Tolbert’s heart, too. She is Walter’s middle daughter and, she said, “I was by his side, helping run the bakery until I graduated from UGA in 1992.” She added: “It’s impressive that my dad, who turned 90 in March, still enjoys baking at home occasionally.”
Black Forest eventually moved just a few doors down the street and was in business there until the early 2000s, when it was replaced by another bakery called Ike and Jane’s (also gone now).
Once Leslie and I had married and settled in Decatur, we frequented the bakery in the nearby Rich’s department store at the old North DeKalb Mall, for birthday cakes and the like. Recalled our friend Mark Gunter: “They had the best chocolate-covered doughnuts and chocolate-covered, cream-filled eclairs. And their German chocolate cakes, too. And their coconut cake!” After Rich’s closed in 2005, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution responded to reader requests by publishing the recipe for that coconut cake.
Rodney Owen said he thought the Rich’s shops “were the best bakery in Atlanta during the 1970s.”
Sometimes, for lunch, I’d go by Le Gourmet bakery in the Peachtree Battle shopping center, because they had great sandwiches. I remember one day, in the early 1990s, I stood in line there behind pitcher Tom Glavine of the Braves, then one of the biggest stars in baseball. I was impressed that, while he was making up his mind, he allowed other customers to go in front of him.
For a few years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a Cookies & Company Cafe in downtown Athens, known for its soft cinnamon toast cookies and its blueberry muffins. The kids and I sometimes patronized it on trips to see my parents.
About 15 years ago, we discovered Southern Sweets, which is located in a warehouse district near Decatur. That bakery’s old fashion chocolate cake (which actually turns out to be vegan!) has graced quite a few family birthday celebrations, and its cinnamon-spiced rustic apple pie, made with Granny Smiths, is sublime. They make a great grilled cheese sandwich, too.
Also, Leslie and our daughter Olivia are longtime fans of Alon’s in Atlanta’s Morningside area. When Olivia recently was visiting from North Carolina, they stopped by Alon’s and brought home a bag full of treats, including croissants, shokolina cake (a brownie topped with chocolate mousse and a disc of dark chocolate, dark and milk chocolate cream dollops and hazelnut chocolate crumble), a tiramisu torte and a kouign-amann (a sweet pastry made with multiple layers of laminated dough).
And on a recent visit to my hometown, I stopped by Independent Baking Co. in Five Points, known primarily for its breads and pastries. The bakery uses all organic flours for its breads, and it mills much of its own flour in-house using two stone mills. I brought back several varieties of bread, including a fantastic French country loaf that was especially good toasted.
Meanwhile, back around the holidays, Leslie had ordered some chocolate chunk cookies for a visit by our son Bill and his family. Our granddaughter Nora wasn’t yet 3 years old at the time, and we gave her half of one of the treats. It was her very first chocolate cookie (mostly, she’d had vanilla wafers). She was eating it when Jenny, her mom, said to her, “You’re eating your cookie!” Nora corrected her: “Chocolate cookie.”
I think next time they visit us, we’re going to have to go to a bakery and let Nora make some sweet childhood memories of her own.
Bill King
Thanks to all my friends who shared their bakery memories, plus all those folks on social media. Also, a special thank-you to Justin Kau of the Athens Regional Library Heritage Room, Jason Hasty of Hargrett Library and Richard M. Wiles of Branch Properties for their research assistance.
Quick Cuts With Bill King 