The Coffee Boys and the Packard Food Truck

In the spring of 1956, Bruce Carlson ’58 and I were talking about what the summer ahead might hold. We needed income, and the idea of a food truck came to mind. Beloit had an industrial area with a number of companies, and we thought there might be an opportunity to sell coffee, rolls, and sandwiches to workers in the morning. Although we both had cars, we knew that serving coffee out of the trunk of a car wasn’t going to work. My two older brothers were working as distributors of funeral cars and ambulances in Chicago, and I put the arm on them. They had just delivered an order of ambulances to the City of Chicago and had a couple of trade-ins, one of which was a rare, almost pristine, 1942 Packard Civil Defense ambulance with twin spotlights and a side-mounted spare tire — what a vehicle! After some further arm twisting, my brothers agreed to paint the fire department red over in white.

Our next challenge was capital to get started. Both of us had jobs but no savings. We prepared a simple business plan and, with Bruce leading the way, secured an appointment with the president of the Beloit State Bank. We walked out the door with a loan for a couple hundred dollars, a significant amount. Things were less formal then.

I had worked at Ayres Cafe on Main Street, washing glasses and cleaning and waxing the restaurant floor after hours, and we were able to buy a used six-gallon gas-fired coffeemaker from Mrs. Ayers. Rather than the usual cardboard coffee cups, we were determined to upgrade and bought plastic-coated cups. We contacted a restaurant supply house and, after a taste test, purchased their top restaurant grade of coffee. We contracted with a commercial baking company for fresh rolls and doughnuts to be delivered each morning. Sandwiches we made ourselves, keeping them clean and fresh in plastic bags we sealed by passing them over an open flame on the stove. Nimble fingers we had to have.

Food truck custom interior.
Credit: Glenn Martin ’57Right after finals that spring, we brought the Packard up from Chicago. We lived in the Beta House at 810 College Street that summer, and we were able to store cases of pop in the kitchen and park the Packard right outside the back door. We removed the front bench seat and replaced it with a driver’s seat from another ambulance, leaving an open area on the passenger side to store food and pop. In the back, we made a wooden rack with drawers to hold sweet rolls and sandwiches. We hooked up two propane tanks behind the front seat to heat the coffee pot, and our Coffee Boy operation was ready for business.

We called on a number of businesses to secure times and agreements and quickly found more. We added to our clients the construction crew that was building the bridge over the Rock River north of the college. We went to evening baseball games and set up in the parking lot. These were great times. We were also asked to provide food and beverages at several farm auctions, so we bought a flat-top grill for making hamburgers. We used carnival coin dispensers on our belts to make change and got proficient at calculating prices and making change quickly. Speed was critical. One of our innovations was using plastic ketchup and mustard squeeze bottles for dispensing cream. The look on the face of a new customer seeing us grab the ketchup bottle and hold it over his coffee was priceless.

One memorable gig that summer was a street party in downtown Beloit. It was a warm night, and there was music and dancing in the street. We had a horse trough full of ice and pop, and we were the only game in town. The ice melted, and although we were able to get another truckload of pop, we didn’t have any more ice. By the end of the evening, we were dropping the warm bottles in one end of the trough and fishing them out at the other, probably without cooling them one bit. I don’t know how much pop we sold that night, but both the Coca-Cola dealer and the Pepsi-Cola dealer competed for our business from then on.

The summer passed by with us working the food truck in the mornings. I worked nights across the river at the 88 Tavern making pizza, and Bruce had a job as an announcer and disc jockey at the Beloit radio station. Occasionally we’d borrow a houseboat from Willie Anspach ’58 and spend an afternoon cruising up and down the Rock River, drinking cheap beer.

Baker's Motel matchbook circa 1957.As fall approached, we needed to find a new place to live. We met with Mr. Baker of Baker’s Motel on Riverside Drive. He smoked and somehow kept the cigarette in his mouth until the ash was over an inch long. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying because you tended to focus on that ash, watching and waiting for it to drop on his shirt. He had winterized several of his motel cabins, and we rented one on the Rock River that suited our needs. We borrowed a set of bunkbeds from Haven Hall, bought some well-used furniture, and we were in business.

Using redwood boards we had liberated from the piles of lumber for the new student union, we built a bookcase to hold a 20-gallon fish tank, a large record collection (thanks to Bruce and his job at the radio station), a record player, and a modest collection of alcohol. This bookcase was eventually sold to another fraternity brother who used it for a year or two and then sold it to another one. It’s probably still in service somewhere out there.

One day, Bruce went to the dog pound and came back with a brown dog. For $2.50, we’d acquired a mascot. We named her Wooglin, after the Beta Theta Pi patron saint. Woogie was a good dog and slept at the foot of my bed on the bottom bunk. I couldn’t get up in the morning until I was able to get her off the bed. But she was nice and warm on my feet.

Bruce and I arranged our class schedules to have morning classes on alternate days, so we were able to keep the business running. Whoever had classes got up first, made the coffee, and got things ready. We kept the hot water heater in the cabin turned up to the highest setting, and used the extremely hot water to make the morning’s coffee. The Packard was absolutely reliable about starting, even in the bitter cold of winter, as long as we remembered to plug in the dipstick heater to warm the heavyweight oil in the old straight-eight engine. It started every day that winter outside the little motel cottage on the river. We got a ticket once for speeding and went to traffic court. We showed the judge a picture of the Packard and convinced him that it couldn’t really go that fast. When he stopped laughing, he dismissed the ticket.

During the cold weather, we added another propane-fired grill in the back with a metal box on top of it stocked with Mrs. Ayres’ chili packaged in small containers. It was good chili and a good seller. One way we added to our income was having customers toss a coin for double or nothing on their purchase. We were flipping wholesale and they were flipping retail. All we had to do was win half of the time to increase our income.

Our bookkeeping was casual. All the money beyond what we needed for the coin changers went into a cigar box. When we needed cash to buy supplies, we took money out. When either of us needed some money, we just took what we needed. We didn’t bother keeping track. One high point was when Dun & Bradstreet called for information so that they could rate our business. We laughed, because we were such a nickel and dime operation (literally). We did get a credit rating, but we didn’t much care. We had already established credit where we needed it and paid cash for everything else.

We got a call one day from a man in town asking if we wanted to take over a doughnut business. He had a small shop with a route of stores that stocked his doughnuts, and he offered to turn over the business to us with the rent for the shop based on the amount of doughnut mix that we used. There was a doughnut-making machine that was fairly simple to operate, and we hired two fraternity brothers, Jim Clayton ’59 and Steve George ’59, to run the shop and make the doughnuts. Bruce convinced Edna Walters, the dietitian at the Commons, to buy a goodly supply of frosted doughnuts. There was only one way to frost them and that was by hand, one at a time. The shop was small, with limited counter space, and we ended up with doughnuts and frosting all over the place. Within a week, we had tripled the business. Nevertheless at the end of two weeks, after adding up our actual costs and taking the doughnut-making machine apart to retrieve a dropped spoon, we decided to get out of the doughnut business.

As the school year started that fall, the temporary student union was operating out of the basement of Eaton Chapel and needed a supply of coffee. We were glad to oblige, but we didn’t have a coffee dispenser or the money to buy one. So we made a plywood box and put a hot plate inside with a switch on the outside of the box. We drilled out a five-gallon galvanized milk can and installed a spigot for the coffee. We would deliver the coffee first thing in the morning, and it would be fresh, hot, and good. As the day progressed, it would cool down, so you would turn on the switch to the hotplate. Then, when the coffee got too hot, you would turn the switch off. And so it went throughout the day. By afternoon, the coffee was cooked enough to take your stomach lining off. The next day, we’d start all over again.

With graduation coming up for me in June of 1957, we sold the whole operation to one of our customers, lock, stock, and Packard, for about what we had invested in it. We left Mr. Baker on good terms, until he discovered that we had filled a good-sized wooden garbage box outside the cabin with hundreds of pounds of used coffee grounds. After graduation, I joined my brothers in the funeral car and ambulance business in Chicago, eventually going into insurance sales, and later into real estate. Bruce and two other fraternity brothers, Lloyd Morgan ’58 and George Dodge ’58, bought a pickup truck and drove it to Alaska for the summer. Bruce later got a masters and a doctorate, taught at Beloit College for a while, and has owned several businesses including a white tablecloth restaurant in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Thanks to the success of the food truck, we were interviewed by the local radio station and pictured in the Beloit Daily News. We paid for that year of college entirely out of our Coffee Boy operation. Part of our savings was eating leftover sandwiches and sweet rolls. Thereafter, I never could face French doughnuts.

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Glenn Martin ’57 and Roberta “Bobbe” Bruns Martin ’59Glenn Martin ’57 passed away on Jan. 6, 2025.

He was born in Chicago and spent much of his life in the area, before relocating to St. Charles County, Missouri, with his wife, Roberta “Bobbe” Bruns Martin ’59.

Glenn is remembered for his creativity, zest for life, and passion for art and music.