Family business is on a roll

Mornings on Dolliver Street in downtown Pismo Beach smell like hot cinnamon and fresh bread.

At Old West Cinnamon Rolls in this San Luis Obispo County town, the line stretches out the door on weekends but it moves quickly. In the open kitchen behind the register, one baker slathers a sheet of dough with yellow margarine while another rolls it around a flurry of cinnamon and sugar. In the oven, the toppings melt to form a glistening glaze that somehow avoids being gooey. On their own, the cinnamon rolls aren’t too sweet, though an optional smearing of cream cheese frosting will change that.

Unlike most cinnamon rolls made from pastry dough, which translate to tough and chewy rolls, these are prepared with a dough similar to dinner rolls. They’re soft and springy from the outer rim to the innermost coil. Why bread dough? Because before there was the Old West Cinnamon Roll Company, there was Old West Homebaked Bread Mix.

In the early 1970s, Betty Clemens needed a second career. After her husband was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she moved from Seattle to Shell Beach, which neighbors Pismo Beach. She’d been a teacher in Washington, but her credential wouldn’t transfer to California. “If I wanted to eat, I had to do something,” says Clemens, who’s now 88 and still visits the bakery regularly. “I didn’t have the time or money to go to college.”

Clemens had always baked bread for her four children, but with her daughter’s influence, she began adding what she called “hippie ingredients” to the recipe like wheat germ and soybeans. The children loved it. Clemens began selling her dinner roll baking mix in a few grocery stores followed by county and state fairs.

A few years into the dinner roll baking-mix business, Clemens was sitting in her booth at the Arizona State Fair with no customers and nothing to do. She bought some spices from a nearby booth and made a batch of cinnamon rolls. Good smells travel quickly, and before the fair’s end, she was charging 50 cents per cinnamon roll, compared to 25 cents for dinner rolls. By the end of the fair, Clemens realized that cinnamon rolls — not dinner rolls — were the family business.

“She wanted to own a factory. That was her childhood dream,” says Clemens’ youngest son, Joseph Parkhurst, who often accompanied his mother to the fairs in his teenage years. The family spent nearly a decade trying to figure out how to make the cinnamon rolls faster. “You never could meet the demand,” he remembers.

Eventually, they opened the bakery in Pismo Beach in 1981 with enough space and equipment to run efficiently.

Parkhurst now runs the bakery while older brother Jim manages the fairs. Old West Cinnamon Rolls still sell at numerous fairs across the country.

Even though he has been working with his mother since he was a kid, Parkhurst never saw himself making cinnamon rolls for a living. “I kept thinking I’ll just keep doing it until I find something else,” he says. “I kept thinking it’s temporary, and then realized it’s part of my psyche and my kids’ psyche. I couldn’t even imagine it not being part of the family.”

Those who can’t visit the Pismo Beach bakery can order the baking mix.

Parkhurst says the mix is the same one they use in the bakery, but home cooks should know that baking cinnamon rolls isn’t quick. “It’s laborintensive,” Parkhurst says. “That’s why cinnamon rolls are so popular, because we do take that time.”

Moreover, his bakers are experts. “If you concentrate on doing one thing and doing it really well,” he says, “chances are, if it’s something people like, you’re going to do well with it.” Old West Cinnamon Rolls: 861 Dolliver St., Pismo Beach. www.oldwestcinnamonrolls.com. To buy the mix, contact the company at (805) 773-1428 or email info@oldwestcinnamonrolls.com. Web orders are expected to be available soon.