Today is National Donut Day. The Salvation Army established the first Friday in June as National Donut Day in 1938 to honor the role of “Donut Lassies,” female volunteers who boosted morale for American soldiers during World War I. The special day, initially celebrated in Chicago, served as a fundraiser for the organization’s military support programs.
Today is also a day for Estes Park to dunk a donut in honor of Franz Dieter d’Alquen, the founder of Estes Park’s beloved Donut Haus, who died last week in Loveland. He was 87.
When we came to Estes Park on family vacations and stayed with my husband’s parents, Walt and Natalie Brown, my father-in-law would always take one or two of his grandkids to make a Donut Haus run, usually the first morning after we arrived. The donut buying trip was a beloved ritual, and our five kids called the shop “Papa’s Donut Place,” but Estes locals knew it as “Dieter’s Donuts.”
Like a prideful hunting party returning with trophies of their kill, our children would return with a large box filled with an assortment of donuts, some covered in glaze, others frosted, a few with sprinkles.
Sometimes the kids would squabble over getting the donut of their choice, but things usually worked out without too many sibling arguments.
My favorites were always a cake donut with chocolate frosting, but others in our tribe liked the long johns filled with Bavarian cream, or the ones coated in sugar or coconut, or stuffed with red jelly.
The donuts were light and fluffy and fragrant with yeast and sweetness. They tasted like a bite of heaven and never lasted long.
The Donut Haus sat on a little island at the bend in the road on Moraine Avenue in front of the Rainbow Slide. Getting into the itty-bitty parking lot was dangerous, but not as dangerous as trying to get back onto Moraine Avenue, or Spur 66 as locals called it back then. And on a weekend morning, in the summer during tourist season, navigating that parking lot was no mean feat.
If you did not get to the Donut Haus before 9:30 a.m., you might not get a full dozen, let alone the type of donuts you wanted. The place was so popular that people queued up, and the line flowed out the door of the little yellow building, which was decorated with painted plywood cutouts of tulips in flowerpots.
The building also sported a logo of a pitched roof over a donut shape with the words DONUT HAUS. There was a bit of a space between the words DO and NUT and my kids would laugh and pronounce the name as if the words were “DO NUT HOUSE.”
The Donut Haus opened in 1975 in a former Phillips 66 gas station. d’Alquen, a German immigrant who came to the U.S. in April 1959 when he was 21, had apprenticed in Germany as a baker and then worked at Armin’s Bakery in the St. Louis area before serving in the U.S. Army as a baker and becoming a U.S. citizen.
He met and married Linda Lee Whaley in Missouri. The couple had a son, Franz Dieter d’Alquen, Jr. in 1965 and moved to Estes Park in 1975. They divorced in October 1978, and Linda died in 1984. In 2014, Franz, Jr., a graduate of Estes Park High School, died in an explosion while working aboard the Alaska Ocean, a large fishing trawler in the Bering Sea.
D’Alquen operated the Donut Haus until 1997, when he sold it to Lois Marth and May Ann Domico, who then sold it in 2008 to sisters Diane and Karen Stovall and Katy Sampson. In 2019, the Colorado Department of Transportation bought the property, valued at the time by the Larimer County assessor at $284,500, in preparation for the construction of a roundabout.
Ironically, motorists now go round and round in a giant donut-shaped traffic circle where the Donut Haus once stood. The area is part of the Town’s infamous Downtown Estes Loop, a controversial $42 million road project finally completed in 2024.
Today, Donut Haus donuts, baked in Loveland, are sold at the Tiny Town Eagle Stop Sinclair at 860 Moraine Ave. Marth and Domico opened the Loveland Donut Haus in the Palmer Gardens Shopping Center in December 2003 and moved the operation to its present location in the Orchards Shopping Center in 2012.
Today, Donut Haus produces 1.25 million donuts a year and supplies donuts wholesale to many Front Range businesses in northern Colorado. The menu of donuts available in Estes includes cake and raised donuts, various breakfast rolls, kuchen, cinnamon bread, and breakfast burritos.
Dieter always had a smile for me. Don’t think he would have known me. maybe just the way he was. Thanks for the remembrance. B. Aiken