Seventy-five-year-old Dennis Bambauer has been delivering pastries on Election Day to the Shasta County clerk’s office for nearly half a century.
Northern California’s online news magazine, anewscafe.com, says County Clerk Cathy Darling may not be able to predict the election results, but she knows Bambauer will show up early in the day in his wheel-chair with treats for the staff.
Bambauer got the idea while helping his wife, Sherrill, deliver her precinct’s ballots to the county election department, where the workers kept counting all night. Sherrill Bambauer said, “We sort of felt sorry for them, and I guess that’s what started us with delivering the donuts originally. Now it has become tradition.”
In 1944, the U.S. government confined Bambauer, a 7-year-old Japanese-American orphan, for two years in the Manzanar Internment Camp in Independence, Calif. Bambauer told the Northern California e-magazine his mother was Japanese. He said, “It was decided that any individual who had any degree of Japanese blood were national enemies … At 7 (year of age) I was considered an enemy of the state, and incarcerated.”
Before retiring in Redding, Bambauer was a staff consultant to several counties for the California Teachers Association.
Source: Chamberlain, Doni. "Man's 45-Year Tradition Brings Treats, Inspiration, to Election Office." A News Cafe: Northern California's Premier Online News Magazine. Ed. Doni Chamberlain. 7 June 2016. Web. 21 June 2016.
