Morning Joe

Morning Joe

Jules Bosch

“Well, now they’ve stolen our sugar.”

The gentleman making the matter-of-fact comment was Jack, our team leader. A balding, broad-shouldered, World War II Navy veteran, he lamented that there would be no sugar for our morning coffee, which he always prepared. (Essentially, he boiled water for our instant coffee, but he took the chore seriously.)

It was the Spring of 1969, ten years before the Islamic Revolution, and the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, the last Iranian monarch, had a strategic partnership with the USA, acting as a key Cold War ally. I was a young engineer working for Philco-Ford, an American corporation based in eastern Pennsylvania. I had already spent four years working for Philco in Southeast Asia on US Defense Communications Agency (DCA) projects, with a year away to attend graduate school. And at the beginning of 1969, I was transferred from Bangkok to our engineering office in Teheran, to support a new project named “Peace Ruby.”

Our 5-man team was on a rugged mountaintop in southern Iran, near the city of Bandar Abbas. Our mission was to install temporary communication equipment on specific Persian pinnacles and communicate with similar installations on corresponding summits, all the while recording signal quality. Eventually, the data collected from these surveys would be analyzed to determine the most effective locations in Iran for constructing a series of radar stations.

Weeks earlier, as the colder winter months were ending, we had prepared for our two-month field trip, with an extensive list of equipment we needed for the testing. We also had a long list of items we might need to survive, including first-aid kits, sanitation supplies, cigarettes, and other necessities. And near the top of the list were coffee, sugar, and non-dairy creamers. Our contract with the DCA allowed us to visit the US Embassy post exchange, where we could purchase these essentials.

Once we reached one of the peaks to be studied, we would hire local laborers to help us move our equipment to the mountaintop and assist with setting it up. The bulky equipment included communication and electrical cables, a gas-fired power generator, and an 8-foot parabolic antenna. And a six-by-six radio cubicle, in which a technician would sit to monitor and record radio signals. Working in 8-hour shifts, we collected data 24 hours a day. After gathering a week’s worth of data, we moved on to the next assigned peak and repeated the process.

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I most remember our effort near Jask, a port city at the southern tip of Iran on the Gulf of Oman. The area was so isolated that we had to hire prisoners (with only minor offenses) from the local jail to help with the setup.

And one morning, I was walking with another team member in the streets of Jask when two women came out of a bakery. Both were carrying large bags filled with bread. They were dressed in traditional Persian garb—long black, cloak-like veils worn over regular clothes, covering the body from head to toe. And black masks covering their faces. As they turned from the bakery, we were face-to-face just 10 feet apart. They were shocked to see foreigners up close and personal, so shocked that they screamed, dropped the bags of bread, and fled in the opposite direction. I, too, was shocked as I had yet to encounter Persian women wearing large, rigid leather masks covering the forehead, nose, and area above the mouth in a V-shaped wedge. I later learned that these were Bandari women, meaning ‘people of the port.” And the masks were a culturally significant item of clothing throughout the Hormozgan province.

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It wasn’t long before we discovered that the laborers were pilfering our sugar and non-dairy creamer. Sugar was hard to come by on the Persian market and expensive. Further, the laborers considered the non-dairy creamer a milk substitute. Dairy farming in Iran did not exist back then, as the soft grass needed to feed grazing cows would not grow under the harsh sun and aridity of the country. In Iran, any milk had to be imported from Europe. It was said that if the Shah had provided each child in Iran with a pint of milk per day, he would have been king forever.

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I never drank coffee until I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri. Back then, in 1967, I shared an apartment with two other grad students. As I entered my last semester, I struggled to complete my thesis—there just wasn’t enough time—and I feared I would have to extend my stay at Columbia for another semester in order to graduate. Early each evening, my two apartment mates would brew a pot of coffee, and, at their suggestion, to gain a few more hours of productive time, I began to drink a cup or two. The caffeine-induced stimulation I subsequently experienced kept me up for hours, giving me the extra time I needed to complete my thesis, and I graduated as planned. And coffee had become a daily habit.

I always drank my coffee with cream and sugar. But now, at daybreak on an isolated mountain without sugar or a liquid creamer, one either drank his morning joe, as Jack called it, black or did not drink coffee at all. The term “Morning Joe” is believed to have originated in the Navy. According to the Internet, “The Navy has been a major consumer of coffee, and it is believed that the term was popularized during World War I when soldiers would refer to their morning coffee as a ‘cup of Joe.’ This theory is supported by the fact that the Navy's secretary at the time was Josephus ‘Joe’ Daniels, who famously banned alcohol on ships.”

Regardless, the laborers did not bother to make off with our joe—their Persian brew was superior to our milder, sometimes flatter instant coffee—a fact I would soon, surprisingly, learn. Within a few days, however, I “surrendered” and began drinking my coffee black. With each cup, I softened my displeasure with visions of being back in our home office, where I could add as much cream and sugar as I wanted to a cup of coffee.

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Soon enough, we completed our technical project and returned to Teheran. As I prepared my first cup of coffee on my first morning back in the office, thoughts of drinking black coffee were eclipsed by the joy of adding cream and sugar to my cup. “Aaah!” My first sip in more than two months—WAIT! What’s happening? The taste’s all wrong—IT’S TOO SWEET! Sugar doesn’t go bad, does it? It’s got to be the non-dairy creamer—it must be out of date—but it wasn’t.

As I spat my first, much-anticipated mouthful of coffee into the sink, I quickly realized that, in fact, the taste was as I remembered, but I could no longer enjoy the cloying sweetness. My taste buds had been compromised on one of those Iranian summits. I emptied my coffee cup and poured myself a fresh one—black.

Once it was apparent that I was now drinking my coffee sans cream and sugar, our fellow Persian engineers invited me to share in their traditional, rich, aromatic brew. And my morning joe has been black ever since.