The Marvel Coffee Club

Anyone who spends a few nanoseconds around me knows I like coffee. I also like my own coffee. Not so much the bean as how it’s brewed. My mom liked coffee too. She had an old-fashioned percolator –a 6-cupper– which I got pretty handy using. I started drinking coffee late, but in this case that was a good thing as I was old enough to be careful when washing the components. There were glass components—made at a time when the whole thing was so solidly made, you had to really try to bust it. When you did, the parts were all nearly lethal!

When I got my fabulous job at Marvel, keeping me infused with caffeine was an important part of the job. When the offices were down at 575 Madison, we had this mechanical terror to make thin brown water:

(L-R) Letterer Jack Morelli, Assistant Editor Lance Tooks and Stat-Man Robbie Carosella await the grinding, clanking and groaning coffee machine to cough up. Picture taken the last week of the Marvel offices on 57th Street & Madison Avenue.

This incredible device used a series of mechanical timing relays, complete with arms and levers, to place a coffee cup under a stream of instantly hot coffee-water. One had all the choices possible from ordinary hot water (to massage one’s feet), the ability to add different amounts of powdered white paint and the final miracle, tea.

If I hadn’t needed that machine as much I did, I would have enjoyed taking it apart to see what made it tick. And lurch. And buzz and click.

In a heartwarming display of corporate largesse, not too long after I started up, the 25-cent cuppa could be had for free. You hear me correctly: FREE. No money. The cost that one did pay, however, was the intake of assorted chemical dyes and powders that wrought havoc on one’s innards.

“Man of Action” Brown, they call me (not my wife or son). And I finally had to say, enough thin water coffee was enough. Mom was very progressive in her time, we had an electro-percolator contraption that we used for times when we needed more than 6 cups at a time. Holidays and such. She donated it to the cause.

I set up this little slice of heaven right between my partner-in-bromide, fellow stat-camera operator, the late Robbie Carosella’s office and mine. There was this amazing small refrigerator, that had apparently been running since 1960 and it showed no signs of giving up (in fact, it lasted well into the 387 park Ave days, 1983-4 at least, lurking on the floor of Executive Editor Tom DeFalco). The perfect place for milk and the perfect top for convivial chit-chat over making your coffee!

I am sympathetic to the coffee needs of man and woman. When asked, I gladly hand over a restorative cup to anyone, but happiest when it’s to my good chums!

Except when they all want cups of coffee. The electric perc only made 10 cups at a time. A crisis was brewing… I could no longer afford to keep this conga-line of sip-licants properly caffeinated. So I started The Coffee Club!

Okay—truth be told, it was Master Editor In Chief Jim Shooter who wandered back one day and asked for a cup. He pulled out two bucks and dropped them on the fridge. Wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Okay, I didn’t protest; I’m always happy to take cash from an Editor. And I believe I had to sneak out and get a fresh quart of milk just after. So that Shooter-oid two bucks was the first time I realized I didn’t have to go broke. Then the club.

I think I charged $3/week for unlimited coffee. Fixin’s too.

This pic of Creator, Writer, Editor Danny Fingeroth working his coffee over, is at an early point in the club evolution. The electric percolator, the tall shiny chrome thing, was only a 10-cupper. This coffee station was located right between the two stat-camera rooms. In fact that warning sign is in Robbie’s best signage font! That hand-made coffee cup was a birthday gift from former stat-man, Mark Rogan—he knew I was serious about coffee.

The coffee needs of the many outweighed the slow percolating time of the few—that device quickly proved inadequate.

I soon stepped up to the advanced rig you see below:

Ahhh… twin Mr. Coffees! Almost never without a cup for the 2 years the club ran, till we moved into larger offices. One that provided a free coffee machine. This is a pic taken around late 1980, judging from the lack of any wrinkles at all on young Jack Morelli’s face… Jack, a dear and close friend, Letterer Extraordinaire even when so young, was always at the ready for a cuppa! This well-lit image of my normally stygian office clearly shows how important coffee is to me. One inch to the left of this image was my stat camera. Thus my good right arm was always dealing with coffee!

A word about coffee! My mom used A&P Red Circle (“A&P” was a major super market chain for a long time, then it transmogrified into the much hipper “Food Emporium” – that worked for a while!) brand coffee for all her life. The A&P coffee concept was to sell the bean and you could grind it right there, as fresh as blazes and to whichever coarseness or fineness you desired. I tried that for a while at my little Marvel watering hole, but when I kid about being “poor but hard-working” (okay, one out of two was true), I emphasize the poor part. And I assure all you coffee-guzzler ex-clients, I ran the club at a bearable loss.

Utilizing the caffeine-o-scientific method, I ran through several makes of coffee and settled on Chock Full O’Nuts. It was far more economical than the small-ish bags of A&P beans too. I think I made my way through 3-4 2-lb. cans per week. (Whatever oddball weight they were, 26-ounce, 30-ounce—don’t remember!)

Finally—here is the trick to getting the best results out of your Mr. Coffee type machine. I roughly guessed at about 1,500 pots of coffee, so I can claim a production thoroughness. I like my coffee just strong enough to let one know it’s on duty and this is the method. Always work with a full load of water. I prefer 10-cuppers, so use 10-cups of water. I use to grind the bean a click above “Normal Perk.” NOT super-fine. The boiling water can’t get through the ground coffee—doubt me? Check the aftermath next time and see a dry spot right in the middle of the grounds.

To make certain that all your coffee is brewed, I put in 7 gently rounded (heaping then a slight tap on the inside of the can) tablespoons of coffee. Yep! 7 spoons of coffee to 10 cups of water. Just enough tooth but not too strong.

I am appalled when people who should know better use espresso dust in a Mr. Coffee-type device. That bean and fineness is intended for a specialized espresso-maker—one that works under pressure. Thus the longer time and atmospheric pressure of the Mr. Coffee method results in a too-strong and bitter coffee. The normal preparation for a cup of espresso is in a demi-tasse and uses steamed milk and sugar. That’s why the bean is extra strong—to punch through all that.

Drinking espresso coffee black is too much. You can’t drink a dozen cups of coffee per day made that way.

Flavored coffees? An abomination in the sight of the Lord. You want a candy bar, get a candy bar. Leave that coffee alone. I used to add enormous amounts of sugar and make my cups half-milk (hey, I was a child!) until a charismatic artist, one Peter Ledger, got me on a ketosis diet thingie. (That Bullpen character will be getting his own tribute page!) The first thing I had to do was give up sugar and milk. When I lost a frightening amount of weight and returned to eating, I greeted my bowl of sugar and milk container with a song on my lips! I even thought I’d reasonably return to my full-tilt sugar levels gradually. So I put in half the amount: 1-1/2 teaspoons. (I’d already cut down, also thanks to Peter—one day, we were talking about how much sugar I used. So, I put my 5-spoons of sugar in first! It was about a third of the cup! Hmmm. I knocked it down to 3-spoons!)

Much to my shock and horror, it tasted like plastic to me! (Don’t ask how I know.) It was easy to go straight to black coffee. Which is how I take it now—anywhere from 9-12 cups per day.