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At Laurel Dunkin' Donuts, Dee Slater serves up her own sweet spirituality

Dee Slater takes orders from customers at the Laurel Dunkin' Donuts on Route 1 Feb. 3, where she works a weekday shift that begins at 5 a.m. Slater has been on the job for 28 years.
Dee Slater takes orders from customers at the Laurel Dunkin' Donuts on Route 1 Feb. 3, where she works a weekday shift that begins at 5 a.m. Slater has been on the job for 28 years. (Staff photo by Sarah Pastrana, Patuxent Publishing)

At 5:40 in the morning, the dream team at Dunkin' Donuts on Route 1 was running plays. Dee Slater, a 28-year fixture at the store, fills the quarterback, coach and cheerleader slot. Her four teammates, all lean, quick and responsive, know their assignments inside out.

Of the 5,769 Dunkin' Donuts shops sprinkled across America, this one's about as special as special gets. Every weekday is a game day, and you don't need to pay to park, you never need a ticket to be an important part of the front-row action. Here, everyone's a winner.

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Caffeine-bound worker bees converge on the color-drenched, recently remodeled store. Sure, there are plenty of places within a half-mile radius where they can get whatever their morning ritual demands. But Slater and her pals make fumbling for the alarm and limping out of bed so worth the effort.

Two Virginia residents, both from Woodbridge, showed up 15 minutes apart. Instantly, each found themselves sucked into the frenetic flow.

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"Every time I'm here, I stop in," said Josephine Kennedy, who works at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. "They're always so chipper. It helps me get through my day."

Then, pulling on the hood attached to her fire-engine red Washington Capitals sweatshirt, she added, "I've been to a lot of Dunkin' Donuts in the morning, and this is top-tier."

The other representative from the Old Dominion, Arif Assaf, said he stops in every Friday morning, en route to his job at Filter Fresh. Slater, he asserted, "is wonderful, very hard-working. She knows her work and she knows her product. Sometimes, when I go to other Dunkin' Donuts, they don't have that rapport."

Clad in jeans, brown cap and matching apron, Slater, who grew up on a tobacco farm in Calvert County, finished a sale and called out her familiar line, like the two had just wrapped up a two-minute Bible study: '"Thank you, girlfriend! You have a blessed day."

Reloading, she was poised to make her next spiritual connection: "Mornin', darlin'."

On an earlier visit to the store, an Episcopal priest said this job, this place, at this hour of the day, constituted Slater's "ministry to a starving world."

Elden Carnahan, who lives in a house on Montgomery Street once occupied by Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, said he's been a regular since arriving in town 20 years ago.

"Dee treats us all the same—young, old, rich or poor—like dogs," he joked, glancing across the counter for his subject's reaction. Dee just smiled, mopping up the attention like a bagel mops up a puddle of latte. He continued: "Many people would not come in otherwise. Dee is unique in our retail experience around here."

As more wide-eyed workers file in from the winter chill, Slater's coworker, Bhavana Patel, stood side by side with Slater. Quiet and unassuming, she is the perfect foil to Slater's signature abrupt, in-your-face, can't-get-enough style. Patel, a mother of four and native of India, has been at the shop for 14 years. Her other assignment, she said, is helping to make the Baskin-Robbins cakes for sale in the freezer down at the other end of the store. Her assessment of the emotion-laden atmosphere bubbled to the top: "We're family. Our team is good."

The other members of the team are Satnam Singh, Sara Kunakose and Sheetal Patel (no relation to Bhavana Patel). Although Singh can't speak English, Slater somehow picked up on his vibe and was able to fill in some biographical blanks. "He walks here every morning from his apartment at Steward Manor. His wife died, and he went back to India to bury her. He came right back to work."

Sheetal Patel, a Laurel High alum, agreed that the team in place is hard to beat. "It's great, actually working with them," said Patel, 22, a business accounting major at the University of Baltimore.

What came next was sweeter than a cream-filled doughnut: A group hug, with all the players on the dream team entwined in one big, happy, passionate embrace.

"If I could spread love all over the world, I would," Slater promised. "Mornin', darlin."

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