The Major

My favorite coffee is Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend. It’s full-bodied, complex. My family is forced to enjoy it too, as it’s the only coffee I buy.

Last night we got on the subject of Major Dickason. I mean, what was his deal?

I envisioned a dapper British explorer/raconteur with a monocle and a pith helmet, the kind of guy who would pal around with Rudyard Kipling. Jill, my daughter-in-law, was thinking grizzled Civil War officer, cradling a tin cup of his battlefield blend of joe to warm his frostbitten hands. Jill’s father, Steve, wondered why we’d reached so far back in history. Since Peet’s was founded in the sixties, Dickason would likely have come up with his brew while scrambling through the jungles of Vietnam.

Of course Sam wasted no time looking it up on his phone, and come to find out Oliver Key Dickason was a retired World War II Army officer and regular at Peet’s flagship coffee shop in Berkeley. He worked with Albert Peet to perfect Major Dickason’s Blend in 1969.

I was disappointed to be so far off the mark but also fascinated at how we’d arrived at three so very different Major Dickasons by using our unique brains to fill in a near-total lack of information.

After learning the pedestrian truth about Major Dickason, I gave up my version, dressed in white linen, savoring his coffee under the awning of a quaint expat café in Morocco. The coffee is still fine, still does the trick, but I can’t help but feel it’s lost a bit of its full-bodied complexity, minus my Major.