The Brief

At the turn of the 21st century, L.A. was the donut capital of the world, with more donut shops per capita than any other city.

Even now, if you take a stroll, there’s a good chance you’ll pass a small mom-and-pop on many street corners.

But how did donuts become such an integral part of L.A.’s urban landscape?

Well, what if I told you that many current donut shops in L.A. and Orange County can be traced back to just one man.

The man, the myth, the Donut King

Ted Ngoy in "The Donut King" documentary.

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Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment

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In 1975, Ted Ngoy found himself in Camp Pendleton, California, after boarding the last passenger plane out of Cambodia to escape the Khmer Rouge.

Ngoy was part of the first wave of Cambodian refugees to come to the United States as their homeland fell into civil war and genocide.

In Southern California, Ngoy worked three jobs to earn money. One of them was at a gas station that just so happened to be attached to a donut shop.

One night, a co-worker offered Ngoy a donut. He took one bite of the fluffy fried dough and his American Dream was cemented.

As the story goes, Ngoy walked right into the donut shop and asked to buy the place. He was promptly laughed at and told to get a job at Winchell’s — which he did.

“Winchell's had this incredible manager training program, and you could go in, learn to bake donuts, learn the very basics, and within about three, six months, you would be handed the keys to your donut shop,” Alice Gu told guest host Austin Cross on LAist’s live public affairs program AirTalk with Larry Mantle. Gu is the filmmaker behind the documentary, The Donut King, which tells the story of Ngoy.

Gu said Ngoy soon became the manager of a Winchell’s in Newport Beach, but he still wasn’t satisfied.

After saving enough money, he eventually went back to the shop where it all began and made good on his original offer. A year later he bought another shop, and then another one.

“It's the complete embodiment of the American spirit and the American dream,” said Gu. “Within three years of landing in California he became a millionaire.”

A castle on every corner

He wanted to share that wealth with his community.

Ngoy wound up sponsoring many Cambodians who came to the United States during the second refugee wave in the late 70s, and he taught them what he knew: donuts.

“He accumulated all these donut shops, but then he would lease them back to them, so they had a chance at the American Dream themselves,” Gu said.

What started out as helping relatives and close friends became an entire niche industry for the Cambodian community.

“So every single donut shop is connected through six degrees of separation to Ted Ngoy,” Gu said.

Ted Ngoy making donuts in "The Donut King" documentary.

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Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment

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A family affair

A cousin of Ngoy started the company B&H that supplied the flour, sugar, and other goods to the donut shops. Another launched a company to manufacture the iconic pink boxes that Ngoy popularized, said Gu.

Why pink boxes? They were 10 cents cheaper than the standard white ones.

“It really became a complete industry within the Cambodian American community,” Gu said. “At his peak, [Ngoy] estimated that he was worth about 20 million. That's actually closer to a hundred million dollars in today's money.”

The king and all his 'donut kids'

“Ted Ngoy was a celebrity,” said Phung Huynh, an artist and educator in Los Angeles. “He was really a superstar for us, seeing somebody who escaped the genocide and was able to make it.”

Huynh heard about Ted Ngoy all the way in Michigan, where her family landed in 1978 after her father fled the Khmer Rouge by riding a bicycle across the border to Vietnam.

“Like many Cambodian refugees, we all wanted to go to California,” said Huynh. “You hear about Ted Ngoy, you hear about all the refugee communities from Cambodia and Vietnam going to California.”

Michelle Sou in a silkscreened portrait on a donut box by artist Phung Huynh.

In 1981, Huynh and her family moved to L.A.

Many in her immediate family became garment workers, but their lives were still inextricably linked to donuts.

“It was very common for a lot of aunties and uncles and family friends to either work in a donut shop or lease a donut shop. That was just like really a part of the culture,” said Huynh.

Ratana Kim in a silkscreened portrait on a pink donut box by artist Phung Huynh.

Now Huynh focuses her art that speaks to second and third generation Cambodian Americans, the self-anointed “donut kids” whose parents operated the stores. She paints portraits of Cambodian refugees on the pink donut boxes that have defined so many of their lives.

“I think when you go to a donut shop, you see happy people greeting you with these donuts but behind the counter is this really complicated history of genocide, of war, of the younger generation finding their place and sometimes being very disconnected and reconnected with their history,” she said.

It’s donuts all the way down

If you’re wondering which shop you can find the Donut King behind the counter now, you’ll be looking for a while.

Gu said after making his fortune, Ngoy developed a gambling problem and lost every penny — and every one of his shops.

“One by one, he literally bet the shops, and one by one, he lost all of his donut shops. It really was quite Shakespearean, or Icarus, if you will,” Gu said.

He now lives in Cambodia, retired from the donut shop business.

But his legacy continues as second and third generation “donut kids” continue to propel their family businesses into the 21st century.

For example, you can visit DK Donuts in Santa Monica, ran by Ngoy’s niece Mayly Tao for some four decades. Now, she operates Donut Princess LA, where the menu includes more trendy flavors and vibrant decorations, but Ngoy’s story can still be tasted in every bite.

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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Courtesy Caltech photo archive

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display