Most people who know the Jackson story know Joe Jackson as the strict dad. He was the father who drove his sons hard, ran long rehearsals in the living room and turned a handful of boys from Gary, Indiana into the Jackson 5. Michael was the youngest of those singing brothers and the one the world would later call the King of Pop. He grew up under that watch.
So the little memory he shared as a grown man caught a lot of people off guard.
Every few weeks, back when Michael was a boy, something would quietly turn up on the kitchen counter. Nobody announced it. Nobody took credit for it. It was just there one morning, waiting for the kids to find.
Can you guess what it was?
Here’s the sweet part. It was a bag of glazed doughnuts.
Michael told this himself, years later, in a short piece he wrote about his childhood. “No note, no explanation, just the doughnuts,” he said. His dad never mentioned them. He didn’t stand around to see the boys smile. The doughnuts simply showed up every so often, and the Jackson kids tore into them.
For a long time Michael wasn’t sure what to make of a father like that. This was a man who had a hard time saying the plain words out loud. Michael once admitted his father never really told him he loved him and rarely gave him a compliment. That stayed with him.
But somewhere along the way he started to read those doughnuts differently. He decided the little bag on the counter was his father’s way of saying something he couldn’t put into words. “An imperfect love, sure, but love nonetheless,” Michael wrote.
There was another memory too. Michael said that when he was about four, the family went to a little carnival, and his dad “picked me up and put me on a pony.” He called it “a tiny gesture,” the kind of thing his father probably forgot five minutes later. Michael never did.
The most honest place to hear all of this is from Michael himself. In 2001 he stood up in front of a packed room at Oxford University in England and talked openly about his dad, the tough parts and the tender ones. You can hear the whole thing in his own soft voice.
Michael talks about his father, in his own voice, at Oxford in 2001
It’s a side of the Jackson family most fans never get to hear. Not a stage, not a hit record, just a son trying to understand the man who raised him.
In his book “Moonwalk,” Michael reached for one more small picture of those early days. “He used to take us all to the merry-go-round in the park, but I was so young I don’t remember that very well,” he wrote. The memory was fuzzy. The feeling behind it wasn’t.
For a father everybody called strict, the things Michael held onto were awfully gentle. A pony ride. A carousel. And a bag of doughnuts that showed up, again and again, with no name on it.