I was wondering if Martha was an only child? That might explain why she didn't know about Slug bug or Padiddle: no siblings on car rides, nobody to play them with. I didn't have a similar-aged sibling, so I didn't hear about car games like those until I started going on band bus trips in high school.

Grant Barrett said:

Steve, who says doughnuts have to have holes? No dictionary defines them as having to have holes although they all mention that they can have holes.

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I know Grant likes to have a print reference, so I wanted to mention an obscure memory from my childhood that has persisted over the years. In the 1933 book

Farmer Boy

by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Of

Little House on the Prairie

fame) the protagonist Almanzo laments the ridiculousness of doughnuts with holes.

He cites the round doughnut with a hole as being a silly fad from "town" that his sisters preferred to his mother's more traditional doughnut sticks that she twisted in the middle so that they would turn themselves in the hot grease after they were puffed up and brown on one side. I can't remember if the author refers to this as a sort of "dough knot" or if my second grade mind made that connection, but I've often wondered if this is the derivation of the word doughnut. Almonzo assumed the round doughnut fad would fall off as a person had to babysit the pastries in the grease, making the dessert more labor intensive.

Wish I had the book to quote directly, but only ever saw it in my elementary school library…

We had these twisted stick pastries where I was growing up in southern Indiana and called them tiger tails or dunkin' sticks.

Just as background,

Farmer Boy

takes place on the Wilder Farm in Malone, NY, boyhood home of Almanzo Wilder. Laura Ingalls wrote this (perhaps?) fictionalized biography of her husband's childhood.