Brain Freeze

There's an ice cream place just down the street from my house. In the winter, they do a modest business, with a car or two in the postage-stamp-sized parking lot some of the time. In the summer however, business peaks. You might as well park in the adjacent lot because you can't get near this ice cream joint. Most summer evenings, you can easily find cars with kids' heads sticking out of every window encircling the lot. Summertime just says "ice cream" I guess.

When we were growing up in Rison, there were several ways we managed to get our ice cream fixes on hot summer days. One source was The Jennie Freeze (more formally known as Jennie's Freeze King). The Jennie Freeze was owned by Jennifer Bell Sipes' parents. If' I've got this right, the Bell's owned and ran the Freeze King from the 60's until the 80's (but email me if I'm wrong). It was certainly our claim to a little slice of Americana and a solid staple of Rison's culture. Everyone dined at the Freeze King. During those hot August football two-a-days, the Freeze King enjoyed intermittent carloads of sweaty, high school boys crashing at the King between practice sessions. And on Friday and Saturday nights, the Freeze King maintained our social lives, or what we described as such. Thank goodness we had the Freeze King as a cushion to soften the growing pains of adolescence.

Another source of a ice cream (and social miscues) was the Wildcat Dairy Dip. I guess the Dairy Dip came along in the early 70's and if memory serves, it was Frank Farrer that was the original owner and operator, although The Dip was bought and sold many times before it finally dried up. I'm pretty sure The Dip was the place where our class spent a lot of nocturnal hours, but I'm not so sure they saw any significant increase in revenues because of us. Most of what we spent there was "time" and not money; however, we we all enjoyed our share of Dairy Dip burgers, shakes and their ice cream.

And, lest we forget, our generation was one that enjoyed home-made (or is it "homemade?") ice cream. My family and yours would gather, sometimes in homes, sometimes at church "socials" (funny that we called them "socials") to laboriously hand-crank the thing-a-ma-jig until it produced a frozen, artery-clogging concoction that always made angels sing. My favorite was just plain vanilla. I figured anything less was just plain un-American. But there were always those for which plain vanilla was just too plain; their ice cream had to have an orchard's worth of fruits chopped up, ground down and poured into the frozen mix. There's a party-pooper in every crowd.

Obviously, part of the reason for dragging your kids along to these fellowships was to offer a ready source of labor to crank the darn ice cream makers. (That's the price we paid for not having our own transportation, remember?). And, inevitably, someone would forget to bring the required amounts of rock salt in order for the ice cream to become more "ice" and less "cream." (There's some science there, but I never gave two hoots about the chemistry; I only wanted the frozen results). I always seemed to be the one on duty when the slushy mess was determined to remain cream. I'm betting that in the early 1900s, people used to get together for their butter-churning shindigs, their sixteen children in tow, all the while with the intention of each sibling working for their keep. I can see it now: every kid handed a butter churn handle along with the stern admonishment to "get busy, or it'll be a long ride home in the back of the wagon." That, of course, was before the kids got their own wagon wheels.

Forget about butter churning and this blistering hot summer and go have yourself a plain-old vanilla-filled ice cream headache!

-Ken