An American Classic Ice Cream : Of Soda Fountains and Soda Jerks

When I was 17, I left Southern California to attend Grinnell College, in the lovely small town of Grinnell, Iowa, smack in the middle of the state. I arrived in late August, in the middle of a lush, humid summer. Two months later, the first autumn cold snap turned leaves bright-yellow almost overnight. It was such a shock to my California-raised system I ended up with a chest cold that turned into bronchitis. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and sent me over to Cunningham’s Drugstore.

I found the pharmacy in the back of the store. The druggist took my prescription and told me it would be ready in 10 to 15 minutes. Feverish and weak I looked for a place to sit down.

That’s when I saw it: maybe 15 stools along a long counter studded with pie cases and straw and napkin dispensers. There were bird-like heads of syrup and soda dispensers. Rows of gradated glassware. In a prominent central spot, like a small shrine, sat the green enamel malt maker. A couple of big-armed women stood behind the counter, scooped ice cream and assembled sandwiches.

I climbed onto a stool and looked at the menu. Garbage salad was the featured special. There were also sandwiches, floats, sodas, malts and sundaes. And then there was the arcana, items I’d never heard of: Brown Cows, Dusty Millers, rickeys, phosphates, Green Rivers. I had stumbled on a new nook of the familiar world, one ripe for exploration.

Deciding that a big dose of sugar might help the medicine go down, I ordered a hot fudge sundae. It came in a narrow-bottomed, flared sundae glass. The ice cream was hard and rich but melting like crazy under the thick hot fudge, whipped cream, nuts and a fat cherry. For a kid raised on DQs and Fosters Freeze, this Midwestern version of the soda fountain was a major revelation.

During my years at Grinnell, I was a Cunningham’s regular. Around 3:30 or 4 on those wintry days when the afternoon almost tangibly slumped, when some of my professors were already tippling and my health-conscious classmates were brewing herb tea on hot plates, I’d set off for downtown Grinnell. My roommate thought I was crazy for eating ice cream in such freezing weather, but I sensed something harmonious and appropriate in the practice. After all, what is ice cream but perfected snow?

After walking five endless blocks, I’d pull open the glass doors of the drugstore and instantly my glasses would steam up. This was before the energy crisis; Jimmy Carter hadn’t yet modeled the cardigan and lowered the thermostat. Heating was intense and, by contemporary standards, extravagant. You could--and indeed would want to--sit at the soda fountain in a T-shirt. I’d hang my scarf and gloves and coat and sweaters on the burgeoning coat rack, stumbling on galoshes underfoot.

Sometimes I’d have to wait for a seat, sometimes the only seat available was right by the coat rack, which emitted a fog from its burden of damp and steaming wool. A budding writer, I eavesdropped and made mental notes on the merchants, the farmers and housewives who showed up daily at the same time I did. There was an old man with poor hygiene whom everybody tried not to sit next to. There was a man who always sat in the small leg of the L; he was friends with one of the waitresses. Now and then I exchanged pleasantries with a woman who’d dropped her daughter off nearby for piano lessons.

Over fluorescent-green lime phosphates and cherry Cokes with a ruby cast, these people talked a lot about who was sick with what and how long they’d been down with this or that. And they’d talk about how long it had been since they’d seen so and so, and when and where that was, and who else had been there, and where that person or persons had been since. The talk never turned to anything the least bit private in nature; more, it was a keeping track, an assembling of everybody’s comings and goings, as if these people met here daily to update and complete an enormous ongoing overall picture of life’s movements within this pleasant little town.

Meanwhile, I made it a project to try everything on the menu, including the garbage salad, which was spiced ground meat on iceberg lettuce with Italian dressing. Soon enough, I narrowed my order down to an egg salad sandwich (I didn’t like to eat ice cream on an empty stomach), a 15-cent vanilla Coke in the tiniest six-ounce Coke glass, and a Dusty Miller sundae, which was chocolate ice cream, marshmallow cream, malt powder, nuts and a cherry.

When I came home to Pasadena for the summer, my mother greeted me with, “Well, I gained 40 pounds in college, so you’re not doing so bad.” She blamed my new size on the college food service. I didn’t tell her about the fourth not-so-square meal I’d added to my diet.

In graduate school in Iowa City, I found my way to another great drugstore soda fountain called Pearson’s. After sampling various items, I settled on two that I could order with a nod of my head to a familiar waitress: a ham salad sandwich (ground baloney, a few chunks of ham, mayonnaise and pickle relish on whole wheat) and a chocolate malt, which filled a tall malt glass and came with leftovers in a steel shaker.

This combination bore the best taste memories of childhood--baloney and chocolate ice cream--and therefore could, on occasion, provide great comfort. One day, for example, my boyfriend showed up early in the morning with a horrible pain in his side. All morning and afternoon, I drove him from doctor to doctor and spent the day in waiting rooms while his appendicitis was diagnosed and the surgery mapped out. Then I drove him to the hospital for the operation. It was a modern hospital with administrators who felt it was important that loved ones be by the patient’s side up to the last minute before surgery. So I held my boyfriend’s hand as they put him on an IV and prepped him. I escorted his gurney to the elevator heading for surgery, waved, said encouraging things.

The elevator doors shut and, suddenly alone, I was shaky, upset and also shockingly hungry--it was 6 o’clock at night and I realized I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. I walked around the corner to Pearson’s. Thirteen years later, I still remember the relief and gratitude with which I ate that ham salad sandwich and chocolate malt. Some things, however modest, remain constant. Life would go on.

Recently, I heard that the little drugstore on the corner of Fair Oaks and Mission in South Pasadena had imported an entire vintage soda fountain from Joplin, Mo. For someone like me, who came of age around Cunningham’s and Pearson’s 1950-ish functional steel and Formica soda fountains, the Fair Oaks Pharmacy soda fountain is like the perfection of a long-held memory. There’s a marble-topped counter, lots of dark old wood cabinets with glass doors, behind which sits all the requisite sparkling glassware.

So one day, my friend Cindy and I stopped in around 3:30, at the smoggiest heart of a smoggy day. Because I still dislike eating ice cream on an empty stomach and because the Fair Oaks offers no sandwiches, we settled for a good hot dog, whose pink meat and relish bore passing taste resemblance to a ham salad sandwich. Cindy ordered a lime phosphate, which with its tincture of phosphate took on that same intense, lively, magical grass green I hadn’t seen in more than a decade. I had a vanilla Coke--which to my now-jaded palate tasted like rum and Coke without the kick.

And then I talked the friendly fellow behind the counter into creating a Dusty Miller for me. He made it in a banana split boat instead of in a sundae glass, but otherwise, it was my first Dusty Miller in 18 years. Cindy, meanwhile, tried the Fair Oaks’ own “Raymond,” with vanilla and chocolate ice creams, hot fudge and caramel syrups. We ate, it seemed, forever, and barely made a dent in the ice cream before us. My mouth was numb from butterfat and cold. The sugar had already set up a buzzing in the back of my head. I pushed the sundae away.

“You don’t want anything else, do you?” our waiter asked.

I ordered black coffee.

This apparently filled our friendly and enthusiastic waiter with wonder he couldn’t contain. “I’ve never had anybody order as much as you guys,” he said, for all the counter to hear. Heads turned to survey our half-drunk drinks and melting piles of ice cream, the bready end of the hot dog left in the basket. “It’s the biggest order I’ve ever had!” the waiter declared.

Self-conscious, I pulled back the Dusty Miller, had another bite or two for solace and gave thanks that at the moment, at least, I wasn’t particularly fat. He meant no harm, I knew. He was a young, sweet, ebullient kid, genuinely surprised--and had no way of knowing he’d sparked a sudden sharp pang of what it felt like to be 18 years old, 20 pounds overweight and hooked on a soda fountain.

Cindy, however, intuitively understood. She spoke slowly and distinctly, with a revelatory edge to her voice, as if discovering and savoring for the first time the true meaning of the term.

“Soda jerk,” she said.

Styled by Minnie Bernardino and Donna Deane

SWEET VICTORY: H47. Attention dieters. Ice cream doesn’t have to be a high-calorie vice. Abby Mandel has a recipe for balsamic berry sauce that makes a great low-fat sundae topping. Good Cooking.

On the Cover: Fair Oaks Pharmacy and Soda Fountain, 1526 Mission St., South Pasadena (818) 799-1414

Models: Stacey Deal and Jamey Brashear

H31--Kevin McCafferty works the soda fountain