My dad and a friend of his always used to joke that they were going to retire and open up a Dairy Queen. They thought it was the best business because you would be open just after Easter to before Halloween and you would have the other months off to kick back. I don’t think it was really about business model, but more so that they both really liked ice cream. My father is not a heavy nor particularly indulgent man, but an outing usually doesn’t end without an ice cream. I was always Miss Boring Vanilla until I later discovered Peppermint Stick and Cookies N Cream. Until then, I was a Vanilla girl probably for fifteen years running.
When I was in grade school, Charlie’s Shake Shop in Mukwonago, Wisconsin, was pretty legendary. Charlie was actually named for a Charlene. They had booths as well as the expected little tables and “ice cream shoppe chairs.” They served every flavor of ice cream someone in second grade could have ever dreamed up, scratch n sniff stickers, and candy sticks. In the back hall, there were a few arcade games. I remember Pac man and Joust, and a pin ball machine. I remember the jukebox, and the times we used to try to trick our siblings into smelling the old shoe or skunk scratch n sniff stickers.
Every year, the student who won the Listening Competition got to go their with the music teacher, where they were treated to the ultimate situation. What was the Listening Competition? We prepared for it all year. We were heavily versed in music appreciation from the standard classical pieces, show tunes, to orchestra pops. We were played a very short, short snippet of the record and had to identify it the quickest. But the needle could go anywhere in the record. Kind of like “Name that Tune” without Kathie Lee. In otherwords, if you are the type of person to only remember snippets of bad 70s ballads because you have seen too many Time Life music commercials, we had the classical version in our heads.
There was a dish that was seldom ordered, but was heavily entrenched in the Clarendon Avenue Elementary School lore. It was literally a bucket that contained a scoop of every single flavor Charlie’s Shake Shop served (and it could be plain or have any toppings you wanted). The winner would get to go to Charlie’s and actually order anything they wanted on the menu, but that is what traditionally was ordered just because you could. No one ever finished it, unless they were lying. You see, the selection put Baskin Robbins to shame. If you were thinking about just 31 flavors, that would be the appetizer. You were just starting to warm up at that point. They happily wrapped it up “to go” if you could make it back to your freezer in time. In a small town, nobody lived to far, so one could actually make it.
Today, no one would dare serve something like that. It would just be a major health issue waiting to happen, but you sure wouldn’t die of a calcium deficiency! It could make any person lactose intolerant for life in twenty minutes.
A few years later, we moved away, and Charlie’s closed and became a bike shop. Or did it used to be a bike shop before Charlie’s? I can’t remember. But the fact remains, is that Charlie’s became history, for a reason we don’t know as it always seemed busy. Back then, which was not that long ago (the 80s), it was the only ice cream place at the time in town in a “one grocery store/one restaurant/one pharmacy” town. Today, there are over 25 restaurants there. I guess we would have been considered like “pioneers” compared to what it is today, except we wore jelly shoes and carried trapper keepers instead of carrying muskets.
Now, I am sure I will hear from someone else who remembers Charlie’s, as I found zero reference to it on the internet. Well, now something about it is on the internet.
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