Dairy Queen Painting
WAUGH FAMILY

Ice Cream Memories

Reading Jerry Shaw’s story on the old Dairy Queen at Orange Avenue and 10th Street [Page 16] made me wonder why old Fort Pierce people have such fond memories of that little institution. 

Then a two-word answer came to me: ice cream.

If you’re like me, some of your best memories of childhood are associated with ice cream. Some of my earliest ice cream memories go back to that Dairy Queen. The store was decorated in black tile and, since drive-through service hadn’t become popular yet, featured two walkup windows. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Orange Avenue was a bustling retail district, with Woolworth’s and W.T. Grant department stores competing across the street from each other and a number of tiny shops, like Dairy Queen, offering a variety of goods and services.

Until close to my 6th birthday, our family lived on South 13th Street, just three blocks away from the DQ, and we were frequent visitors from our earliest days. The story goes that my grandfather walked me there as a toddler before I had gotten my first haircut. Because I had long blond locks people would ask him if I was a boy or a girl. 

Knowing my grandfather, he probably took me the next day to Clarence Hash’s barber shop, which coincidentally was next door to the Dairy Queen. I’m guessing my folks had a tendency to let their sons’ hair grow longer than my grandfather liked because it seemed in our early years he always took us for our haircuts. It was a ritual I looked forward to. Mr. Hash, a bird hunter, always had copies of Field & Stream for older customers to read and gave us boys a piece of Bazooka bubble gum after our trim, which was usually a buzz cut.

As I grew older and my folks had more kids — eight in all — we moved farther away from the DQ. Instead of walking there, my dad — mostly on Sunday nights — would load us in the Plymouth Fury station wagon and take us to the Dairy Queen to partake of its soft-serve ice cream. The older kids got to get Blizzards, a type of milk shake, while the middle kids, a group to which I belonged, got cones [I liked the chocolate dipped]. The youngest kids, whom my dad called Winkies, got Dilly Bars, ice cream on a stick dipped in chocolate. If I recall correctly, the store’s late 1960s and early 1970s prices had Dilly Bars at 10 cents apiece and chocolate-dipped cones at 25 cents apiece. I’m guessing the Blizzards were either 35 cents or 50 cents each.

Dairy Queen enjoyed a relative monopoly on Fort Pierce’s ice cream trade until the mid-1960s, when a Dipper Dan Ice Cream Shoppe franchise arrived in Sears Town, now called Sabal Palm Plaza. The store boasted “50 wild flavors,” my favorite being bubblegum, of course.

The 1970s brought the arrival of Carvel Ice Cream, which boasted 36 flavors and 60 varieties, to what was then called Fields Plaza on South U.S. 1. Their soft-serve ice cream cakes were quite popular. 

When my wife, Gretchen, made one of her first visits to Fort Pierce it was her birthday, and my mom tried to impress her with a Carvel ice cream cake. When my mom ordered it, she didn’t know at the time what to put on it, so she told the attendant that she’d call later. She never did, leaving the cake’s decorator to inscribe the cake with what she saw on the order form. So, when my mom presented the cake to her future daughter-in-law, it didn’t contain a birthday greeting but the words, “Will Call Later.’’

True story and a recollection that makes us laugh nearly 40 years later.

Ice cream was made for good memories.

Gregory Enns
Reach Gregory Enns or 772.940.9005.

See the original article in print publication

Feb. 05, 2025


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