Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making

Eight. Ice Cream for Breakfast

eight Ice Cream for Breakfast 180 When Howard Deering Johnson was a child in Quincy,Massachusetts,he loved the strawberry ice cream his mother made on Sunday afternoons in the summer.She used fresh cream from the family’s cows and luscious ripe strawberries,and he never forgot the flavor.The years passed,and Johnson grew up. He served in France during World War I, came back, and worked as a salesman for his father’s cigar business. In 1925, he bought a drugstore with a small soda fountain in Quincy’s Wollaston neighborhood. Johnson started out by buying his ice cream from a local manufacturer.But he remembered good ice cream, and this was not good ice cream. “Every time we opened up a drum of vanilla in front of a customer,the fumes gave away the artificial flavoring,” he recalled later. He decided to provide his customers with ice cream that was “as good as the homemade ice cream they all remembered.” His first batch was not a success. When he served it, one customer said it would be just great if he “could get the sand out of it.” Johnson kept working on the mixture, and soon he was making a rich, high-butterfat, smooth ice cream. Before long, people were lining up for Howard Johnson ’s ice cream.Since the soda fountain seated only ten people,he decided to expand by opening an ice cream stand at nearby Wollaston Beach during the summer. To attract attention, he painted the stand orange. Whether it was the bright color or the quality of the ice cream,the stand drew crowds. On one hot August day, Johnson sold fourteen thousand ice cream cones. He packed the ice cream in drums at the drugstore and delivered it to the beach in a taxicab.When the ice cream ran out,he’d send back to the store for more and call out to the crowd, “Stand by, everybody. More ice cream on its way.”1 By 1929,business could hardly have been better.Then the Depression hit. The Depression of the 1930s and the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 were devastating for the ice cream business.Opinions vary as to which was more to blame,but the combination hit the business hard.As one industry magazine put it, “The dime that went for soda now frequently goes for beer.”2 Ice cream had been one of the nation’s fastest-growing industries.In 1929, Americans were eating nine quarts of ice cream per person annually, and production was more than 277 million gallons. In 1933, ice cream production dropped below 162 million gallons,its lowest level since 1919,and annual per-person consumption dropped to just over five quarts.3 Trade magazines, previously one hundred or more pages long, shrank to sixty pages or fewer. Many in the industry had never experienced bad times and were at a loss for a solution as the numbers spiraled downward.In 1933,the president of the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers, G.G.Kindervater,described the situation in uncompromising terms: Everything was wonderful while we were riding the crest of the wave. Then suddenly and without warning something happened—the wave flattened out and we found ourselves gasping for breath and struggling to get our feet on solid ground.And,we are still engaged in that struggle. If, after reflecting upon the course of events in the past four years, we will make an appraisal we must reach the conclusion that we were not the sound,sagacious business men we pretended to be. We were carried away with the fantastic notion that because handsome profits were being made in the industry a miracle, for which we were responsible,was being performed. In the light of our knowledge today we realize fully that these same handsome profits acted as a powerful drug that lulled us to sleep.4 Fortunately,the industry had taken some steps that kept it in good stead when the bad times arrived. Mechanization and refrigeration had helped Ice Cream for Breakfast / 181 to modernize the business.In addition,the mergers and consolidations that had taken place in the industry, as they had in so many others during the 1920s, created efficiencies. But the problems were severe and not easily overcome.Ice cream had turned back into a luxury for many,and ice cream...