I was at a local grocery store and decided to grab some sort of frozen novelty to have in the freezer for when my grandson comes over. There’s over 150 choices of frozen treats at this store and that’s not counting tubs of ice cream! That got me thinking about the frozen treats I had in the summer growing up on the Northside in the 1950s and early ‘60s. Back then there were only about a dozen choices.
Probably the one my kid brother and I had most often was the Popsicle. It was the cheapest, 5 or 10 cents if I remember right, and it had two sticks so you got two treats for the price of one. The very first one was invented by an 11-year-old kid named Frank Epperson way back in 1905 in the San Francisco Bay Area. He originally called them Epsicles and got a patent for his creation in 1924. Their popularity grew and he later decided to change the name to what his own children called them – Pop’s Sicles. Popsicle also became the name of the company and still is today. I assumed that Popsicles had always had two sticks because that’s all I ever saw growing up. But in doing a bit of research, I found out they started out with one stick and were a bit longer, but as the Great Depression began to take its toll, the company debuted a two-stick version of the Popsicle to help consumers stretch their dollar and the duo sold for 5 cents. Many mom and pop stores had a gizmo that they could cut your Popsicle and split it in two evenly.
Other treats from the Popsicle company I remember from my childhood were the Creamsicle, which debuted in 1937; the Fudgsicle, which debuted in 1946; and the Dreamsicle. While I absolutely remember the Dreamsicle, and there are ads where all products are featured, I couldn’t find any info about it. If my memory serves me, the Creamsicle was made with ice cream surrounded by orange ice but the Dreamsicle was made with ice milk.
Another treat I remember was the Cheerio, which was a chocolate covered ice milk bar on a stick. The Cheerio was evidently created during the Depression by the Good Humor Company as a cheaper version of their Good Humor Bar which was made with ice cream. Now I vividly remember eating Cheerio bars, but I can’t ever remember seeing Good Humor bars as a kid. There were also Dixie Cups which were small paper cups of ice cream, with a paper lid and a wooden spoon (actually more of a small flat paddle). They were invented in 1923 and because a filling machine had previously been created that could fill a cup with two flavors of ice cream at one time, these ice cream Dixie Cups had two flavors in them; vanilla and chocolate, and vanilla and strawberry.
There were other treats as well. There were Drumsticks which were invented by brothers I.C. and J.T. Parker in 1928. The Parkers wanted to provide prepackaged ice cream cones but found that the cones became too soggy before they could be shipped to sellers so they coated the inside of the cone with chocolate. The Drumstick was so named because someone thought it looked like a fried chicken leg. There was also Eskimo Pies which were patented in 1922 by Christian Nelson, an Onawa, Iowa, schoolteacher.
Of course there were also just regular ice cream cones. The corner store by our house, like many neighborhood mom and pop stores and drug stores in those days, not only sold these other frozen treats, but also scooped up ice cream cones. At our corner store you could choose between vanilla and chocolate, that was it.
We may not of had as many choices back then, but they really were a treat.