Ice Cream Memories By Ellen Donker

There are many.

The Old Barn Milk Bar was the site of many ice cream outings.

Most people have a good story involving ice cream, probably from their childhood. Unlike going out for pizza or cake, an ice cream outing is almost always special. Maybe it’s the variety of the treat itself combined with indulgence, celebration and socializing.

Growing up in my hometown of Wayne, NJ, we had a couple of favorite places. If my family were eating dinner at Bond’s, a small chain of family restaurants, we always left with an ice cream cone in hand. My favorite was, and still is, vanilla chocolate chip in a wafer cone.

As a little kid, I had the habit of licking the ice cream upward, dislodging it from the cone more times than I could count. Losing your ice cream to the pavement was bad enough but then to endure the ridicule of your older brother and sister? Oh, the tears! Oh, the shame! Thankfully, my parents, although somewhat exasperated, always got me a new cone. If I think about it, my father was involved in many of my ice cream excursions. Always ready for a treat, he often had an excuse to stop at Carvel on his way home from most any errand. We enjoyed many an ice cream cake. I was a sucker for a flying saucer.

When our family moved a couple miles down the road, we had new places to discover, including T&W (Terwilleger & Wakefield), a shop that sold ice cream cones for a quarter. Talk about an unbelievable deal. Plus their scoops were always generous! Although a trip to T&W was a hilly ride on our bikes, it was worth the effort.

During one of our treks, my father went with me and my friend, Denise. It had just rained, and he rode through a puddle that turned out to be a giant pothole. I guess the way he went down looked pretty funny because Denise laughed uncontrollably, much to her dismay. My father was a good sport and probably assuaged his pride with peppermint stick, one of his favorite flavors.

The place where we would go if we really wanted an ice cream experience, say on a hot summer afternoon, was the Old Barn Milk Bar. True to its name, it was housed in a barn and served the biggest ice cream cones I had ever seen.

My first memory of the Milk Bar was in my father’s brand new Thunderbird, which sported white fabric seats. Afraid we would wipe our sticky hands on the seats, he made sure we three kids had completely finished our cones and washed up before granting us entry to the car. He was the one who introduced me to peanut butter swirl (vanilla base, of course), and it became my second favorite flavor.

In my high school years, when we were old enough to drive, carloads of us would go to the Milk Bar after school. If one of our classmates were working a shift, they’d scoop us an even bigger cone than usual, which was definitely a stomachache waiting to happen.

Once I had children of my own, we made many trips on foot to the Village Ice Cream Parlour. The kids loved tasting all the different flavors – birthday cake and PlayDoh stand out – and adding as many mix-ins as they could fit in the cup, even gummy worms, which I could never understand. Unlike me, they were better flavor experimenters.

Sadly, the Village Ice Cream Parlour no longer sells vanilla chocolate chip. Apparently, it’s gone the way of the Choco Taco. The world’s (or maybe just our town’s) tastes have shifted. After a lifetime of solidarity with my favorite flavor, I’ve been left behind. I suppose it’s time to adapt, which may require some tasting research. I sense a good excuse to indulge.