The Sweet Tastes of a Kid’s Summer

From the perspective of kids, summer is over. School will once again request their full attention. Whether they provide it or not remains to be seen.

But what they don’t realize is that their experiences on those long summer days are not lost. They have been preserved in long-term memory for their enjoyment later in life. And some of that memory will include the unmistakable flavors of the many treats they consumed on those hot days.

Each generation has its own favorite summertime tastes, much of it dictated through subliminal marketing techniques. My childhood summers introduced me to many memorable treats, especially the ones we bought with our own money out of sight and certain admonishment from Mom.

The list is long but some of my favorites included candy and pop my friends and I bought at the Colvill Park concession stand. This was the small building next to the enclosed picnic pavilion. We usually stopped there on the way home from swimming at the pool. We also often raced over there during the 10-minute break.

My favorites from Colvill Park and elsewhere included some that are still sold today but many are gone or reformulated. Here are some of them.

Everyone knows what Popsicles are. Back then they were cheap, available in many flavors, and shareable if you separated the two sticks carefully (there was even a tool for that). But at the urging of moms everywhere, they now come as individual sticks. Popsicles can be messy as they often fall off the sticks and they are generally boring to older kids.

Other “sicles” include Fudgsicles, which are chocolate fudge flavored ice cream (good), Dreamsicles, orange sherbet on vanilla ice milk (better), and Creamsicles, orange sherbet on vanilla ice cream (best).

PushUps have a tart orange flavor and a unique way to eat them – you pushed them up. But they were too small for the price.

A Frozen Milkshake was a candy bar on a stick that you could break your teeth biting into. But since they were frozen, they lasted longer than a lot of other treats. There were other frozen candy bars on sticks.

A candy necklace was just that – candy pieces on a stretchy string that you wore around your neck. They were a bit difficult to eat and too feminine for me.

Bub’s Daddy was a long stick of bubble gum that had indents where you could break it apart into individual pieces. But I just had to stuff the whole thing in my mouth to the point that I couldn’t talk. The gum was about 90% sugar and was guaranteed to give you a stomach ache. My jaw got sore from all the chewing.

Pop brands back then included Coke and Pepsi (of course), Nehi (Royal Crown), Sunrise, Squirt, Dr Pepper, Fresca, Mountain Dew (with the hillbilly on the bottle), Orange Crush, 7-Up, Bubble Up, and many more. There were no energy drinks back then, just the ones with caffeine.

Pop flavors, often chemically derived from questionable materials in secret labs, included orange, grape, strawberry, lemon-lime, cream soda, and some strange ones such as blue raspberry. We sometimes mixed them together, which was always a poor decision.

At Paton’s Grocery, in my east end neighborhood, half the fun of buying pop was to get it out of the chest cooler. It was like a Chinese puzzle sliding the bottles through their lanes in the chilled water to get to the only place to pull it out after inserting your dime. You had one chance so had to pull hard.

At home we made our own “pop” with Fizzies and the short-lived King Stir. We challenged each other to let a root beer flavored Fizzy tablet dissolve on your tongue until gone. There was always Kool-Aid but many of us also had Watkins Nectar. Some of my Wisconsin relatives still generically refer to any flavored drink mix as nectar.

We seldom had pop at home. Bottles were heavy, broke easily, and with five kids, the pop wouldn’t last a day. It wasn’t until later, when cheap off-brand pop became available in cans and my older siblings had moved on, that Mom brought some home. Once in a while we had Hi-C, which was a 56-ounce can of orange-flavored sugar water. Note to the two millennials reading this: you opened the can with a punch opener, one hole on each side of the top – one to pour and one for air flow.

In addition to the ice cream treats mentioned above, we had ice cream cones, of course. My favorite was a sugar cone with three scoops, each a different flavor. We also had Drumsticks, ice cream sandwiches, A&W root beer floats, and anything Dairy Queen. For home, Mom bought the five-quart pails of vanilla ice cream. When the folks weren’t around, we’d fill large bowls and drown the ice cream with Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup. That ice cream might last a whole week if brother Dave wasn’t around. We were in heaven when we acquired a blender and could make shakes and malts.

Remember Whirl-a-Whips at the Marigold store on Bush St.? They were early soft-serve ice cream cones. I only remember the chocolate malted flavor, but I think they had vanilla, too. Apparently, the only place that still sells Whirl-a-Whips using the original equipment is at Dakota Drug in Stanley, North Dakota.

I have to stop now because I have the sudden urge to buy a pail of vanilla ice cream and some chocolate syrup. I wonder where Catherine hid the blender.