Scope and ContentWe All Scream for Ice Cream by Kit Lane There was as ice cream "factory" in Saugatuck as early as 1885 which worked all night creating the flavor of the day for the next day's resorters. Today there are eight places which serve ice cream in the summertime plus restaurants which feature the confection on their menus. One shop keeper claims that Saugatuck is the only place she has ever been where people "shop" for their ice cream cones, noting flavors, prices and types of cones available. A single family will go to three or four stores, she says, before all members are satisfied. "It was around the time of World War I and I must have done an errand for a gentleman in Douglas for which he wanted to reward me with an ice cream cone. At that time I think the only store in town that sold ice cream was John Norton's Drug Store, with which I was quite familiar. So as the gentleman began opening his change purse he asked me how much an ice cream cone costs now-a-days. Perhaps I should have said 10 cents without further explanation and there wouldn't have been any problem, but I gave him the full story. If you order the standard one scoop type, it costs six cents, but, I emphasized, if you get the really nice two-scoop size, it costs ten cents. If I remember right, he found a nickel and a penny in his purse." - Willard Prentice After the soda fountain closed at the old Norton Drug Store in Douglas there was no place to get ice cream cones without going over to Saugatuck. Since 1970 a number of Douglas businesses have tried serving ice cream including: • Kathy's Ice Cream shop, in the old gas station at the point of land where Ferry Street (Chase Road) and the Blue Star come together, next door to the Kalico Kitchen. The building was razed this year. • Peter's Ice Cream which started and ran for a season, or maybe two or three, at the old Gray Gables building on the Blue Star, formerly River Guild, later the Joyce Petter Gallery, • One summer the Douglas Bakery put in an ice cream freezer. • The Tastee-Freez trying to appeal to as broad a range of customers as possible began carrying hard ice cream in the 1960s. The Tastee-Freez, which began as a franchise operation in 1956 was one of the early soft ice cream stores. Frank and Louise Smith were the first owners. Later it was owned by the Naughtins, the Collins family and a number of others. - Kit Lane "Many remember the ice cream at Parrish's drug store downtown, but when I was a kid in the 1940s, living at the old lighthouse on the Ox-Bow lagoon, we would often hike down the beach to Camp Gray. In Swift's Villa, the old administration building, they had a soda fountain that made chocolate sodas that were worth the walk. Ice cream was especially appreciated by my family because the lighthouse had no electricity or refrigeration. Food that had to be kept cool was put in the cellar. Milk was delivered to Ox-Bow and a member of the family would row over to get it with a basin of water. We would put the glass bottles in the cool water and then take cheese cloth and stretch it over the top and down into the water in the basin. The evaporation of the water on the cloth cooled the milk and helped keep it from spoiling." - Norm Deam "My mother was very picky about ice cream, and, while you won't want to tell the Parrishes this, she didn't care for theirs. However, there was a period when the Ferry Store served marvelous double chocolate sodas. That was during the time when Jean Palmer and Mary Kay Betties owned the place, and I guess their tastes was as demanding as ours. At the Gage cottage, which was even more isolated in my young days than it is now, our most glorious summer treat was s'mores which we made lavishly with two graham crackers, two melted marshmallows and half a Hershey bar." - Helen Gage DeSoto