By Victor Greto
NEW CASTLE — If time has a window, it’s that small, sliding one at the Dairy Palace facing Basin Road, through which thousands of children and adults have reached for a vanilla soft-serve cone.
Nearly a half-century after the fact, Joyce Parker can still see 3-year-old Bernie Nutter’s fingers stretching just over the ledge of that window, hear his squeaky-kid voice rising from below: “Cone with a curly-cue on top, please.”
There was no need to say “vanilla,” because that was the only flavor that slithered out of the soft-serve machine for decades.
First taken over by Joyce and Vince Parker in 1956 when it was a Dairy Queen, the ice cream stand became Parker’s Dairy Palace in 1970, and has been a part of the neighborhood and a sign of spring and summer ever since.
“You don’t think about it, 50 years,” says a now-deep-voiced Nutter, 48, who only recently moved to Bear. “Back then, we lived at Penn Acres. After I left home, and married, I came back to live at Wilmington Manor.”
It’s evidently hard to leave that stretch of Basin Road, which bloomed with developments to the north soon after World War II.
Even now, because Nutter works at the New Castle County airport across the street, “It’s hard to pass without stopping,” he says. “I like the banana splits, or the milkshakes.”
And although his two children are grown, he used to bring them with him, too.
He’s not the only one.
Four generations of George Alford’s family have eaten at the Dairy Palace.
Alford, 62, has lived at Wilmington Manor all of his life. One of his first memories includes the image of his old man carrying his younger sister on his shoulders, with George walking beside him, all on their way to get ice cream.
Back then, the ice cream stand was surrounded by fields. There may still have been the buzz of airplanes overhead, but not much else.
“You could see it from my home,” Alford says, because his family lived right on Basin Road.
After Alford grew up, he often took his two daughters Naomi and Leslie to the stand. The two girls eventually worked for the Parkers during several summers, just as he did while he went to college.
“Now we take our grandchildren,” Alford says.
Although Vince Parker died in 1998, Joyce Parker still helps run the stand that she sold to her daughter, Joy, six years ago.
The Dairy Palace, part of the fabric of the Basin Road neighborhoods, has become a fixture for both nostalgia and newly-born memories.
Only last week, Jeanne McCaslin, who lives near Hockessin, stopped at the Dairy Palace for the first time in her life and got a peanut butter shake.
“Yes, I’ll be back,” McCaslin says, standing next to her friend, Janice Jennings, who has been coming for years and was licking a tall vanilla cone.
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Joyce Parker, 69, was born at the right time to spend all of her adult life running an ice cream stand.
It took a while to realize it, though. She was born during the Great Depression in the very small town of Deep Creek Lake, in western Maryland.
There wasn’t all that much to do in Deep Creek Lake at the middle of the last century, until Vince Parker moved there.
Vince, the son of an itinerant preacher, was born in Chester Springs, Pa. His family moved to Maryland in 1950, when Joyce (nee Brant) met him.
Five years older than Joyce, Vince attended high school there and hung out with Bud Savage, 73, who was born and raised in Deep Creek Lake, and who now lives in Bear.
“I remember Joyce when she was a little girl going to school,” Savage says.
Savage and Parker had lots of girlfriends, he says, and they were the best of friends. Vince and Bud joined the Air Force together in 1952 at the height of the Korean War.
“We did it because we knew we were going to be drafted, and didn’t want to go into the Army,” Savage says.
When Vince came back in 1954, he married Joyce, who, during his absence, had helped care for his mother.
Joyce was only 17 when they married, and they were broke, she says.
But Vince’s brother Charlie ran a Dairy Queen in Lewes, and asked Vince to join him. He did, and it worked out so well that Vince was offered an opportunity to run a Dairy Queen in Seaford, where both Joyce and Vince worked during the summer of 1955.
A man named Ernest Overby originally built the ice cream stand on Basin Road as a Dairy Queen in 1954, but wanted to move to Rhode Island. Hearing of the Parkers’ success in Seaford, he offered the store to the Parkers.
The Parkers accepted and moved to New Castle in 1956.
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The roadside ice cream stand — like the roadside diner, hamburger or hotdog joint — sprang up along burgeoning American roadsides soon after World War II, says Jim Smith, professor of English and American Studies at Penn State University.
Those stands mushroomed because of the pent-up demand after the war’s gas rationing ended and new cars were available, he says.
Improvements in highways thanks to “defense funding” — the interstate highway system was built during the 1950s — the rise of suburbia, the country’s ongoing love affair with the car and an emphasis on families because of the post-war baby boom, all pushed the trend.
The ice cream cone itself was invented by the turn of the 20th century, and made popular at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
The soft-serve process was invented in the 1930s, and became the foundation for both the Dairy Queen and Tastee-Freez franchises of the 1940s.
By the time the Parkers came on the scene in the 1950s, they could learn the trade from Dairy Queen, and then add their own touch to make their ice cream stand distinctive.
“I’m old enough to remember the popularity of the soft-serve in the middle of the 1950s,” Smith says. “It was seen as a kind of novelty and not real ice cream.”
No matter what some may think, soft-serve ice cream is real ice cream, says Bob Roberts, an associate professor of food science at Penn State.
If the stand doesn’t cut corners, the same ice cream mix is used in soft-serve as in real ice cream, he says. The difference with soft-serve is it’s eaten right after it’s mixed. What many consider “real” ice cream is further frozen in a freezer called a “hardening room.”
If all ice cream stands look alike to you — including the Dairy Palace — you’re right.
Its location by the road, huge parking lot, forward-leaning walls, service windows, wide glassy fronts and big signs outlined by neon lights, all were created to draw drivers’ attention to the product sold and the convenience of getting it.
The strategy worked.
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Gary Phillips, 52, lived 15 houses away from the ice cream stand when he was growing up.
Aside from the dilly bars he got there — “I was a freak for those,” he says — one of his fondest memories was playing baseball for the children’s teams the Parkers sponsored.
“Baseball was the biggest thing back then, and the Parkers had a baseball field right in back of the store,” he says.
When Phillips signed up to play for the Chelsea Cardinals, he remembers so many kids trying to be a part of the team that Vince Parker had to sponsor another one, the Chelsea Redbirds.
“Vince was a father figure,” says Phillips, now a teacher at DelCastle High School. “It seemed like there were hundreds of kids, and he knew your name.”
The Fourth of July was a special time at the neighborhood during his pre-teen and early teen years in the 1960s, he says.
During the evening of the summer holiday, “Everyone would line up there in the open field (next to the Dairy Palace, where a shopping center now sits), and we’d watch the fireworks shot off across the street at the air base. And there’d be lines of people at the Dairy Palace.”
But the Parkers’ ice cream stand was not the only one in town during the late 1950s and 1960s.
Jim Piovoso’s father built a Dairy Queen across the street from his 3-1/2-acre truck farm on New Castle Avenue in 1958, so his children could try their hand at the business.
But only a few years later, the family leased the store to the Parkers.
Jim says his three older brothers and sisters didn’t want to be at the ice cream stand all the time, which the business required.
He began working for the Parkers in 1967, at $1 an hour, helping to run the New Castle Avenue store, and also the store on Basin Road when it got busy.
“I still remember the flavors” that were added to the ice cream, he says. “I used to say it so many times: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, pineapple, cherry, butterscotch, walnut, raspberry and hot fudge,” he reels off quickly.
Echoing others, Piovoso says the Basin Road ice cream stand was “a fun social place. You start seeing the same customers and you get to know them. Before they come up, you know what they’re going to order. They’d be happy you’d remember what they wanted.”
When Piovoso worked for the Parkers, the couple was separating from the Dairy Queen chain, because of its demands on them, including changing some of the architecture of the building and paying for it out of their own pocket. The Parkers also wanted to add hot dogs to the limited menu, which the chain did not allow.
There were other changes, too. Vince, who attended college through the 1960s working on a Masters Degree, also began teaching math and science at West Park Elementary School in 1969.
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By 1970, the Parkers had let go of their interest in two other ice cream stands in the area, including the one on New Castle Avenue and one near Newport. They bought the Basin Road store outright, and renamed it Parker’s Dairy Palace.
Because Dairy Queen took away the machinery, the Parkers bought their own, which included adding another flavor, chocolate. Aside from hot dogs, they even tried to sell hamburgers there, “but they made the whole place smell,” Joyce Parker says, so they stopped.
Because Vince was teaching, Joyce effectively ran the Dairy Palace herself, Piovoso and the Parkers’ only daughter, Joy, say.
Joy, who spent many childhood days in the backroom of the stand while her mother worked, officially started working there at 14.
“It was an apprenticeship,” Joy says of her childhood in and around the ice cream stand. “I learned the business inside and out.”
Now 40, Joy and her mother share daily duties with up to eight employees each day, from April through early October.
They still are not tired of their favorite Dairy Palace food, which they eat daily: for Joyce, it’s a hot dog and a chocolate malt; for Joy, it’s a hot fudge cherry sundae.
Although Joy has changed some things since she officially began running the stand six years ago — including adding candy toppings and a slushy machine — it’s the still same constricted space her parents first worked in 50 years ago.
They’ve only closed three times: when Vince’s father died, when Vince died, and when a hurricane hit.
The stand remained open on 9-11, and also served as a place for people to gather and talk about what happened.
Although the Parkers struggled during the 1950s, barely breaking even, they make a decent living from the store now.
But the drawback during the summer is no vacation, no beach time, no days to relax and enjoy the sun.
“I don’t even have parties,” Joy says. “A machine breaks down, or someone doesn’t show up for work. It’s always something.”
But she has the winter to “clean out the closets” at home and get everything ready for April.
“It can be very hard work and I get dismayed at times,” Joy said. “But to have a kid come up to the counter and see his face glow — they love it so much. Even if their parents are grouchy, they can’t help but laugh when I hand them the ice cream.”
Bernie Nutter still remembers reaching up toward that window 45 years ago.
“My dad still lives in Penn Acres,” he says. “There’s still some of the original people who live there, and it’s nice to see them when I go back. Things have changed, but nothing really drastic.”
Including the ice cream.