Best of Boylan: Royal Oak Ice Cream Good Any Time of Year

Royal Oak Patch columnist Gerry Boylan is traveling this week so we are bringing you a "Best of Boylan" column from Jan. 3, 2011:

Admittedly, a column on ice cream is an off-season topic for my first column of 2011. But as I drove down Main Street last week past the , I was vaulted back in time to the 1960s when that building was home to Brown's Creamery.

It was a rare treat for my family, but on a very occasional Sunday afternoon, we'd tool up in the 1953 Ford sedan and head out. We kids would traipse in a beeline to the creamery counter and order root beer and ice cream and be awarded a bright pin that said, "I ate a Brown Cow."

At least, that's what my older brother Mike and sister Sue can recollect.

As I grew older and began to earn my own money — from a Detroit News paper route — my barely discretionary cash was directed to ice cream and possibly the most perfect taste combination ever invented: the Sanders Hot Fudge Cream Puff Sundae.

I know I've mentioned this before, but it really deserves the attention.

Back in the day, Sanders had a chain of retail restaurants that specialized in selling the Sanders dessert lineup. A perfect way to end a day of delivering  126 newspapers from Center Street to Parent Street between Lafayette and Main was to park my bike in front of Sanders, just east of the Royal Oak Theatre in the Washington Square Building, and plop down on a spinning bar seat. I'd open the sports section to memorize Tigers, Red Wings, Pistons or Lions stats, depending on the season. I'd sip on hot chocolate with whipped cream and wait for the hot fudge to be ladled onto my vanilla ice cream-loaded cream puff. This was my version of heaven at age 12.

When I was a teenager, students from St. Mary's Elementary and Dondero High frequented a spot on Lafayette called the Chocolate Square, now the site of , 401 S. Layafette Ave. I'm not sure whether the attraction was the ice cream or the waitress named Jan who wore the first miniskirt any of us had ever seen.

These memories on a freezing day prompted more thoughts of Royal Oak ice cream. I think we all had our favorite neighborhood version of Jimi's or Tastee-Freeze. The Good Humor trucks with Fudgesicles and Bomb Pops were summer staples.

I also had some personal experience as roving ice cream salesman. I answered a Daily Tribune "help wanted" ad and found a couple who had invested in a large panel van, installed some freezers and arranged for a biweekly delivery of ice cream to their residential garage. I took the commission-only job because I have a naturally sunny disposition and had point of view that went something along the lines of: Why couldn't I make a lot of money selling ice cream?

Another way to say it was: I was one naïve bumpkin!

The first problem was that the truck badly needed a paint job. I volunteered to paint the truck for materials and pulled it into my backyard and enlisted my creative friends to paint away. Oh, it was creative, all right. My friend Ken Verla bought a variety of iridescent paints from Walker-Crawford, and a few hours later, the truck was sure to attract attention — especially if you favored a glowing neon panel truck that could blind you from 100 feet away. 

The second sticking point was that the truck's freezers were electric, which meant that when they were unplugged on a hot, humid Michigan July day, I had about four hours before my ice cream cargo turned into a sweet-sticky soup.

The third challenge was the standard stick shift on the column. The stick shift, combined with a bad clutch and my lousy shifting skills, resulted in a pulsating neon truck lurching down the streets of Royal Oak with the sounds of the jingling bells keeping time with every halting release of the clutch. 

Yep, I was raring to go, so I headed out to streets such as California and Maryland in south Royal Oak where there were so many kids, they seemed to multiply every time I rang my feeble bells. Cruising with my younger brother David along as co-pilot, I would do fine — if a parent didn't emerge from a house to see this rolling kaleidoscope headed down the street.

I was a big favorite with the kids, whom I would let jump in for a ride. That was a big attraction until I dumped one of the Dixon kids out of the side door with a particularly bad clutching episode, causing a lump the size of snow cone on the little fella's forehead. But the tears went away with a Nutty Buddy bribe, and those Dixon kids were tough cookies, anyway.

As it turned out, I made more money selling cold beer to adult softball leagues until the Royal Oak Police asked me what the heck I was doing selling beer out of an ice cream truck. Those were the days when the police would counter youthful stupidity with a stern warning to never be so daft again or there would be serious consequences, which sufficiently scared the bejabbers out me.

Back to ice cream. Ice cream will never go out of style and the streets of Royal Oak are still dotted with ice cream joints that create new memories for youth and families in Royal Oak year-round. We're blessed by the legendary at 4233 Coolidge Hwy., and one of my favorites in downtown Royal Oak is the at 603 S. Washington Ave.  

I like ice cream so much that I once traded my car for an ice cream maker. (The car was a total reamer, and the truth is I also received a check for $100, but it bounced.)

The touch of ice cream to my tongue is a velvety reminder that the simple pleasures in life always create the sweetest memories. Let's go!