You want to say more about ice cream?
Right. Last time I talked about ice cream on a stick, but there were a lot of other forms back then.
Go ahead.
Well, we had Dixie cups. They were light-cardboard containers with a lid we would pull off to get the ice cream.
The Dixie company made the actual cup, but we considered the name to mean the product inside. The printing on the top would advertise the ice-cream company.
But the thing that we looked forward to was what was under the lid. When we pulled the tab to take the lid off, and then turned it over, there would be a photo of some movie star.
Neat.
We had to peel off some kind of paper to really see the picture. I think I read that the Dixie company had a patent on that paper. Anyway, some kids would collect those lids. I had a few, but I never got into collecting them. I was more into baseball cards.
Any other kind of ice cream?
Oh, sure. There was the good old reliable ice-cream cone.
There were two flavors of cone — the cracker material — and, of course, what would a cone be without the sprinkles.
Back then we considered sugar good for us. Energy, and all that. Of course, sugary things are now a guilty pleasure. Indulge yourself once in a while.
Of course.
Another kind of cone was the Mello-Roll. That was probably a brand name, not a generic, but what did we know? We were just kids. Anyway, it was a cylinder of ice cream, wrapped in paper, and we were supposed to let it unwrap from gravity and drop into a specially shaped cone.
The trick was to have it drop into the cone and not onto the ground. Lots of luck with that.
A challenge.
Yep. Don’t know if they’re still around, but another sure is: the ice-cream sandwich.
I’m not surprised because, with them, the cookie on the outside could be even tastier than the ice cream inside. And finally — you thought I’d never get here, right? — there was what we called a skyrocket. Looking around today, people seem to call it a push-up.
It was a cylinder of ice cream, or maybe a sherbet, that we pushed up out of its container with a stick on the bottom. We called them skyrockets because they looked something like the fireworks of the same name. And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Well, thanks for the tour of your ice-cream beginnings. It was delicious.