Do we ever forget the high times of our youth? They rest, for some of us, like precious keepsakes, carefully wrapped and tucked away in our memory boxes. Anytime, anywhere, at any age, something may jog our memory and out it pops, fresh as it was the day we stored it in our special place. Not only is the memory young and fresh, but we are in the picture too. We are there. We, in that moment, relive our feelings, our emotions are often what they were at that time. By some strange alchemy we can be the younger creatures of that time. In this day of instant photos, youtube, facebook, twitter and all the rest, so wonderful in their way in helping us relive our pasts, there is yet nothing like the memory recall they provoke,  bringing with it  the emotional overburden lending to past events a texture we can feel, a flavour we can taste, an aroma we can smell.

So it was with me when a friend recalled to me the Dairy Dell that I knew in my years in Winnipeg. What a revolution it heralded in its day! In those times when you went for ice-cream you might have one or two flavours offered to you. The Dairy Dell, when it opened across the street, kitty corner from Aberdeen School on the corner of Salter Street and Flora, offered up to twenty flavours. Unheard of! Shall I wax lyrical about the intense chocolate, the lemon, the hazelnut ice creams, far ahead of their time. And how about that dollop of whipped cream on top of every milkshake? It just blew away the competition. And how about that Billboard, advertising Dairy Dell, with the heads of two dairy cows protruding into the air to attract our attention. (Imagine, it cannot be found on Google!) As if we needed more than the multitude of delicious ice-cream flavours to bring us to this site. People came from across the city, not just from the North End where most of our community lived. If you waited around long enough you could meet most of the people you knew on a warm summer evening.

An extension of the Standard Dairy that supplied many of us with our milk, delivered daily to our front doors, it was another manifestation of the commercialization of Salter Street, spreading from the Selkirk Street shopping area.  It was on Selkirk, around the corner, that I worked setting pins by hand at Mac’s five-pin bowling alley. Further down the street was the butcher for whom I once delivered meat on my bicycle. In the next block to the Dairy Dell was Buckwold’s Bakery where we got our bread, a fixture there for many years. Across the street was school where I spent almost a decade. When I lived on Jarvis, the parents of Fishy and David Steinberg operated a grocery store, around the corner off Powers, on Dufferin Street. This was my neighbourhood.

The whole shopping experience was in transition from home delivery, milk, eggs, bread, ice, you name it, it was delivered to our homes by horse and wagon. Can you see the horses trotting down the street, pulling their wagons?  And the smell of manure in the streets?

I remember the milk bottles at the front of our doors, each bottle with its special bulb at the top, into which the cream in the milk tended to rise. We could whip that cream into such delicacies. With time, car ownership would become more general and would bring the shopping centre. But for that time, the Dairy Dell catered primarily to walk-in traffic. It would be much later that the lack of parking space on busy Salter Street would become a factor and suburban shopping centres would hollow out our neighbourhood shopping neighbourhoods.

During our growing up years, the Dairy Dell was always a natural meeting place. Except of course, during the frigid winter months in Winnipeg, when our thoughts were far from any craving for ice cream. Sensibly, the doors of the Dairy Dell would close when the frosts descended on our town. We all knew that the summer season had truly arrived when the Dairy Dell opened and we could again meet with our friends there. Walking there, waiting in line, (there was always a line-up,) sharing the time of consumption in the most languorous way possible, outside on the sidewalk, as the day’s heat ebbed away into evening, going to the Dairy Dell for ice-cream was a whole social occasion for our crowd. The ice cream was just the beginning. The meeting, looking for friends and exchanging conversations, were almost, almost, the more important part of the occasion. We could always count on a meeting a cross-section of the community there on a summer evening. The ice cream shop became a community centre.

Remembering the days of my growing up, the forties and fifties, (how ancient that sounds,) I am struck at how avant-garde Winnipeg was in its way. How many ideas that would later be found generally in many other places, would be tested out early in our town. So far away from many other centres of large size, there was an entrepreneurial eagerness, in the post-war years, to offer new ideas to this captive market. We would appreciate, as we travelled, how innovative our city was. The city drew on the surrounding area like a lodestone, and accessed a population much larger than that residing within its limits. In those days it was the Americans who came here to Winnipeg to visit the big city.

Despite the winter, it was here we had the Dickie-Dee ice cream carts circulating around the city during the summer (started up by my brother-in-law, Sid Glow, before being developed nationally and internationally by Earl Barish-I was his best salesman). As did the Dairy Dell model. The same spirit motivated the establishment of a Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and the Winnipeg Ballet, theatre, and the whole intense cultural scene. At one time the Winnipeg Free Press was a great newspaper read around the world. The Winnipeg Stock and Commodity Exchanges had world status. The mundane, like fast-food Harvey’s, the Army Surplus stores and Canadian Tire had origins here. The neighbourhood department store model like Oretzki’s competed with the larger corporate bodies.

These things represented the spirit, alone in our isolated wilderness, that justified supplying the city of Winnipeg with a social and commercial infrastructure not often found in many cities of a similar size in my growing up years. In Winnipeg was established the unique Canadian Wheat Board to market farmers grain internationally, the United Way to conserve charity monies, and the Metro mega-city, long before many others, not to mention the floodway envied by many who have yet to get their act together. We always felt we were up-to-date when we went to other places. We were, after all, not hicks from the country-side. And our graduates and expatriates could be found out there, punching above their weight.

Dairy Dell was not just a multi-flavor ice cream shop to delight the young and old, when winter seasonally loosened its grip on the landscape, it was part of the Winnipeg fabric that was an expression of an attitude of mind, the inherent pioneering spirit of the western region, the optimism and can-do outlook of the New World. It sure brightened the days of my growing up.