By Bob Copperstone
I Was a Teen-Age Soda Jerk
Beginning at age 10 in 1949, and lasting through my teen years, I found myself rather unwillingly behind the soda fountain, feeding and refreshing the sugar-rushed customers at downtown Wahoo’s Wigwam Café.
My parents, Hank and Irma Copperstone, had purchased the Wigwam, along with partners Clair (Muzzy) and Dorothy (Dodo) Miller.
My sisters Rochelle and RoJane (Janie) and I were, of course, pressed into service to help make a go of the family business.
I was paid the prevailing wage of 50 cents per hour.
Along with many other chores, I was expected to pursue soda jerkery.
I found myself behind the fountain area's front counter, among tubs of chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, orange and cherry sherbet ice creams, and at least a dozen syrups in a seemingly inexhaustible number of flavors.
To my right was the ubiquitous Coca-Cola (later Pepsi-Cola) dispensing machine.
Behind me were the malt powder dispenser and several green Hamilton Beach Mix-Master malted milk machines. Below them were the five-door refrigerated cabinets that held the bottles of pop and the sandwich board (to the left of the fountain) lettuce and other condiments.
What we called bottles of “pop,” New Yorkers and most of the eastern states called “soda” or “soda pop”. We knew better.
When a waitress turned in an order for a chocolate soda, I would grab a tall, thick, tapered and footed glass off the shelf behind me.
I’d shoot a healthy slug of chocolate or other flavor of syrup at the bottom, followed by a scoop of vanilla ice cream; add another shot of syrup, then one more scoop of ice cream.
Placing the glass under the water fountain, I would shoot a thin, strong stream of carbonated water along the inside of the glass, careful not to break up the ice cream balls.
If done right, this stream built up a tasty head of foam that floated the ice cream to the top. A spoonful of marshmallow sauce topped with a maraschino cherry completed the sweet concoction.
A couple of paper straws and a silver, long-handled spoon slid down inside, and the sweet concoction was lifted onto the black marble countertop, ready to be admired by the whole room and taken to the sweets-seeking customer.
I had jerked yet another genuine Wahoo ice cream soda.
Take that, New York!
Ptomaine-Tortured Teens Tour Toddling Town
Recently I came across a scrapbook souvenir of my 1957 Wahoo High School senior sneak day, which featured a memorable "Special Train" ride for what they called a "Students' Educational Trip to Chicago."
Oh, it was special, all right, and very educational (in a sick sort of way) as we learned on the train ride home.
During that ghastly return trip, we were forced to learn an anatomy lesson on the internal functions of the human gut, and its fascinating ability to purge itself of the contents of the Burlington Route's special chicken casserole, served with a side of ptomaine.
The hands-on lab featured about half the students aboard who had ordered the chicken dinner. Misery soon began flowing from multiple orifices.
I don’t remember what, if anything, the school did to chastise the railroad for poisoning its children. But someone dropped the ball.
If this food-poisoning had occurred today, the Burlington bigwigs would face an army of ambulance-chasing lawyers, as well as outraged parents howling to have the perpetrators’ craniums and/or rear parts surgically removed and served up on platters. The whole episode would have been photographed and posted to the social media and gone viral.
My memory, six decades later, is fuzzy about some of the details. Chicago was interesting, to be sure, but most of us had been up all that first night and were half-asleep during the tour.
But my olfactory senses’ own memory banks have not failed me after all these years and, yes; I remember well what our homecoming smelled like, and what the seemingly endless retching and voiding felt like.
* * *
To add to the misery, the following week the Wahoo Newspaper carried a story about the miserable trip.
Bear in mind that the victims of the poisoning were children of the readers, and suffered greatly.
But the story, edited and most likely written by the owner of the paper, Guy Ludi, downplayed the whole thing.
To read his story, we were little darlings who all got tummy-aches. No, Guy, we didn’t. We went through the hell of unending vomiting, explosive diarrhea and overflowing toilets.
I don’t know what the railroad did with our reeking railroad car with its slickened aisles after we arrived at the Lincoln train station.
If we suffering children had had our way, though, the car would have been switched to a siding and torched. Preferably with the railroad’s food-handlers locked inside.
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