The Sweet Shop Down Town

It was the fabulous fifties, A Leave It To Beaver era of innocense, balanced out a little by the edginess of Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. I was a fairly typical teenage girl who lived on Main Street in Small Town, USA, and on most school days, when the bell rang at 3:30, I hurried out of the locker-clanging halls of our stately brick High School and made a bee-line down Broadway as fast as my saddle-shoes would take me, and dashed into the glass-fronted Sweet Shop, where I tossed my books into the back room, donned a stiff white apron, and began taking orders for sandwiches, drinks, and ice cream as a steady stream of students filled up the stools in the front and the booths in the back, until they were lined up three deep the length of the counter, and the juke box was going full blast.

I knew how to make cherry phosphates, vanilla cokes, chocolate sodas, strawberry milkshakes, tin-roof sundaes, and you name it—every concoction you can think up that soda shops carried. We had to be fast and good at our job. I could flip four cheeseburgers, three grilled cheese, and ten hamburgers and sling them on plates while I poured coffee, swirled two milkshakes, and made five fountain drinks and two banana splits with whipped cream and cherries on top. We soda jerks each did the whole thing: took orders, made the food, served it, and took money at the cash register.

Our little shop was the place to go for snacks and socializing for many years. It was owned by a short muscular man known as "Pee-Wee." He had sort of bulging blue eyes and a ready smile, and I liked working for him. We had one of the first automatic ice-makers, a huge contraption in a side room, where we'd go to dip up buckets of the tiny square cubes when the bins got low behind the counter. None of our drinks ever came out of a bottle, though. They were always made by holding a gracefully-shaped glass with a scoop of ice under the spigot, pulling down the lever, and holding it there till the bubbling carbonated water and syrup filled it to brimming. Ah, yes, delicious. And make that with two squirts of vanilla, please.