Doggie Cup 6/18/22

If you ask anyone who has tasted it, the best ice cream on earth is made by the Penn State Creamery. No doubts, but the Meadows in Duncansville has been making the best frozen custard yogurt since it opened in 1950. So any time we are near Duncansville, we are sure to stop, as we did on an early June afternoon after Sue, Nagwa and I met friends in Cumberland, MD for lunch.

But that day there was an added attraction - a Black German Shepherd named Raja who was there with his owner, a retired EMT, enjoying a "doggie cup" of vanilla. If you bring your dog with you when you buy a frozen yogurt treat, a free doggie cup is offered.

We watched Raja go at his doggie cup of frozen yogurt with passion over about 15 minutes, while we enjoyed cones. He stopped only a few times, possibly to fight off some "brain freeze".

Raja knows delicious frozen yogurt when he tastes it, as do many others in central PA. Today there are over 20 Meadows franchises across the area.

Across the 1950s and 60s many towns in the US had one or more ice cream shops or combination restaurant and ice cream shops. Sue and her two sisters worked in local ice cream shops on weekends and summers while in high school and college. For sister Sandy, it was Emerson's Dairy and for Sue and her sister Sherrill it was the Dairy Dolly (both in Ashland, OH).

As pictured above from the air, the Dairy Dolly had a sit-down restaurant in the front with booths and a counter with stools. The rear was a covered in-car dining area (under the red and white canopy). For in-car dining, orders were placed by intercom. Trays of burgers, fries, sodas, ice cream treats, etc. were delivered to cars and hung off partially rolled-up windows - as per Mel's Drive-In from the movie American Graffiti. Sue was frequently assigned to take orders via the intercom because she could be trusted to handle them quickly and courteously, and accurately add-up customers' checks.

The top two and last photos are from the Internet