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St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 52

Location:
St. Louis, Missouri
Issue Date:
Page:
52
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

Success Story Ice Cream by the Truckload Hollywood Overseas rooks Atkinson They Never Call A Spade a Spade Conway Brothers of Philadelphia Put Business on Wheels and Watched It Grow By Jack Rice NEW YORK, Sept. 7. FORECASTING THE WEATHER for the next day, the man said that we should expect "shower activity." "Rain hower activity," in fact, as distinguished from showers of meteors. Of the Pont-Dixpatrh Staff THERE HAVE BEEN geniuses in the ice cream business. The first genius unveiled the ice cream cone at the St.

Louis World's Fair in 1904. The latest geniuses are the Conway brothers, Bill and Jim, of Philadelphia. They put the ice cream parlor on wheels, in custom-built trucks, eight years ago and now they are living off the butterfat of the land. The Conways are the oriel- mi 1 rmm "linnrnniiinn- mrnrw iti iw- j-n iinn i mm If he had warned us to be prepared for "showers" he would have been one of us lineal descendants of the natural man. By adding the formal word "activity" he moved up Into the graver category of scientist or technologist learned, disinterested and abstract.

He indicated that he had no personal interest in showers, though, the Lord knows, we needed tiiem. On the contrary, he was personally giving us the facts after he had processed the weather map. All he had done really was to contact the United States Weather Bureau. He was also illustrating a current tendency to re By Sheilah Graham HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 7.

SUSAN HAYWARD hates publicity, so she came into London a day ahead of schedule, and instead of going to the Dorchester where the M-C-M people had booked her a suite, Susan went with her family to the Savoy. "I'm willing to give interviews when my picture, 'I Thank a starts but until then, I'm a private citizen," she told ma firmly. When Darryl Zanuck was asked if he were worried about the long schedule for his movie, "The Longest Day," he replied, "The only thing I'm worried about is running out of cigars." He used to get them direct from Cuba. THE FASHIONABLE French resort of Deauville will never be the same, because the young Aga Khan Is selling the ocean villa he inherited from his late father, the dashing Aly. About the only thing the father and son had in common is their love of horse racing.

THAT DASHING adventurer and good writer, Ian Fleming, is making a fortune from the filming of his James Bond, detective, stories. Cubby Broccoli flew Into Hollywood to sign some actors for the production, to be financed and released by United Artists. First to go is "Doctor No," which I started to read as I took off from London, and finished as we landed in the U.S.A. The story was so absorbing I didn't know I was in the air. BROOKS ATKINSON fly Post-DispitcH Photogrip.itr.

LOU MILLER, left, St. Louis distributor for "Mr. Softee," and JIM CONWAY of Philadelphia, who founded the firm with his brother Bill. nators and developers of a business trade-named Mister Softee. They started with one truck in West Philadelphia in 1954 and by the end of the current ice cream season they expect to have 2350 trucks doing a roaming curb-side business in 37 states and Puerto Rico and England.

They had 1C09 trucks at the end of 1960. Jim Conway was in St. Louis recently to discuss the delights of the business witih the local distributor, Lou Miller. They had a fine but modest time telling success stories for my benefit. Miller was promoting soft ice cream sold from scooters when he heard of the Conways' truck idea in 1958.

Miller committed himself to five trucks and now he has a depot full of trucks. He services 95 trucks in St. Louis and the Missouri and Illinois area around it. Most ot the trucks are owned and operated by independent dealers. They buy the trucks from the Conways' plant at Run-nemede, N.J., and are serviced at local depots run by distributors sudh as Miller.

The trucks come in two styles, for $10,000 or extra-fancy at $13,000, and for $2500 down a man can go into the business for himself, driving from one concentration of children to another and dishing out the ice cream as quickly as the dimes hit the counter. The Conways receive a royalty on the sales but they have not prospered by ice cream alone. There is more to it than giving dealers a chance to make those deserving Conway boys rich at early ages. "We operate on the principle of a piece of pie for everybody," Jim Conway said. "If I'm hoggish about it, or Lou is, or my brother Bill is, the dealer isn't going to work his head off and then we all lose." The first dealer to work his head off was Jim Conway.

He is smoking it off now, chain-lighting cigars, but the big job is behind him. He and his brother way said. "We were living In a housing development. Everybody in it got to know one another. We had a strong bond-hating the builder.

One young fellow I got to know was in advertising. He suggested the name The Conways liked the name but when they put it on the truck it did not look quite grand enough. For several weeks they stood back, looking at the name, prefixing it with Captain and General and other titles, and liking none of them. "Finally, Bill said, 'What's wrong with calling him Mister just plain Mister Softee," Jim Conway said. So they did and at the same time the business began to grow and now the Conway boys contemplate living happily ever after, on Ice cream.

Miller complimented Conway on staying in form. Conway sighed, and let his scrupulous honesty assert itself. He unbuttoned his coat to show that he was several inches out of trim, and announced that he is on a diet. Nobody mentioned ice cream for a while. Conway could pass off the increase in his waistline as earned income.

He had lean times with his first ice cream truck. The brothers were operating on money borrowed from Cousin Patty, and they were operating with a name that sounded somewhat borrowed, too. They called the product "Dairy King" and came to realize that was not quite the thing to do. There is an older, established soft-ice-cream firm doing business at stands, as Dairy Queen. "We got lucky again," Con My Neighbor Says! For that ladies lunch, fill avocado halves with orange sections and sliced pimientos stuffed olives.

Serve with French dressing on a bed of salad Pass Melba toast. cause It's faster served and they needed a volume business. They had six trucks on the street in Philadelphia, the second year but they were not making the family fortune. They were not even getting back the Cavanaugh fortune. "That's what really made the turning-point," Conway said.

"We wanted to get Patty's money back for him so we started looking harder for good men to operate the trucks. The next year we had 43 trucks and in '57 we had 132 and suddenly we didn't have to worry about getting Patty's money back to him." There six Conway brothers, and three of them are living. The third brother is a priest. The boys' mother died in 1936. Their father, a motorman on a Philadelphia trolley, raised the boys and he encouraged them to go to college.

They all did, Jim Conway helped himself through the University of Pennsylvania playing football. He played guard in the single-wing formation and he still has the trim look of a Bill long ago did right by their bankroller, their cousin Patty. "Every new business needs a rich uncle at the start," Conway said. "Makes it more convenient. We didn't have a rich uncle but we had our cousin, Patty Cavanaugh." Cavanaugh has been a long time in the restaurant business, the Cavanaugh Railroad Restaurant near the station in Philadelphia.

Cavanaugh still has the restaurant but he likes the ice cream business better now and has an office with the Conways. Cavanaugh is older than the brothers. Bill Conway is 37, Jim is 34. In 1955 Cavanaugh also was more solvent than the brothers were. Bill Conway put up some money, his savings.

Cavanaugh put up considerable money, about $70,000 by the time he finally got around to saying "No more," Jim recalls. Jim Conway put up a truck, made over into an ice-cream stand and he put in 16 hours a day driving the truck around West Philadelphia, looking for customers. The Conways sold "soft" Ice cream, the runny variety, be If your sponge cake Is dry it may be because you have over-beaten the egg whites, 400 much flour or too litfle sugar, overbaked it or baked at too low a temperature. move English prose from the arena ot human beings and pass It through the laboratory, where knowledge can be sterilized. As for instance, news is "structured" in the mass media.

(All plurals like "media" and "stadia" should be dumped into the Since the masses who consume the media are the proletariat, which meekly responds to the appropriate stimuli, commercial products nowadays receive gratifying "public acceptance." That Is, the public buys them for hard cash or on the lay-away plan after the advertising panjandri have Implemented a scientifically planned program. "Syndrome" Is another Imposing word that probably ought to be dropped in here somewhere. No writer wants to be a square, especially in public. The social sciences and technologies have taught him that human beings are statistics, outer-directed towards status symbols. They can be intrigued into believing almost anything.

Science and technology can (and I quote) amass, disaggregate and restructure any information that is available. In these circumstances, a writer would be a fool to write as though human beings have minds of their own and say what they think. The jargon of science and technology spares him the embarrassment of committing himself to a belief in men end women. Several weeks ago this column remarked that Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, contains some of the densest prose of the generation. The remark was not universally admired.

But perhaps we can finalize the argument by reference to "Some Mechanisms of Sociocultural Evolution" by Julian H. Steward end Demitri B. Shimkin in the summer issue. They never call a spade a spade. They never use one word when 10 will do.

For example: "Our treatment of culture and its evolution rests upon nine heuristic concepts which constitute a mixture of hypothetical postulates and real but tentative observations." "Culture summates the body of adaptive, cognitive and expressive behavior and its consequences." There is more where that came from. When the social scientists talk among themselves (conducting a "dialogue," as even non-scientists love to remark), they require abstract terms that are precise, that are understood by other scientists and that convey information without contaminating it with opinion. Granted. But it is difficult to believe that prose like the excerpts quoted above is anything except a pedantic affectation, conveying a grain of information in a ton of words. Information does not have to be conveyed that way, as other articles in the current Daedalus indicate.

The Anglo-Saxon survivals in the modern English language ere vivid and clear because they are derived from human experience. They deal with realities frankly. "Tip" is a healthier word than "remuneration" because it tells the truth bluntly. The fatuous intrusion of scientific and technological terms in current prose recalls with gratitude a tersj remark that Pogo made last spring: "Albert, you is took leave of your brain bone." DUP0NT 501 NYLON CARPETING MACHINE WASHABLE! Exmoor Sweaters of Tycora only at FOR ONLY good path-clearing lineman, if he keeps his coat buttoned. Contract Bridge Fly FREE or naetenaa i own Luxurious 4-Enqint Pressuriied Compilation Only Dirter fflgfir fa South 1 2NT 3 6 CVV REAL A( STEAL lil3lMllrMllM(iffrfe West Pass Pass Pass Pass East Pass Pass Pass Pass Pass North Pass 3 4.

5 Pass Stay at th Plush very little relationship to the cards South held. West's pass of six clubs is equally hard to justify. Of course, he knew he would beat six clubs, and was apparently willing to settle for a sure profit, but his fear that, if he doubled, the opponents would escape to some better contract was carrying caution too far. The contract went down three (40 points) at this table, but, as a result of the failure to double, West's team lost 200 points instead of gaining 300 points on the transaction. HACIENDA HOTEL Round 00 Per Person Trip I DoubU Occupancy VACATION FACKAOE 6 Doyi 5 Nights For Information or Reservations Call EV.

3-3C8S I A VBAAC TrtllDC MONTGOMERY WARD phone GEneva It is difficult to explain Swath's sequence of bids. The opening club bid was natural enough, but, from that point on, it seems that South went completely haywire. The deliberate concealment of the good spade suit, the false three heart bid, and the final bid of six clubs all appear to hava SEE rOUR riMVEL XGENT 6302 NATURAL BRIDGI North deaJar. Norta-South vulnerable, NORTH VK104 AK72 497643 WEST EAST J1082 Q765 95 VQJ8633 Q54 4J96 KQJ10 SOUTH AK94 A7 41083 A852 The bidding: North East South West Pass Pass 1J(. Pass 2 4 Pas 24 Pass 3 A Pass 3 NT Pass 4 Pass 5 Dble.

Opening lead king of STRANGE THINGS sometimes happen team of four matches, even when the players are of the highest caliber. For example, look at this hand played in the finals of a national championship. North, after passing originally, responded with a jump shift to two diamonds to show there was a chance for game despite his previous pass. He might How to Fix It Yourself By Hubbard Cobb Myrtle Meyer Eldred Feeding Problems EATLNG PROBLEMS are perpetual causes of tensions in the home. Any ceremony which takes place three times a day allows for dissension and conflict just that often.

Small children are easily swayed from a desire to eat. vfr-owym to conversa They listen Thev listen IT'S HARD ENOUGH to bring a supply of fresh cold water into a house but when you start fooling around with hot water your problems really start to grow. One of the most common hot water problems is the long wait that is involved after a tap is opened before the water starts running hot. The simplest remedy for this is to insulate the hot water pipe. The insulation will reduce the heat loss in the line in the bottom of the tank into a pail.

There is usually a tap provided for this purpose on the heater. If you do this little job every few months or so you'll usually have a good supply of clean hot water. It's quite common for hot water lines to pound or clatter when a hot water faucet is opened and this is simply due to the water being so hot that steam forms in he lines when the pressure is released. If you keep the temperature of the hot water at around 140 degrees which is a nice safe temperature, you won't be troubled with pounding and chattering lines. Many households keep running out of hot water simply because they are trying to get along with an undersized heater.

You must remember that in the past few years the need for hot water in the average home has increased considerably. The heater that was adequately 10 or even five years ago is probably too small for today's way of life. tion and it distracts them. They hear a sound outdoors and have to go to investigate its source. Their appetites are not "hearty." Food is used to fill up their stomachs for the moment, and then they are ready to call this a meal.

Parents have an entirely different viewpoint. They appreciate food because of previous enjoyable experi possibly have passed three no- 1 flxl E77 TTH FI warehouse I 1 REMOVAL i ILJL-jr -Hr wr1 CLEARANCE Sfffj jTMTIW HOLLYVOOD I llBtAlmUi BED OUTFITS yjggfp rPjjSSJ if ACCOUNT VLJ 1 I) 1 1 $54.95 now $OC SAVI 0N EXTRA-HEAVY DROP-SIDf fc.Btumu ft MATCHING BABY CRIBS TtJf $59.95 NOW A do luo oqulpmtnf, convtrfs to A'mjm WW I CHESTS ma $44 JO how. 844 I BABY CRIB MATTRESS88 liBSBSL. I VISIT OUR HEW SHOWROOM AT 9100 OLIVE ST. RP.

Is BUNK BEDS trump, but this contract would and is especially valuable where probably have gone down also, a hot water pipe must run a West made a super sound considerable distance from the double of five clubs and opened hot water heater to a tap. the king of clubs. Declarer The next common hot water Jl eventually lost three clubs and MYRTLE ELDRED problem is one of dirt and sediment pouring out of the tap along with the hot water. This is caused by the sediment in the hot water tank being drawn into the lines and the way to avoid it is to remove the sediment from the tank at regular intervals. Don't use any hot water for several hours and then drain off the sediment a diamond to go down two, which, with the 100 honors held by West, came to 600 points.

Actually, the contract was not too bad, since about all that was needed was a 2-2 trump break. When the same hand was played at the second table, the bidding went: They'll Do It Every Time By Jimmy hho CLEARANCE PRICED! DISCOUNT PRICI I now $28 $59.50 NOW $3780 1 ence with it. They think of it in terms of flesh, muscle and bone, red cheeks and bright eyes, and are upset when children neglect it. They have no patience when the child demands foods which they consider of negligible health value. Here is sufficient basis for argument, wheedling, explanation and punishment.

Not only do these make the child self-conscious about eating, but he becomes aware how important his eating is to his parent. There was never a situation more tailor-made for the child's exploitation. By not eating, he gains far more obvious benefits than by eating. He can't see what eating does for him, except the temporary satisfaction, but he certainly can see how uncomfortable he can make his mother, and how much more notice he gets when he doesn't eat. Perhaps every parent focuses too much attention upon eating.

It should be a more casual affair, the parent taking it for granted that the hungry child will eat, and as much as he wants, when food is offered. For the older child whose appetite is diminished, more efforts may have to be made. Consider that children like crisp, crunchy foods along with soft ones. They like soft foods to complement the chewy ones they are being asked to eat. They like color in food, and even a sprig of parsley or green leaf will make a plate of pallid food look more appetizing.

It never should be necessary, if small portions are offered, to coax the child to take just one more spoonful in order to clean his plate. Neither should the goodness of certain foods be flaunted. Al! he wants to know about any food is whether it looks and tastes good, and then his own appetite will furnish the impetus for eating. Feeding trouble of your hmite? Send for bnohlet, "All About Feeding from 6 month to 2 yenn." lnelo 25 rent and a Humped, ielf-ad-dreued entelope uilh your request. Addret Mr.

F.ldred in tare of the Pott-Ditpntch. '21 Sept. 7, $69.50 NOW $4480' Complete BUNK BED OUTFITS Consisting of BEDS 1 STURDY LADDER GUARD RAIL i MUST COMPLIMENT THAT'S POOR MERWM IS JUST TME -fiHERKlKJOM HOW WELL STILETTA'S INNOCENT BVSTANDEre-WAlTJ 1 HE LOOKS HE LOOKS WAV Of TELLIN TILL HIS FRAO GETS HIM SO YOUN6-SO FIT- rf FLOTILLA SHE HOME SHE'LL AGE HIM I NEVER SEEMS TO LOOKS LIKE Vja GET ANV OLDER I OLD IRONSIDES I 3 AND HOW ARE VOU SHE'S GREAT I fT VeELING.FLOTILLA? WrW-g SufsX -I MMaUeE catty gal pal 'J TELL ANOTHER 6AL OPEN AN ACCOUNT 6501 CHIPPEWA I TAT5 TKADyY 7020 W. FLORISSANT (JENNINGS) I SATURDAYS 9 A.M. 'TIL 5:30 CLOSED ALL DAY WEDNESDAY OPEN DAILY 10 TO 5 P.M.

"oms ,9 ICC OLIVE ST. ROAD PHONE WY. 4-0400 i.

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Pages Available:
4,205,153
Years Available:
1849-2024