June 24, 2019 - I woke up at 2:00 this morning and recalled something that happened to me over 75 years ago… in Center, Texas in 1939. My earliest life memories began when I was three years old and I ate my first ice cream on June 19th of that year. My parents made home-made ice cream on that day every year to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Mother was 15 years old and Daddy was 20 when Daddy eloped with her, drove to Mansfield, La. and got married by lying about her age. And every year without fail on June 19th, they got us kids together to make ice cream.
Up to the time I entered High School we lived in rent houses with no indoor plumbing, electricity, phone, car or refrigerator. (We placed our milk and butter in the well bucket and lowered it into the well to keep them cool.) The Center Ice House made house deliveries of blocks of ice daily.
Since we didn’t have an ice cream freezer, we took a large bucket and placed a gallon syrup bucket (filled with ice cream ingredients) inside it. Then we put chipped up ice between the small bucket and the large one (to the top of the buckets) and sprinkled salt on the ice. Then came the hard part: we took turns grasping the bail of the syrup bucket and turned the bucket from side to side until the ice cream mixture began freezing inside the lining of the bucket. Since the bucket didn’t have a “mixer” turning inside it, about every ten minutes Mother would remove the syrup bucket lid and scrape down the frozen layer. Then she put the lid back on and by repeating this process several times the cream would totally freeze in about 45 minutes. When she made the final removal of the lid, it was like waiting for Santa Clause to get our bowl of ice cream. I usually sipped on mine to make it last longer.
As I lay in bed this morning, I could envision Mother, Daddy, Bill, John and me… sitting in the light of our “coal oil” lamp and turning the bucket bail. We were too unbelievably happy to even know we were poor folks. And as I recalled my wonderful childhood days with loving parents and siblings, I felt a smile slowly moving across my face…
…and then a tear.
