Not that I will miss the product in the least, but - sentimentalist and Massachusetts home-girl that I am - I sadly report that Carvel will be closing its ice cream cake factory in Marlboro, Massachusetts, this coming May. Ninety people will lose their jobs producing Fudgie the Whale and Cookie Puss cakes. (This from an AP article that appeared recently in The Boston Globe.)
While I always feel badly when people lose their jobs - especially factory workers, who won't easily find replacement work - I have never been a big Carvel fan. As an ice cream enthusiast, I have been fortunate to have spent my life in a region of the country where ice cream - despite our nasty weather - is really important, and where we have good local chains and brands, and all kinds of small specialty shops.
For a while there, we even had ice cream wars.
Years ago, a homemade ice cream shop - Kelly's, I believe - opened on Charles Street, just across the street from another ice cream store. In the thick of rivalry, someone from the "other" store tried to bomb Kelly's and ended up killing himself. (I want to say that the "other" store was a Baskin-Robbins, but I don't want to impugn that chain if it wasn't their guy who did the deed. I will say that I really dislike B-R ice cream, which tastes gummy and not particularly natural to me. Fortunately, living in a land of ice cream good and plenty, B-R is seldom the only option when you really need an ice cream fix.
But reading that the Carvel plant was shutting down, did make me a bit nostalgic for the completely awful ads they used to run, in which Carvel founder Tom Carvel would push his wares for whatever holiday was coming up: "Fudgie the Whale, for a whale of a dad" was his Father's Day special.
Now who wouldn't want to put that in front of Dad on Father's Day?
It also got me thinking about the Carvel business in general, and on the Carvel site, I learned that Tom Carvel is an immigrant success story who came from Greece as a small child, and who - on the cusp of The Depression - and with a $15 loan from his future wife - started selling ice cream off the back of his truck.
Corporate lore has it that the first Carvel shop was founded when his truck got a flat tire , and that Carvel holds a patent on some sort of ice cream making machine, as well as on "all glass front buildings with pitched roof". Not to mention that he was the "first to introduce the marketing concept 'Buy One Get One Free'", and that he built the first soft serve ice cream machine. Oh, yes, and was the "first to franchise a retail ice cream store in the U.S.," and created the first round ice cream sandwich.
Well, the firsts just keep on keeping on. First prefabricated ice cream store. (I'm guessing that means that the store itself was pre-fab.) The first in the ice cream biz to use gift certificates.
First in the industry with the gift certificate concept.
Carvel also instituted a "Little Miss Half Pint" beauty contest for girls under the age of six. (Thanks, Tom, the world really needed a beauty pageant for little girls!)
This first shall be last: Carvel was the "first to use [its] CEO in radio and TV commercials, which, of course, is what those of us who grew up in the region where Carvel had a presence - the company started out in NY - grew to know and, of course, make fun of.
There was nothing glib or silver tongued about old Tom. Years later - Carvel died in 1990 - I can still here his mumbly voice and the completely a-rhythmic way he had of speaking. "Fudgie. The Whale. For. A whale of a Dad."
The ads, though, made Tom Carvel famous, and his golfing buddies included the likes of Bob Hope, Perry Como, and Jackie Gleason. How's that for a way -back roster of celebrities of the 1950's and 1960's. ("And away we go!")
Carvel is no longer a stand-alone company, by the way. It's part of a food services company that also includes Cinnabon. Just think - Cinnabon for breakfast, Fudgie the Whale for lunch, and you could lapse right into sugar shock. (I've got a sweet tooth, but I can't stand the smell of Cinnabon, let alone the thought of eating one.)
But what an American dream. Inventions. Patents.Fortune founded on a $15 loan. Household name. Icon. Golfing buddy of Perry Como.
Most immigrants, of course, don't have quite the success that Tom Carvel did. It's nice, however, to think that some of them still do.
But it also makes me wonder how many of the 90 workers who'll be losing their jobs when the Carvel plant in Marlboro closes were immigrants, too, just trying to carvel out a small piece of the American pie (or ice cream cake) for themselves and their families.
As always when there's a plant closing, I'm a little sad.
3 comments:
I never realized that New England was the ice cream capital of the universe until I left. When I was just out of college, 20-something in the big city, one my roommates would say, "Hey, let's go get ice cream," and we'd have to decide whether to go to Steve's, Herrell's, Ben and Jerry's, or a couple of other places whose names I've forgotten, all of which were within a 15 minute walk of our apartment in the Fenway.
I have never seen another American city with the ice cream density of Boston.
You are very entertaining and a riotous collector of memories. For some reason, bored at work, I typed in google "Vallee's steakhouse" as there was one right across the street from the world's worst mall in Fall River, MA., now prominently mentioned in deadmalls.com. That restaurant certainly had pretentions of being upper-class next to Rustlers steakhouse or whatever Texas name suggested that their steaks actually came from a living, sentient animal. And I also remember the Carvel prez's ads: with that gravely voice he would say something inane like, "please try my icecream cakes, please!" From birth to Brighton and Brookline, to Fall River and then on to Cranston and Warwick, RI, and now for the last 11 years in Milwaukee, WI. But you display a sympathetic nostalgia for little details that is quite entertaining and very endearing. Thanks for the memories. Here in Milwaukee we have custard as our rich, preferred quality ice cream. My family back East seem invariably impressed by the quality of life (and ice cream)out here.
John - Yes, we still have excellent "ice cream density", thankfully.
Anonymous - Thanks for your nice comment. And the Rustler! We had one of those in a strip mall in the neighborhood I grew up in. One of my sister's friends worked there. As I recall, she had to wear some sort of cowgirl outfit.
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