I looked at what I posted last year on my birthday, and I don’t think I can top it. So, here it is again, with one number changed in the title.

Yes, it’s my birthday, and I’ll cry if I want to. After all, 82 is a pretty big number. I’d much rather be 28 (I think). And, no, I am certainly not crying.

I thought about the birthday parties my parents gave me when I was young, today. Or rather, I thought about thinking about my early birthday parties, but the truth is I really don’t remember them. Did I have birthday parties? I mean real birthday parties, with friends and classmates, not just birthday cake and candles with my family. I am not sure. Michael Bobroff, do you remember?

Actually, I do remember one party. I don’t know how old I was, but I was in elementary school, and my memory is that the party was the party that I wanted to have. My guess is it was a Saturday afternoon, and I think we all went to see a matinee at the Tivoli or the Varsity, the two theaters then operating in the Delmar Loop area in University City, Missouri. And then we went down the street to the Velvet Freeze Ice Cream Store, and had ice cream. My memory is that I became very upset while I was at Velvet Freeze, and that my party was ruined. But I don’t know why I was upset. Maybe because my friends were more interested in the ice cream and in each other than with me. But that’s just a guess. And now that I am thinking about it, maybe there was no movie, just Velvet Freeze. I have no idea.

Since I couldn’t remember much about my other birthdays, and I only remember Velvet Freeze (if you aren’t from St. Louis, or maybe Kansas City, you have never heard of Velvet Freeze), I decided to look up Velvet Freeze. The article I saw at losttables.com, a website devoted to old St. Louis restaurants, was very informative. The article started with the invention of the ice cream cone at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (an accidental invention to be sure, when someone took a waffle from the waffle man and wrapped it around his ice cream, and everyone said: “Voila, you have invented the ice cream cone.”

Well, in fact, we don’t know the name of the guy who wrapped his waffle around his ice cream (it was probably not Voila), but we do know the name of one guy who decided that this might be a business opportunity, and quickly became a large manufacturer of cones in the city which then supplied most of the cones made in America, and shipped them around the country. His name was Grosberg. Oscar Grosberg.

Now, until today, I didn’t know anything about Oscar Grosberg and his cone factory. I found it interesting that Grosberg was spelled with one “s”, not two, which is not typical. And then I remember that my father’s sister, Mary (I called her Aunt Mary, by the way) had a very good, long time friend named Roz Grosberg, and I just looked her up on findagrave.com, and – lo and behold – she was a one “s” Grosberg. Could she have been the daughter of the cone king? Is this something you would like me to look into further?

Well, back to our story. It turned out that another Jewish immigrant to St. Louis, Jacob Martin, started what he called the Union Ice Cream Company (later the Original Double Dip Ice Cream Company), which operated at the same time that Oscar Grosberg was making cones. And, wouldn’t you know it, Jacob and Oscar decided to join forces and make both ice cream, and they named their new company: Velvet Freeze, Inc.

This was no small company. It had two ice cream factories, one in South St. Louis on Gravois (do you know how to pronounce Gravois?), and another in the north of the city. And, according to the article, by 1936, it had 50 stores in the greater St. Louis area, and then expanded into Kansas City and elsewhere.

The company continued to thrive through the 1970s, under different ownership, but eventually the stores began to close and, in 1986, the Velvet Freeze factory stopped making ice cream. A major St. Louis dairy, Pevely (“white in the bottle, pink on the cheeks”) began to manufacture ice cream under the Velvet Freeze name, but it really didn’t catch on.

Today, November 26, 2024, there is only one Velvet Freeze ice cream store left. It is a homey looking place on West Florissant Boulevard in the suburb of Jennings. You can’t go there today, because they aren’t open on Mondays or Tuesdays, but they should be there tomorrow, opening at 2 p.m. Next trip to St. Louis, I may try it out. They have over 50 flavors, and they make their own ice cream using the original Velvet Freeze recipes, on Saturday nights.

By the way, the “lost tables” website is a great one, if you are interested in old St. Louis restaurants. I did also read the write up of Rinaldi’s Pizzeria, located just a few blocks from the Velvet Freeze on Delmar, where I spent much of my high school years with dates and friends and the likes, eating the square cut, extraordinarily greasy, pizzas with home made (I think home made) sausage. And – and this is true – I tasted every bit of that pizza as I read the article this afternoon. It was that good.

Rinaldi’s is not there anymore either (in fact the block that it was on has been torn down I saw a few weeks ago, getting ready for something big, I assume), and moved from University City west to Creve Coeur in the early 1970s. It’s not there any more either. I don’t think any of Al Rinaldi’s kids wanted to take over a pizza business.