Golden Days at Our Town's Dairy Queen

In the 'burg, Dairy Queen was more than a place; it was a feeling. It was the anticipation in the pit of your stomach as you rounded the corner and saw the red roof in the distance.  It was the taste of summer, sweet and fleeting, captured in every bite, every lick, every sip. If your stomach could have a Christmas of its own, Dairy Queen would be the presents under the tree.

While retail in Ogdensburg had the likes of Grants, Fays, or Ames, Dairy Queen was one of the culinary queens. Sure, you could buy ice cream at P&C, and mom could forcibly contract carpal tunnel in her wrist trying to scoop some at home, but it just wasn’t the same. No, rolling into their parking lot, and getting a soft serve with the little curly at the top of a sugar cone on a warm, sticky July night, replete with flying insects throwing themselves at the overhead yellow bug lights, well, that was special. The trip, the atmosphere - it was all part of the experience, much like Starbucks is today, absent the pretentiousness.

It was an odd barn-shaped building, with a slated red roof, certainly out of the ordinary unless you were in Pennsylvania Dutch country, on top of which was the little Dairy Queen herself, wearing a Dutch-style cap and dress, a little 5-foot weathervane, going where the wind would take her, calling all souls with hunger pangs to her magical dairy-themed palace.

In addition to grabbing some chow or ice cream at the order window with the sliding screens and the high-school girls with their short-sleeved chocolate brown uniform tops with tan accents, made the act of ordering a Dilly Bar feel like an illicit transaction in deliciousness. There was also a dining area, where you could pick out songs on the jukebox right at your table, or throw down quarters in the precursors to video games., like Sea Wolf or Duck Hunt.

The first thing that hit you wasn't the scent of Brazier Burgers sizzling on the grill or the sugary allure of freshly spun Mr. Misties. No, it was the auditory salad of the buzzing of conversations, the metallic clinking of spoons against stainless steel tumblers, punctuated by the chime of the cash register, or the slushy whirring of a shake being crafted.

Mothers always seemed to have no problem with kid’s pleas to go there, perhaps to get out of a night of cooking,  although if you had a mother like mine, she’d rip whatever cool deliciousness you had out of your hand to “help you” by “cleaning up” the sides before it dripped. Gee, thanks, mom. But you could always count on her to have plenty of napkins should you drip, spending about 10 minutes pulling them out from those dispensers until you had enough paper in hand to cause the foreman at Diamond to add an additional shift.

The menu was a lexicon of mouth-watering fast food joy. Brazier Burgers, with their special sauce, grilled on an open flame, served as the hearty prelude to the main act of dairy delicacies with catchy names like Dilly Bars - round lollipop-like ice creams, each one a perfect swirl encased in a thin shell of chocolate, on a stick - Buster Bars, those cylindrical vanilla ice cream novelties with Spanish peanuts embedded in them, also on a stick and covered in a hard chocolate shell. Sundaes, meanwhile, were not just served; they were bestowed upon you in little baseball helmets, turning every kid into a temporary titan of the diamond, batting a thousand in cool, creamy, sugary, deliciousness. “Blizzards” - their shakes - came with a long, thin red-colored spoon, as there was no possible way to create enough suction with a straw, short of the vacuum of outer space.  Then rounding out the batting order were Mr. Misties, which came in a kaleidoscope of colors, each sip a step closer to brain-freeze bliss. If you listened hard enough, you could hear Gene Wilder singing “Come with me and you'll be In a world of pure imagination…”

Going to Dairy Queen after school was the kid’s version of a VFW post, with friendships forged over shared fries and tales taller than the Blizzard of '77,  where you went to celebrate the small battles, like acing a test or surviving another week of Mrs. Frasier’s algebra class. The prices, laughably cheap by today's standards, meant that even the most financially challenged among us could afford a tray of culinary happiness. For $5, you could get enough food to satisfy the OFA football team; today, $5 would get you a small fry.

Our Dairy Queen is long gone, supplanted by Kinney Drugs. Yipee.

So here's to the Dairy Queen of "the 'burg," a respite for moms too tired to cook, teens looking to see and be seen, and people of every type enjoying a great burger, some fries, and frozen dairy treat.

Consider this an ode to a time when calories didn’t matter, there were no peanut allergies, all kids rode bikes, and whatever crazy things you did (that you shouldn’t have done) only lived on in the memories of your friends, not forever on social media. And plenty of memories of us teen kids from the ‘burg still live on, and thank God for that.