Column: Consensus? No, never on sundae
RONALD REAGAN was famous for liking jelly beans, but he may have also been partial to ice cream, since in 1984 he named July "National Ice Cream Month" and the third Sunday of the month "National Ice Cream Day."
This week, the Sacramento Bee ran a nearly 3,000-word story titled: "Here's the Scoop: Everything you need to know about ice cream as its big day approaches."
Actually, the third Sunday of July was last Sunday, but that's not what caught my eye in the Bee story.
In a section of the piece titled "Great scoops in history," there was this:
"1881 -- The owner of a soda fountain in Madison, Wis., placed a scoop of ice cream into a soda glass, topped it with chocolate sauce and called it a sundae because it was sold only on Sundays. The price was 5 cents. A historical marker was erected in 1973 to mark the site."
Now, I knew Madison was famous in the world of ice cream, mainly due to the work of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Stephen Babcock, who revolutionized the dairy industry more than a century ago by developing a test to measure the butterfat content in milk.
Babcock eventually won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and had the dairy building named in his honor. Today ice cream from Babcock Hall is revered by UW graduates worldwide.
But the first ice cream sundae? Noted with a historical marker?
Alas, the Bee story was in error. But I did some research Friday and learned something I didn't know: It wasn't in Madison, but the ice cream sundae was invented in Wisconsin -- in Two Rivers, near Manitowoc.
I was pleased to discover that famous Wisconsin first, and not just because I like ice cream sundaes. I was happy because I knew that if a small town in Wisconsin was claiming credit for inventing the sundae, there had to be another small town somewhere else that was laying the same claim.
In other words, a controversy, and what newspaper writer doesn't like controversy? As the great columnist Jimmy Breslin once observed, "There is no slight so small it can't be turned into a lifelong feud." (Breslin, in his book about Damon Runyon, also noted that there was never a situation so dire that a fresh edition of a Hearst newspaper couldn't make it worse.)
Where small towns in Wisconsin are concerned, I wandered into just such a controversy earlier this year, when I wrote about Seymour, which is where the hamburger was invented. At least, Seymour says so. In 1885 a 15-year-old boy named Charlie Nagreen was trying to sell meatballs at a Seymour fair but noted no one wanted to sit down long enough to eat a plate of meatballs. Inspiration struck. Charlie mashed his meatball flat and stuck it between two slices of bread so people could eat while walking around the fair. The hamburger was born.
When I wrote about this, however, I got a curt note from Jeff Lassen, the fourth generation of Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Conn., informing me that the hamburger was invented at Louis' Lunch in 1895.
I was somewhat sympathetic, because I know how high emotions can run on these matters of great historical significance. Madison was on the other end back in 2005, when I learned that the city of Willimantic, Conn. -- what is it about Connecticut, anyway? -- was laying claim to have held the first "boombox parade," on Memorial Day 1986.
Every Madisonian knows that the boombox parade was actually invented four years earlier -- on April 1, 1982 -- by the UW student prankster Leon Varjian, who led a 22-piece marching band, wearing discarded Indiana University uniforms bought by Varjian at an auction, down State Street. The boomboxes blared the music of John Philip Sousa, courtesy of WORT Radio.
On Friday, after reading about Two Rivers and its claim to the ice cream sundae, I checked and, sure enough: Two Rivers' claim to inventing the sundae in 1881 was challenged, just last summer, by Ithaca, N.Y., which claimed the sundae was first served in Ithaca in that same year of 1881.
The rhetoric between officials in the two cities got pretty heated.
It seems to me there is only one thing to do. If after all these years we can't decide who was first, let's have a contest and decide which city makes the better ice cream sundae. Let me be the first to volunteer to be a judge.
Heard something Moe should know? Call 252-6446, write P.O. Box 8060, Madison, WI 53708, or e-mail dmoe@madison.com.
