Ice Cream, Friendly, Family Style

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Cool down with a photo that in some way involves ice cream. Other frozen treats such as Popsicles, frozen yogurt, ice milk and sherbet are also entirely acceptable. If it's sweet and it's frozen, it qualifies.


Aha! This is the perfect excuse for an entry I've wanted to do for a while now. There's a little family-owned ice cream shop not far from where I live, and they deserve all the free advertising they can get. Let me tell you about them.


Trevor's Ice Cream is right next to Subway, in the shopping center at 22nd and Kolb here in Tucson. It's not a big place or a fancy place, not part of a franchise or a chain. It's homey and colorful, though, with green and yellow, red and blue in their walls and decor. The main menu is a big chalkboard, and there's a little chalkboard for overflow.


The owner is Trevor (hence the name), an easygoing guy with good taste in music. (He listens to KXCI, Tucson's highly independent and eccentric radio station.) When Trevor isn't working, and sometimes when he is, he's helped out by his daughter Trudy. She used to work at Unnamed Largish Company before I got there, but she prefers the ice cream business.

The ice cream itself is good (Breyer's and Good Humor, mostly) but nothing extraordinary. The three things that make this place worthwhile are the eclectic menu items, the low prices, and most of all, the customer service. Both father and daughter are friendly and quality-oriented. Trudy in particular really enjoys making these ice cream treats, and her enthusiasm is catching. If you don't know what you want, she'll gladly recommend something.

Here is one of Trudy's recommendations: a 1/2 boat banana split, with three(?) small scoops of ice cream, several toppings, whipped cream, and even a vanilla wafer cookie. "Make sure they know this is the half boat," she told me as I took this photo. The full boat split is much larger. Cost on the half boat: just $2.00! At most places, you probably can't even get one scoop of ice cream for that price any more. Yes, it tastes every bit as good as it looks. If there were such a thing as an ice cream diet that you could really lose weight on, I'd be in and out of this place all the time for 1/2 boats, orange freezes, ice cream with fruit, and other delights. As it is, I sometimes just say hello to Trevor and Trudy on my way to Subway, and buy something ice creamy only occasionally. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I know I sound like a commercial here, but there's a reason for it. Once upon a time, many years ago, I managed a small business myself (Rockarama, remember?). It's not easy to open a family business like this one, and keep it going, and do it your way instead of letting a franchisor dictate the terms. Rockarama was never a commercial success. I want Trevor's Ice Cream to do much better than that. Trevor and Trudy deserve it!

Karen

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John Scalzi also asks:

To the best of your recollection, what were you doing on this date three years ago?

I cheated. I did a search for documents last modified on 8/7/03. The results of that led me to this line item on my University of Phoenix course list:

FIN/320 Corporate Finance 3 07/10/03 08/07/03 A

Yup! Three years ago tonight, I finished up my Corporate Finance course, with one of my two favorite instructors. I was still working at Worldwide Travel then, so that's what I did all day before going to class that night. My daily writing schedule had almost certainly fallen apart by then, a victim of the copious homework. Blogging was still a little over seven months in my future.

Karen

Reminder: the next Round Robin Photo Challenge, "Summer Gardens," is almost upon us! Click here for details!

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