Queen of the Dairy Queen

During the summer of our senior year, I was told that the Laconia Dairy Queen was hiring. I knew three of the girls who worked there—fellow seniors Amy and Holly, and Dana (who had graduated in 1985.)

Having lived in the Midwest for ten years, I now know that our Dairy Queen was much smaller, and with a more limited menu, than most. The one in central Illinois had been a “Brazier” Dairy Queen, and it served a full fast food menu, featuring corn dogs, burgers, and fried cheese. It also had a drive-through, air conditioning and indoor seating—the Cadillac of Dairy Queens. Our Dairy Queen was a little box of a building, and when more than two people were in the back room it felt crowded; the front “fishbowl” part was even more confining.

I picked up my application form at the window one night, and it was hard to fill out in the ways that those part-time, minimum-wage applications are for 17-year-olds: you have to list things like babysitting and that mind-numbing job you quit after one week (Dexter shoes, walking down the aisles of the windowless basement to scan for out-of-place boxes, because we never had any customers.) The hardest part was knowing what to call the position I wanted.  Business parlance seemed too formal: “frozen dairy product salesperson?” “Dairy Queen associate?” “ice cream clerk?” but I worried  that “ice cream scooper” would limit me professionally—would I get stuck making soft-serve cones while the other girls got to make Blizzards and Buster Bars?

My mother’s helpful suggestion was “just say you want to be a dairy queen. Isn’t that what they call the girls who work there?” I am still highly skeptical about this.  It was a fact that they hired only girls for the front window. Not in a Hooters type of way (check out the shirts they had us wear) but rather like the Girl Scouts— we stood for wholesome and industrious young womanhood.

I ended up going with “ice cream clerk” and learned from our manager and fellow Gilford graduate, Holly, how to fill the Mr. Misty machine, how to make Dilly and Buster bars, and how to dip the cones in the warm greasy cone coatings without having them fall in there (and remain for eternity, because I don’t ever remember cleaning those things out—this is where Holly’s memory is probably a lot better than mine.)

It was probably the closest I have ever come to joining a sorority—former Dairy Queens, mostly pretty, happy young women in their twenties, would stop at the window and, mid-order, tell us when they had worked there: 1980, 1977, 1974. My fellow Gilford grads were mostly on their way to other places very soon—so we could tolerate pompous tourists and people griping about prices and cone sizes. A common complaint: we charged extra for whipped cream on a sundae. As Holly very logically put it, "It's easier to charge extra than to subtract the cost for people who don't want it."

Some summers when I am visiting my parents I think about stopping at the Dairy Queen and telling the girl (or boy, now)  behind the window when I used to work there. But I don’t, mostly because I remember how it was to be on the receiving end of such information. At the time, I never knew how to respond, but the years have made me more curious. Did they wear uniform shirts? Did they get to eat all the free ice cream they wanted? Had they called themselves “ice cream scoopers” even though though you don’t scoop soft serve?