The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Since the vaccines needed to be refrigerated, Bert and I volunteered Dunkle’s fleet of ice cream trucks to help transport them across the country. Our franchise owners themselves got involved recruiting “Polio Pioneers,” as they were called (never “guinea pigs”). They taped up posters and handed out leaflets in their shops, at the Elks Clubs, the Rotary, 4-H, the local Boy Scouts. Nobody gives us credit nowadays, but I am telling you: Dunkle’s was responsible for encouraging hundreds of thousands of children to get inoculated against polio.

  The first national trials were to be held at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Bert and I decided we’d go down personally to hand out free Dunkle’s ice cream to all the brave little Polio Pioneers as a reward. Why, it was history in the making! And besides, the publicity, I imagined, would be marvelous.

  Commandeering an ice cream truck from our franchise in Washington, we drove to McLean bearing gallons and gallons of chocolate and vanilla ice cream mix, a huge bouquet of pink and brown helium-filled balloons, and a life-size cardboard cutout of our brand-new mascot, Spreckles the Clown. After each child was inoculated, I would hand them a coupon for a free Dunkle’s ice cream, which could be redeemed from our truck parked right outside the school, where Bert would be waiting.

  “We’ve come to celebrate all the brave little Polio Pioneers volunteering here today,” I announced over the school’s PA system from the principal’s office.

  Yet the cafeteria, where the vaccinations were to be administered, was thick with the queasy, chemical stench of poster paint and floor cleaner mixing with fumes of overheated alphabet soup. As soon as you inhaled it, you felt instantly anxious. The mothers waiting with their children chain-smoked cigarettes, chipped at their nail polish, gnawed on their cuticles. I couldn’t blame them. Their little boys and girls, five, six, seven years old—their most precious possessions in the entire world—were being offered up as human sacrifices to the gods of science—volunteering their tiny arms to be injected with an experimental vaccination. Dr. Salk had assured the nation that the polio virus he was using had been “killed.” But nobody really knew for certain. Nothing quite like this had ever been done before. It was an enormous leap of faith. Indeed, some of the parents had dressed their children as if for church, the boys’ hair slicked carefully in place, the girls in crinolined dresses and polite hair ribbons.

  The only people who seemed to take the scene in stride were the reporters. Local newspapermen. Radio announcers. Two men from NBC, one with a big, heavy camera balanced on his shoulder like a piece of artillery. They milled around smoking cigarettes and wisecracking, waiting for something striking to strike them. I decided it was smart to introduce myself, offer them Dunkle’s ice cream coupons.

  “Ice cream?” one of them said dryly. “You don’t have anything stronger?”

  Dr. Richard Mulvaney was administering the vaccines. His very own children were the first to receive them. “We’re Polio Pioneers,” his daughter announced earnestly, pushing up her puffed sleeve to show the reporters her Band-Aid.

  The trials proceeded smoothly enough from then on—though solemnly. They reminded me a little of the lines for taking Communion back at the Most Precious Blood Church—and my stack of coupons thinned. Yet suddenly the doors swung open with a horrible metallic thwonk! An exasperated mother charged into the cafeteria, yanking her son along behind her as if he were an obstinate dog. The boy was shrieking, “No! I don’t wanna get a shot! No, no! Don’t make me!” Dropping to his knees on the linoleum, he became deadweight, howling and writhing as she tugged at him.

  “Billy Junior, don’t make me whup you. I will not have you get sick and crippled for the rest of your life, do you hear me? You pick yourself up off that floor this instant, or I’ll really give you something to cry about.”

  “No! No! No! You can’t! Don’t make me! Please, Ma! Don’t! Please!” Billy Junior’s face was red as raw meat and slick with mucus; his scorching shrieks caused some of the other children to shrink back in panic. The cafeteria had grown humid. Perspiration was sliding down the back of my dress. My leg was beginning to throb. The reporters were exchanging dubious looks. The boy’s cries started to ignite everyone else’s misgivings. Mothers began murmuring and glancing toward the door. Children tugged at their mothers’ hems and began whimpering. In a moment, it seemed, there could be a massive stampede for the exit. The trials would be abandoned—years of hard work and research left in shreds.

  “Stop making such a ruckus and listen to your mother,” I bellowed, thumping my cane on the linoleum floor. “Look at me,” I heard myself say. “Is this how you want to end up?”

  The cafeteria grew quiet.

  “That’s right. You heard the lady,” Billy Junior’s mother said unsteadily, gesturing at me. “Do you want to end up like that?”

  Sniffling, the little boy regarded me with a mixture of timidity and fascination. No one, darlings, ever expects cripples to speak. Certainly they never expect us to be so candid about a condition that they themselves are trying so desperately to ignore. “You had polio?” he asked in a small voice. Sucking on his bottom lip, he inched closer. I could see his gaze trailing up and down my calf, his pupils following the crosshatch of my scars. “Can I touch?”

  “Billy Junior,” his mother scolded.

  No one but Bert or my doctors had ever bothered to look at me, to see me up close, respectfully. I shrugged. “Be my guest.” Lifting up the hem of my dress slightly, I extended my bad leg in its clunky black orthopedic shoe. The boy touched my calf hesitantly, gingerly, with only the very tip of his finger, as if he were afraid I might detonate. Some of the other children abandoned their places on line and gathered around, angling for a glimpse.

  “You see, kids?” I said in a teacherly voice. “I can’t climb a tree. I can’t roller-skate. I can’t ride a bicycle. Unless you want to have a bad leg like mine your whole life, go get your polio vaccine.” I motioned toward the nurse’s station with my chin. “And then you can have ice cream.”

  “We did good today, Lil,” Bert said proudly as he steered the truck back toward Washington. Reaching over to the passenger seat, he kneaded my shoulder. We had not worked so hard, been on our feet so long, since the Depression. The momentousness of the day, the historical significance, had devolved into just another ice cream line for us, full of whiny children, sticky hands, and melty ice cream dripping everywhere. Bert and I were so tired we decided to spend the night in Washington instead of catching the train back to New York. He booked us into the Willard. It was the fanciest hotel we had ever stayed in—right down the block from the White House! Dinner we ordered from room service. Gin gimlets. Shrimp cocktail. Steaks. Our room had its own television—far bigger than the console we had at home! As we switched it on and sat down on the couch in a daze with our cocktails, I gave a geschrei. For lo and behold, there on the six o’clock news was me—pointing at my cane and telling Billy Junior, “Unless you want to have a bad leg like mine your whole life, go get your polio vaccine.” Then Bert appeared in grainy black and white, leaning out of his truck to hand the boy a vanilla ice cream cone.

  “Even the folks at Dunkle’s Ice Cream came to help out on this historic day,” the newscaster intoned. “They offered special encouragement—and plenty of free ice cream—to all of McLean, Virginia’s brave young Polio Pioneers.”

  Grabbing the telephone, I dialed our publicist, Larry Melnick, at home back in New York. I’d wanted Dunkle’s to receive plenty of attention, of course. But on television I had looked so homely, so unglamorous. Clark Bauer—everyone who had ever discouraged me against stepping into the limelight—was exactly right.

  “I’m not sure I’ve done Dunkle’s any favors today,” I told Larry miserably. “I looked terrible. Ugly and old and crippled. And repellent.”

  But all Larry could say was, “You and Bert were on TV? Lillian, do you know how much Texaco and Colgate have to pay for that sort of publicity?”

  And so, o
n May 21, 1954, I arrived in a small studio on West Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan with the very first actor hired to play Spreckles the Clown. For the occasion I’d had my hair done at the beauty parlor—dyed even blonder, whooshed into a meringue—and I was carrying a cane whimsically painted to look like a peppermint stick. Why not? My “candy cane,” I decided to call it. Children, they loved that sort of nonsense. Larry had instructed me to wear only a plain gingham dress and an apron. “You’re a mother, a homemaker, an ice cream lady. Which is precisely your appeal, Lillian. Don’t try to be a movie star.”

  “Please. Do I look to you like Betty Grable?”

  The idea was to shoot an inexpensive television ad promoting Salk’s polio vaccine, courtesy of Dunkle’s Ice Cream. “If we offer it as a public-service announcement, perhaps a few stations will run it for free,” Larry said.

  It was our attempt, of course, to get something for nothing—that one extra potato, that handful of rice, tossed into the sack by the pushcart man.

  The commercial was shot with a single camera against the felt wall of the studio. I stood on a small platform so that my bad leg and orthopedic shoes were clearly visible. Staring directly into the lens beside Spreckles the Clown, I took a deep breath and recited woodenly:

  Hi. I’m Lillian Dunkle of Dunkle’s Ice Cream. Spreckles the Clown and I, we are begging you. (Here Spreckles got down on his knees and clasped his hands together in a hammy plea.) Please, get your children immunized against polio. I may not have a leg to stand on (and here I pointed to my bum leg and waggled my striped cane), but your kids should. And once they’ve been vaccinated, bring them to your local Dunkle’s for a free, wholesome ice cream cone as a reward. Try our delicious homemade I Got a Shot Sherbet, our Polio Pioneer Peach, or our yummy Choco-Full-of-Antibodies. Listen to me, darlings. I know what it’s like to go through life like this. And you shouldn’t have to. Besides, I’m a mother. (I smiled and shrugged.) So sue me: I worry.

  A deep male announcer’s voice (Larry’s) then concluded, This announcement is brought to you by Dunkle’s: America’s Freshest Ice Cream.

  What can I say, darlings? We filmed it and handed it over to our advertising guys at Promovox, and that was that. One local CBS network aired it at some dismal time, right after the test patterns shut off before the earliest morning news. Few people saw it. Or so we assumed. But then our franchise owners started telephoning: “Our customers saw Mrs. Dunkle on television and want to meet her.” “Some children here in Mamaroneck came in with pictures they drew of Mrs. Dunkle and Spreckles the Clown. They want to know: Is her cane really made of candy?”

  Then, as fate would have it, some insomniac bigwig over at NBC saw the commercial. He himself had had polio as a child. Before we knew it, he was on the phone to our admen, offering to air the spot for free if we abandoned his rival at CBS. He placed our commercial smack in the middle of prime time, just before the enormous hit show This Is Your Life.

  Suddenly there I was, darlings, on national television. Me. Little Malka Treynovsky Bialystoker. La Ragazza del Cavallo. Showing off my leg and my cane.

  Most of the other “mothers” on the small screen at the time, they were as cheery and prefabricated as Bakelite. Harriet Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet. Jane Wyatt in Father Knows Best. Barbara Billingsley in Leave It to Beaver. Smiling gamely, they sashayed to the front doors of their TV homes in a taffeta skirt and an apron without a hair out of place. Lemon meringue pie for personalities. But me? What can I say? I was plainspoken. I was humble. I was crippled. And I was funny. Not Lucille Ball or Imogene Coca funny: I did not do slapstick or goofball characters. It was just something in my voice, I suppose. That folksy, shrugging Italian-Jewish New York way of speaking. My character, it put people at ease, drew them in, allowed them to relax contentedly in themselves.

  Besides which, I had a new, gentler face.

  Today, of course, everyone mocks the plastic surgery I’ve had. The comedians on television, oh, are they having a field day. Please. Is this something I’m supposed to be ashamed of? You go back and live with my leg and my looks, darlings, then tell me what you would do. Few people have either my money or my guts, however, to have such work done. So as far as I’m concerned, this ruckus is just jealousy.

  And what I had corrected back then, it was tasteful. A slight lift, a slight thinning. None of this ski-jump-nose nonsense or those death masks they’re giving actresses nowadays. I simply became more refined. While I would never be beautiful, I went from looking intense and hawkish to merely earnest. Endearing.

  And the public, they went wild for me. The same mob impulse that causes pogroms and schoolyard teasing? This time, such a frenzy worked in reverse.

  Soon, “So sue me: I worry” became a hugely popular catchphrase. Customers, they gleefully parroted it in our stores, mimicking my accent. I heard it cited on the radio and on television’s Your Show of Shows. Nancy Walker even played me in a sketch with Phil Silvers! (Listen to me, darlings. Get your polio shot. Wear clean underwear. Pick up your room. Walk the dog already. And stop dating men who work as hairdressers. I’m a mother. So sue me: I worry, she said in her parody.) Finally it was decided that our Dunkle’s billboards themselves should include a picture of me, Yours Truly, waving my candy cane, beside Spreckles the Clown. LILLIAN DUNKLE SAYS, GET YOUR POLIO SHOT AND COME TO DUNKLE’S FOR A FREE ICE CREAM CONE. “LISTEN TO ME, DARLINGS. I’M A MOTHER. SO SUE ME: I WORRY!”

  Dunkle’s had to hire a clipping service to keep track of all the newspaper articles about “Lillian Dunkle, the Pied Piper of Polio,” “Lillian Dunkle, the Queen of Vaccines.” “‘Don’t Be Like Me,’ Says Dunkle’s Doyenne. ‘Immunize Your Kids.’” “Raising Her Cane—and Her Voice—for America’s Children.” Suddenly there was a photograph in the New York Times of Jonas Salk himself standing beside me and Bert at a March of Dimes fund-raiser at the Plaza’s Grand Ballroom. As the microphones were thrust before me and the flashbulbs burst, I began to enjoy myself a little. Folksy, heartwarming tales I spun about my colorful immigrant upbringing on the Lower East Side. “I’m half Jewish, half Italian, just like Mayor Fiorello La Guardia!” I told reporters. So what can I say? So I embellished a little. So I edited. I may have invented a few choice details. For Chrissakes, it was showbiz.

  By the end of the year, I was on the cover of both Life and Look magazines. Nowadays every farkakte product has some sort of novelty spokesperson. Mr. Whipple, squeezing the Charmin. Goddamn Morris the Cat pulls in six figures a year. But I was the first-ever trademark sales personality, thank you very much. In 1955 I was even a celebrity mystery guest on What’s My Line? It took Dorothy Kilgallen less than five minutes to identify me because I slipped up and answered her questions in my real voice. “Oh, I know who you are!” she exclaimed gleefully from behind her pearl-trimmed blindfold. “You’re what’s-her-name? The ice cream lady with the candy cane! ‘So sue me: I worry’! That’s it! Are you Lillian Dunkle?” To hear the whole audience roar in delight and approval, oh, it was marvelous. Bert, he and Isaac were both waiting for me in the wings afterward, with roses. I introduced them to the host, John Daly, and we went to Sardi’s to eat. Beneath the table Bert squeezed my good leg adoringly. Even Isaac said shyly, “Ma, I’m really proud of you. You were really, really boss.”

  “Lillian,” Larry told me, “you’re everybody’s warm, Italian-Yiddishe mama. Even in Peoria they love you. You have to make more commercials, and fast.”

  And so we did. This time with Bert standing beside me, simply waving.

  And our company, it grew and grew—more than I had even imagined. Even when the vaccine trials were over and a report came out attesting to its success, customers still flocked to our stores. (Where, upon Bert’s insistence, we still kept collection cards for the March of Dimes right beside our cash registers. They remain there to this very day.)

  In one year we went from 116 to 157 stores, then 184, then 203. Some of them were built with a newfangled design, Dunkle’s Drive-Ups. Each new franchi
se we ceremoniously marked on a “Dunkle’s Locations Across America” map in our headquarters with bright silver thumbtacks. Soon it was glittering up and down the East Coast, as far south as Pensacola, as far west as Kalamazoo. We bought more factories, enlisted as many big dairy and sugar suppliers as we could find. The bank loans, the contracts, the lawyers: Oh, you do not want to know.

  Me, I kept inventing fresh flavors and novelties. The Mint Everest. The Nilla Rilla ice cream cake. The lessons of the tenements, they stood me exceedingly well. One day I realized we were losing money on our ice cream sandwiches every time the chocolate wafers got crushed. I ordered our franchises to take the crumbs and fold them into vanilla ice cream. “Call it Chocolate Cookie Crunch,” I instructed in our newsletter. “Tout it as a special flavor. Use it as a topping, or a filling in our molds.” This is how our Secret Cookie Crunchies came to be—the prime ingredient in our ice cream cakes. Now we’re famous for them. I even had them trademarked. But they started out as garbage.

  “Nothing is to go to waste, do you understand? Every drop of spilled ice cream formula is a penny down the drain.” Every server was trained to make ice cream scoops weighing no more than 3.5 ounces apiece. If they botched up an order, they were to spoon the ice cream into a big tub and mix it up with the other mistakes. The next day this was sold as Pirate’s Treasure Ice Cream. Loaded with sprinkles, nuts, cherries, fudge sauce. The kids loved it. A bestseller. We discarded nothing. We squeezed out every cent of profit that we could.

  More billboards went up. Me and Spreckles the Clown, everywhere. On the radio. On NBC’s Today show. People asked us to speak at their elementary schools, at their Junior League meetings. The National Chamber of Commerce presented me with a cane coated in gold leaf; the March of Dimes enlisted Bert and me as cohosts for their annual benefit.