Regina Berger (left) was the third wife of Louis Charles Graeter. She was twenty-three years his junior. Courtesy of Graeter’s Ice Cream.
“There were a lot of companies like this in Cincinnati. They made it in the back room and sold it out the front door,” said Lou Graeter, grandson and namesake to Louis Charles. “That’s the way they ran the business. And they ran the business a long time that way.”
To make the ice cream, Louis Charles still used what was called a French pot freezer, a handmade metal bowl that looked like a cylinder and sat inside a wooden bowl filled with ice and salt. Louis Charles filled the metal bowl with a mixture of cream, sugar and eggs.
“That pot would spin the mix and force the product to the sides and it would freeze,” said Dick Graeter, another of Louis Charles’s grandsons. “Then a person would stand there with a paddle and scrape that off the walls of that freezer until it all came together and was frozen.” To spin the pots, Louis Charles lined them up and hooked them by a pulley to a single motor overhead.
In addition to ice cream, which was primarily a summertime treat at that time, Graeter’s sold chocolate confections and various knickknacks. Dick remembered:
At that time, we sold novelties, too. A lot of ceramics. In those days you didn’t have all the gift stores and all these other places selling all that stuff. That was another thing that was an extra sale that you had in the wintertime when you weren’t selling ice cream. All retail people are always looking for something else to sell, something that will pay the rent.
Grandma always did that. She would go to New York a couple times a year and buy all this stuff and bring it back. And she’d send it to stores as part of the candy cases, different novelties, even toys and things.
TRAGEDY AND TOUGH DECISIONS
Life was cut short for Louis Charles in 1919 at the age of sixty-seven, when a car struck him as he exited a trolley.
It was a scary time for Regina, who was left with two young sons, a business and not even the right to vote (which wasn’t granted to women until the following year). The world was in the midst of its first world war and the largest flu epidemic in history. The war claimed an estimated sixteen million lives, while the flu that started in 1918 killed fifty million across the globe. A fifth of the world’s population, and a quarter of the people in the United States, contracted the disease.
Cincinnati was changing during this period, too. A wartime shortage of labor and poor economic and social conditions in the southern states drove people north for factory jobs. Cincinnati became home to a large black population who settled primarily in the West End. While many were poor, black entrepreneurs settled in Cincinnati, too. Businesses such as a jazz bar called Cotton Club, which many say rivaled the club of the same name in New York, brought celebrities to the city and helped improve its image as an arts center in the Midwest. In later years, such notables as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday sang at the club.
The same year that Louis Charles was killed, the Cincinnati Reds won their first World Series against the Chicago White Sox. The title was soon tarnished, however, because members of the Chicago team were suspended for purposely losing the series for financial gain.
Graeter’s was not the only family-owned ice cream business in town during this time. Thomas and Nicholas Aglamesis, who settled in Cincinnati from Sparta, Greece, started Aglamesis Brothers Ice Cream in 1908. The duo opened their first ice cream shop, called the Metropolitan, in Norwood, an eastern Cincinnati community. A second store in Oakley followed in 1913. The product was similar, though it was not made in French pots as Graeter’s was. And, unlike the Graeters, the Aglamesis brothers were content with their two stores.
Regina had a different vision for her business. Despite being a young widow, she was determined to persevere, not just continuing with the single store but expanding it. She opened the first satellite stores on Walnut Street downtown and then in Hyde Park, which became one of Cincinnati’s wealthiest enclaves. The store, which was originally part of Higginson’s Tea Room, stood in Hyde Park Square, which was developed in 1900 as a center for shopping and community identity. This store at 2704 Erie Avenue is still in operation today and is the oldest operating Graeter’s retail store.
The Graeter’s store in Hyde Park is the oldest of the stores still in operation. It opened in 1920. Courtesy of Ken Heigel.
To help with the family business, young Wilmer, the oldest son of Louis Charles and Regina, dropped out of school in the eighth grade, because he was more interested in driving a truck, his son Dick said.
“If Wilmer was around today, he would be one of those kids labeled ADHD,” Dick said. “He was really smart, he just didn’t do well in school.” But he was, Dick remembers, very creative and artistic, an unusual combination of characteristics for someone who worked with his hands.
His younger brother, Paul, on the other hand, finished high school, though he didn’t go to college.
By 1929, Regina had opened six new stores in Cincinnati, including ones in Norwood, Madisonville, Avondale and Pleasant Ridge. To manage the volume of ice cream needed, the company purchased a manufacturing facility on Reading Road in Mount Auburn in 1934 during the height of the Great Depression. The family turned a building that once housed an old printing press into an ice cream and chocolate production plant. All of the ice cream for the retail stores started being produced on Reading Road in 1937.
The back of a tally sheet from the 1930s lists store locations at the time. Courtesy of The History Press.
As history would prove over and over, people always made room for the little luxuries in life, such as ice cream. While other businesses faltered and failed, Graeter’s grew during the most difficult economic time in the country’s history.
By the end of World War II, Graeter’s Ice Cream included a network of stores that spanned Cincinnati. By this time, Wilmer and Paul were heavily involved in the business, but it was Regina whom everyone, including her sons, called “the boss.”
Her great-grandson, Richard Graeter II, believes she must have been a remarkable person, managing everything from the death of her husband to the business through two world wars and the Great Depression, at a time when most women didn’t work outside the home at all, let alone run a business.
“I never met her, but I owe her for everything I have,” her great-grandson Richard said, “because without her strength, fortitude and foresight, there would be no Graeter’s Ice Cream today.”
A CHANGING COUNTRY, AN UNEASY ALLIANCE
By the 1940s, America was fully engaged in World War II on the European and Pacific fronts. While it took men from their homes to staff the military and forced rationing for the civilian public on everything from sugar to gasoline, the war alleviated unemployment. During the Great Depression, as many as eight million people were out of work, and another eight million lived below the poverty line. By 1941, the country had virtually no unemployment. In fact, some industries actually experienced labor shortages. Many women went to work, even in factories, to help with the war effort, making up 36 percent of the nation’s total workforce by 1945.
As she had in the decades before, Regina Graeter remained at the helm of Graeter’s Ice Cream through the war. The rationing of sugar became a particular problem because ice cream couldn’t be made without it. “You couldn’t get sugar,” said Dick Graeter.
“I worked in a couple of stores during the war years. You’d almost run out of product. Eventually I think they started to get black market sugar, which helped considerably,” he speculated.
The black market became a way of life for some people and businesses during the war because it was the only way they could get what they needed, whether that be meat, gasoline or sugar, albeit at a higher price.
One way that Americans helped in the war effort was to grow “victory gardens,” in which they planted their own fruits and vegetables. It was estimated that by 1945, twenty million gardens produced 45 percent of America’s produce.
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sp; After World War II, thousands of soldiers reentered the civilian workplace, and women returned to the home. Many businesses that had made money on the war now invested it in new plants and equipment for civilian production. Frugal Americans had saved money during the war that they now could spend on new houses and cars.
Marriage rates soared after the war, as did the birthrate, which became known as the Baby Boom. Between 1948 and 1953, more children were born than in the previous thirty years. In 1954, the country experienced the largest one-year population gain in history. The Baby Boom would reshape the American family for decades to come. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, Americans considered it ideal to have a ranch or split-level house, one car and three children, with a husband and father as the primary breadwinner and a stay-at-home wife as mother and housekeeper. From this ideal sprang the suburbs: single-family homes with yards located away from industry. In Cincinnati, new subdivisions popped up in the surrounding hills of the city, and the new middle class flocked to them.
So many people left the downtown area that by the 1950s, Cincinnati underwent what was happening all over the country: urban renewal. But as happened in other cities, the renewal was done by bulldozer. Cincinnati embarked on the country’s second largest slum clearance until that time. Thousands of buildings were razed, leaving thousands of families displaced.
The areas where Graeter’s Ice Cream stores had originally expanded to—Oakley, the East End, Bond Hill—became increasingly working class and, in some cases, new slums. Stores set up by Regina had to move to follow the population that would buy ice cream, to places such as Westwood, Price Hill and Mariemont.
CHANGES IN ICE CREAM
It wasn’t just the landscape of cities that changed. Advancements in manufacturing changed many things, from cars and appliances to ice cream.
Until after the war, virtually all ice cream manufacturers created their product by a method known as “batch freezing,” which was similar to what was done at Graeter’s, though not in true French pots. But after the war, commercial refrigeration and more sophisticated ice cream makers came along, and batch freezers disappeared. With the continuous commercial freezers, the mix of cream, sugar and eggs was poured in and quickly whipped with fast-moving beaters. These machines continuously spit out the ice cream—basically the antithesis of Graeter’s.
At Graeter’s, the mix was cranked in small batches—even today, a batch of Graeter’s makes only two and a half gallons—and had to be scraped by hand from the sides of the pots and hand-packed into cartons. The Graeter’s method incorporated the least amount of air into the ice cream, making it more dense and luxurious.
Dick Graeter remembers trying to make Graeter’s Ice Cream in one of the newer ice cream makers when he joined the company in the 1950s. “You couldn’t make the product that we were making in that type of a freezer. It would turn it into butter,” Dick said. “I tried that several different times when I came here.”
The new machines created a version of ice cream that was lighter in texture and airier than Graeter’s. By law, ice cream could have as much as 100 percent overrun, or be as much as 50 percent whipped-in air. It was, in essence, frozen foam. Graeter’s had (and still has) only a small amount of air that inevitably gets mixed in during the freezing process, just between 20 and 25 percent. A pint of Graeter’s weighs almost a pound, whereas the competition’s ice cream might weigh half as much.
Dick insists it wasn’t just a pure love of the product that kept them from giving up the labor-intensive French pot method for a perhaps more lucrative continuous freezer version. “I always said that we were too dumb to make the next step, didn’t know any better.”
The changes in ice cream production came hand in hand with the onset of commercial dairy farms. The number of small dairy farms dwindled starting in the 1930s for more than fifty years because it became cost-prohibitive. Dairy farmers figured out what to feed cows to get the maximum output in milk. The annual average yield per cow rose from 3,000 pounds in 1890 to 4,500 pounds in 1950.
Insulated trucks led to larger milk-processing plants, which could process the milk at a much lower cost. Dairy products, including the milk and cream needed for ice cream, decreased in price. For dairy farms to make money, they needed bigger operations.
Local competition in ice cream increased with the introduction of United Dairy Farmers (UDF) in the 1940s. Started by Carl H. Lindner Sr. and carried on by his children, the group started one of the first dairy stores, where milk and other dairy products, including ice cream, were sold instead of home delivered. Despite growing popularity and convenience, the UDF ice cream was made by the continuous method, making the product a far cry from the hand-packed, dense ice cream made at Graeter’s.
The plant at Reading Road includes pots for cream and men making the ice cream to the left. Courtesy of the Cincinnati Historical Museum.
Another change to the ice cream industry was the introduction of soft serve, which became possible because of new equipment that hadn’t been available until this time. “There was a soft serve place on every corner after the war,” Dick said. “It really put the ice cream businesses like ours out of business. All ice cream like ours was sold in drugstores. There wasn’t a drugstore anywhere that didn’t have an ice cream fountain.” Soft serve, sometimes referred to as frozen custard, was new and different—and widely available.
Like many culinary inventions, the history of soft serve is not definite. More than one claim to its creation exists. In one version, the silky smooth semi-frozen mixture was created by the founders of Dairy Queen, J.F. McCullough and his son, Alex, in Davenport, Illinois, about 1927. The duo decided to see if customers preferred ice cream in a softer state, before it was completely frozen. When they found that it was a hit with consumers, they started looking for machinery that would make it possible. In 1939, they found the necessary equipment. They opened the first Dairy Queen in 1940, and the phenomenon took off from there.
The competing story is that soft serve ice cream actually came from Thomas Carvelas, who was forced to sell partially frozen traditional ice cream on the streets in New York after he had a flat tire while delivering the fully frozen version. When customers loved it, he started making the softer version and selling it regularly. In this version of soft serve history, Carvelas actually invented the machine that creates the soft ice cream.
By 1956, soft serve ice cream consumption was increasing by 25 percent a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And by that year, the three major chains—Dairy Queen, Carvel and Tastee-Freez—had more than two thousand locations across the country between them.
Another change Graeter’s had to deal with was not in terms of competition but in advances in technology. The invention of the home freezer made it possible for customers to store ice cream at home. “In the ’30s before the war most of the refrigerators had one little freezer compartment that wasn’t separate. You really couldn’t store ice cream. Any ice cream that you got you had to eat right away or you bought it out somewhere,” Dick said. “When freezers were separated from the refrigerators, that really led to all the frozen food business. That did change the business significantly.”
Attitudes after the war changed, too, Lou said. “Everybody stayed home and watched TV.”
Staying home and being able to eat ice cream at home led to the production of ice cream novelties such as the Cho Cho Bar, basically chocolate ice cream on a stick, which was sold for a nickel.
WILMER’S WAYS
As for their own childhood, Dick, Lou and Kathy Graeter, Wilmer’s oldest daughter, say they don’t remember actually eating that much ice cream. “I don’t think we did eat much ice cream when we were kids because I don’t think he brought it home,” Dick said of his father. “Ice cream was more of a treat in those days.”
But Dick and Lou both remember their father being able to eat a large quantity of ice cream.
What Kathy remembers most about her father is his w
ork ethic. “He was always a very hard worker. He enjoyed what he was doing all the time,” she said. “He had a real appreciation for what the product is: unique, something special.”
It was also Wilmer, Dick and Lou believe, who came up with the idea of adding chocolate chips to the ice cream. Those chips and the way they are added are one of the hallmarks of the Graeter’s Ice Cream enjoyed today.
“Howard Johnson made the first chocolate chip ice cream. And everybody kind of copied from them,” Dick said. But the way Graeter’s adds chocolate chips to its ice cream is unique and hasn’t changed since they started doing it: melted chocolate mixed with a small amount of vegetable oil is added to the spinning pot of cream, sugar and eggs when the ice cream is almost completely frozen. (The vegetable oil guarantees the chocolate will melt in the mouth at the same temperature as the ice cream, Dick says.) It spins for a few minutes to harden into a shell and then is scraped off by hand with a paddle into the ice cream, resulting in different size chunks. It is a process that can’t be duplicated by the big continuous freezers, Dick says.
“They have a fruit feeder that adds the chips at some point when the ice cream is partially frozen. But they can’t do it the same way we do it,” he said. “Ours comes out with actual pieces of chocolate of different sizes. You can’t do that with commercial equipment. That’s one of the unique things we do that no one else can do.”
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