When I was in the Weiner King restaurant business in central NJ back in the late 70s, we sold soft serve ice cream from behind the counter and had a self-serve sundae bar in the dining room area. This was long before the days of sneeze guards. Customers could load their cones or bowls with a wide array of syrups, like chocolate and butterscotch. We had whipped cream, wet, sticky walnuts, marshmallow goop, chunky strawberry and pineapple fruit syrups, and a nice assortment of sprinkles — also known as jimmies in some circles. I don’t know if they were called sprinkles in NYC and jimmies in Philadelphia or how it worked, but I preferred jimmies. Where I lived was kind of like an out of focus line of demarcation between the two cities and people had their selective allegiances.
At one point, I played around with the idea of getting a sign painted to hang above the sundae bar, but I found that people were such disgusting slobs, it became downright impossible to keep clean. I mean, have you ever tried scouring gooey, syrupy stuff that was spilled all over the counter and floor, and splashed on the wall? With sprinkly fruit stuck to it? Walnuts became glued within minutes and you needed a paint scraper to get them up. There was the problem with maraschino cherries, too. They rolled across the floor and customers stepped on them. This went on day and night. Eventually, I yanked the darn thing out because it got completely out of hand. There was no such thing as respect. Oh well, it’s too bad, because it was designed with children in mind (and their supervising, adult-like, responsible parents,) and the sign I came up with would have been perfect for it. I would have called it the…
