A couple weeks ago, I ran a picture of a crowd of kids outside the Dover White Cliff ice cream shop on Washington Boulevard.
The picture belongs to Dixie Adams, 71. Her grandfather took the photo outside her father’s shop in 1945. Her brother-in-law is in the shot, and she got to wondering, “Who are all those other kids?”
The picture was a little dark, but I did get one positive ID. Dick Rose, of North Ogden, said he’s the guy on the far left front, holding a half-eaten hamburger in one hand.
The shop was at 12th Street and Washington Boulevard, across 12th Street from Mound Fort Middle School, which did not serve school lunch in 1945.
“All of us kids, when the bell would ring at lunchtime, would see who could get over there first to get a table,” he said. The shop only had three, so they had to be quick.
He couldn’t ID any of the other kids but does remember Dixie’s brother-in-law, Ron Phipps.
“He was a good friend of mine, played football, baseball and track. We took all of them. We were undefeated in 1948,” he said.
Phipps “was one of the guys I played football with who lost his front teeth because we didn’t have face masks. I broke my nose, but he lost his teeth.”
The article sent Grant Seegmiller and his wife, Sharon, of Kaysville, on a massive memory trip.
Grant said he went to Mound Fort and then Weber High School starting in 1936, graduating in 1949, “and then the draft got me, and that was the last of me in Ogden.”
He said the picture was “quite interesting, but I can’t make out any faces here. My wife worked for Dover’s White Cliff, so we had a lot of history.”
Sharon worked at the shop when she was 13 and 14.
“Mr. Dover used to make those big suckers she (Dixie) talked about,” she said. “He’d put a great big marble slab in the back room. He’d have it outside until it got good and cold, then he’d bring it in and grease it and pour the candy on it.
“Of course, the cinnamon was the favorite,” she said. “I remember him standing at the stove, just back behind where the counter and everything was, and maybe it was the candy he was cooking, but he’d stand by that big pot and he’d stir it and stir it.”
Clarence Socwell, Ogden playwright, said he easily could have been in the picture because he went to Mound Fort from 1936 to 1946 before switching to Ogden High School.
“Every time I think about having a strawberry malt and a hotdog with mustard, I’m taken back to my occasional lunch there,” he wrote me.
“I didn’t sit at one of the tables but sat on a stool at the soda fountain, which you didn’t mention in your piece. It was a typical soda fountain for those days, like the one in other drugstores or Newberry’s five-and-dime, downtown.”
He’s still friends with a bunch of those kids.
“Some of us who knew that corner as our school haunts still meet at the Sizzler (a restaurant at 12th and Washington built where Mount Fort used to be) for lunch on the first Tuesday of every month starting at 11:30 a.m.
“We’re known as the Mound Fort Bunch. We’ve been meeting for many years. If you or Dixie want to join us, just stop on in for lunch and a chat. We usually find a table in the south room.”
Isn’t that today?
Maybe I’ll take that picture down so they can see it more clearly.
The Wasatch Rambler is the opinion of Charles Trentelman. He can be reached at 801-625-4232, or ctrentelman@standard.net. He also blogs at www.standard.net.
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