Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,12
“the queen of the dairy business.” By 1941, when Pearl Harbor came under attack, ten Dairy Queens had sprung up around the Midwest. Shortly thereafter, Sherb Noble, along with millions like him, stepped out of the picture. “In June of 1942 I went into the service for Uncle Sam and did not return until the fall of 1945,” he wrote. “From 1945 on you may know the history of Dairy Queen as well as I do.”
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These nonchalant final words about the early, prefatory days of Dairy Queen are more profound than perhaps Noble meant them to be. The prewar years tend to conjure up swing music, jitterbugs, and Bette Davis. But the country that began to emerge from the Great Depression was more shambling and rough around the edges than perhaps collective memory serves.
Few universal truths ever apply to an entire national experience, but on a broad, overwhelming level, the Depression cast a heavy pall over American life that carried through the late 1930s. The humiliation of hunger and rickets and pellagra, the worn-out clothes and Hoovervilles and relief lines, had all sent shamed citizens into a painful extended hiding. While the United States never hit 25 percent unemployment again, as it had in 1933, the so-called Roosevelt Recession of 1937–38 all but wiped away the fragile gains of the recovery.
In 1940, only about half of US homes had indoor plumbing and less than a quarter of the population had a high school degree. The precariousness of daily life had left communities riven by division and suspicion; demagogues advocating for communism, isolationism, socialism, anti-Semitic populism, dog-eat-dog free-market anarchy, and fascism found easy popularity. Segregation still held, and the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, along with the tattered economy of the 1930s, which had caused many newer arrivals to leave, had left the country less ethnically diverse than before. Moreover, the shine of opportunity that had drawn millions from rural areas into the developing cities had also halted.
But slowly, conditions stabilized. The droughts ended and the dust—figurative and literal—settled. In 1938, after decades of worker-rights wrangling, the Fair Labor Standards Act went into law, steered by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, America’s first female cabinet member. The legislation installed progressive and then-controversial mandates such as a minimum wage, a forty-four-hour workweek, and regulations that kept six-year-olds from having to work in textile mills and coal mines.*
With expanded leisure hours, a more standard five-day workweek, and, eventually, single-digit unemployment, Americans started to find the time and means to reemerge from hiding. They went on Sunday drives, whiled away hours in soda shops, and saw movies at drive-ins as they sprung up. And they went for ice cream at places like Dairy Queen, which represented a simple, inexpensive, and decadent invitation to live in public once again.
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Though small slider joints had popped up in the cities and diners had started to line the roadsides for travelers and tourists, Americans still overwhelmingly ate their meals at home. In 1940—by culture, necessity, or both—only 15 percent of the average American budget was set aside to dine out.† Dairy Queen, born of Midwestern pastureland ingenuity, reflected this dynamic. Its offerings started with soft-serve ice cream in 1940 and only grew by malts, milkshakes, and banana splits in its first several years. These offerings provided an ideal, and cheap, respite from a culture of home dining; not until nearly twenty years after DQ’s founding would savory lunch and dinner items be added to the equation.
As a result, the early decades of fast food were dominated by ice cream and beverage stands in small towns and the suburbs. Until the end of 1965, the big-name chains we know today—McDonald’s, along with Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken—were still just getting off the ground, cumulatively hosting fewer than two thousand locations. By that time, the United States would be dotted with seventy-five hundred outlets of franchises such as A&W, Tastee-Freez, and most famously Dairy Queen.
For these reasons Dairy Queen will probably always be associated with soft serve, idle hours, small-town communal innocence, and wholesome Americana. In a beautiful 2010 ode to the brand, the writer Michael Parks posited that a settlement needed to have a Dairy Queen to truly qualify as an American small town. Anything less relegated it to just a blur on a highway. And soft-serve ice cream, he added, was a key social mechanism. “Soft serve requires a machine. A machine, in turn, requires a store,” he wrote. “Not quite solid, and made