MORE TASTEE-FREEZ: Yvonne Cattoni dropped us an email with a bit more background on the Foster Brook Tastee-Freez that was moved in the mid-1960s to a new location in Eldred where it stands today — much remodeled — as the Eldred Tasty Snax.
“After reading the two articles on the local Tastee-Freez, I thought someone should bring up the name Walt Klussmann. After speaking with his son Bruce Klussmann … I thought I’d pass along some information on Walt and Tastee-Freez,” Yvonne wrote.
“Walt owned the 37th Tastee-Freez in the country and it was located in Foster Brook. … Mr. Klussmann also owned the local Bradco Milk Co. and supplied the ice cream mix to the Tastee Freez locations,” she said. Bradco closed in the late 1960s, she said
Yvonne has been in touch with Walt Klussman’s son, Bruce, with whom she worked at Kendall in the late 1960s. He retired from Kendall in 1999 and now lives in Florida. He told Yvonne that his father owned the Tastee-Freez franchise rights for Western Pennsylvania and Western New York.
“In 1961, Tastee Freez added the Ring-A-Ling trucks that went into neighborhoods with frozen treats,” she said, adding, “Debbie Goodman Berliner and I used to wait for this truck to come out to West Branch.”
The ice cream business must have been tough back then.
“Bruce added that there was much competition from Dairy Queen, Mr. Softy and Dairy Isle to the Ring-A-Ling truck business. He told me a story where the competition would follow the Ring-A-Ling trucks to learn their routes and then would arrive into the neighborhoods 5 or 10 minutes earlier to steal the sales,” she wrote.
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WRONG ID: A number of readers have called and written to point out a misidentification of a plant on last Tuesday’s Page 1. What we identified as leeks were not that at all.
Reporter Kate Day Sager, who took the photo that accompanied a story about leeks emerging late because of our harsh winter, said she shot the photo in an area on Rutherford Run where leeks are usually plentiful.
Katie Frick, who identified herself as a wild edible forager from Westline, emailed us that she thought the plants in the picture were plantains. Not the banana-family plantain, but English plantain (Platago landcelota).
Kate went back to the woods over the weekend with her shovel to confirm that the plants were definitely not leeks. Her nose confirmed her error.
“The stink is on me for this one,” Kate said.