Noblesville DQ Serves Up Last Cold Treats

To say the community is sad about the closing of the Dairy Queen on South 10th Street to make room for a roundabout would be an understatement.

The Dairy Queen has been an icon in the community – a place where families gather to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and sports wins – for nearly 70 years.

Sunday afternoon, I watched as the employees of the Dairy Queen — on the northeast corner of 10th and Pleasant streets in Old Town Noblesville — served the last hot dog, last soft-serve ice cream, last Blizzard.

People are really going to miss this place. Even after the store was dark and the building locked up, just after 6 p.m., customers were still driving in, hoping to get one last DQ favorite, but seeing disappointment in their eyes when they read the hand-written sign taped to the outdoor menu board, “We are closed. Thank you.”

Earlier in the day, at about 2:30 p.m., the store’s general manager Cathy McConnell Zeller went outside to put a message on the Dairy Queen marquee. “Thanks for the Memories.” The reader board, or marquee, had been blank all day because she was too busy inside to get out front to update the message.

The marquee is the original sign that was in front of the original Dairy Queen that William Madinger built across the street (at 807 S. 10th St.) and opened in 1954, on the southwest corner of the same intersection.

A Ledger article on May 22, 1954, read, “How much does a vacant lot cost in Noblesville? Realtors say the only way you can get a vacant lot today is tear down a house already standing on the lot. Such being the case, it cost about 9,000 bucks to make a lot for the (original) Dairy Queen about to rise on 10th Street, cater-cornered from the Hoosier Pete filling station (location of the current Dairy Queen). Those who watched the house being razed noticed the log walls. Apparently, a log cabin had stood there and a house built around it. Incidentally, a Dairy Queen is an ice cream stand,” the article read.

The Gerrards, at 823 S. 10th St., the first house south of the original Dairy Queen, sold Christmas trees on the original Dairy Queen parking lot for over a decade starting in 1954, according to county historian David Heighway, who found a Dec. 11, 1954, Gerrard’s Christmas Trees newspaper advertisement. (Betty Gerrard, a retired costumed interpreter at Conner Prairie, turned 101 on Aug. 6 and her house will be demolished, too)

Zeller, a 1972 graduate of Noblesville High School, started working at the original Dairy Queen in March 1969, at age 15, she said.

“The first night I worked, I got home, and Daddy asked me how my night went, and I said, ‘I’m never going back.’” He replied, “Yes, you are. You’re going to give it a try.”

How long did it take her to learn how to make the perfect soft-serve ice cream swirl that Dairy Queen is known for?

 “That takes a lot of practice. It looks like it’s so simple, but it takes a lot of practice,” said Zeller. “I probably had it down after two or three weeks.”

She proceeded to invite me into the Dairy Queen behind the counter and watch her demonstrate – in just seven seconds — how to make the perfect swirl, the perfect curl, on top of a soft-serve ice cream cone.

“You’ve got to end the ice cream so it’s a nice round top, then just stretch it and twirl it.” The twirl is the most difficult to learn, she said. “You want to have a nice, thick curl on it; you don’t want a real skinny one. You want it to really stand out. After all, we’re Dairy Queen, and the curl is our crown. It’s gotta look good,” Zeller said.

Just a little after 3 p.m., Cynthia Malone Pfleging, a ’72 classmate, popped in one last time to see Zeller. They worked together at the original Dairy Queen across the street. Robin Huber Ward worked there, too, all through high school. “I started at the old store across the street and made the move to the new store. It was a great place to work,” Ward said in a message to me on Monday.

Zeller continued. “We started the same year together. It was a blast. We had to wear these little white dresses, like little nurses’ dresses, with white organza aprons with a ruffle around them…. My mom has pictures somewhere,” Zeller said. “We had a great time.”

They made 50 cents an hour. “Just us two got tips,” Pfleging said.

On a good night, they made $2-$3 in tips, they said smiling.

Pfleging, who had been there earlier in the week with a cooler bag to take home Dairy Queen treats, this time, on Sunday afternoon, was invited behind the counter, too, to see if she still remembered how to make the curl on the top of the ice cream cone, which she did and proceeded to consume soon after. Pfleging smiled big as she finished the curl. “Not bad, after like 40 years,” Zeller said, clapping for her lifelong friend. 

What was so fun about working there? “We were all high school students. We all knew each other. Our friends were always hanging out. It was just fun. It was busy,” Zeller said. “We had banana split sales. Then we didn’t have Blizzards. Banana splits were the big thing. At that time, they were 49 cents, which was a lot of money back in the ‘70s. So they had 1 cent banana split sales for one day. Harvey would buy 20 big cases of bananas, 40-pound cases of bananas. There would be two of us, we’d stand in the middle, and we would peel and slice a banana and put it in a dish and slide it both directions to each window. We would do that in hour shifts … Ruby bought Corn Huskers because that was the only thing that would take the color off from all of the banana peels. We would go back and scrub and then we would take the window and two more unlucky people would get to peel bananas for an hour. They would line up, wrapped around the building, just to get in line for a banana split.”

What else did Zeller remember? “We had the old-fashioned multi-mixers and we could mix four milkshakes at a time; you got a flood of milkshakes. Things have changed so much. … Nothing was made to go. We didn’t have lids for anything. We eventually came out with little tiny cardboard discs that at the top of the cups had little indentions and those would flip down … Anybody who bought Cokes would get a cup and a straw. Things have changed so much….”

Zeller worked her summers there and after school. “It was crazy … Allisonville Road (10th Street) was the main drag,” she said.

The ABA Indianapolis Pacers players back in the ‘70s (Geist wasn’t like it is now) would take their boats to Morse Reservoir and would always stop by the Dairy Queen on the way back to Indianapolis. Their co-worker, on one occasion, waited on one of the Pacers at the window. “Oh, my God, it’s big George McGinnis,” her co-worker wailed. McGinnis signed his napkin for the co-worker …. “Pacer players were here a lot. Governors were here a lot out on Morse Reservoir,” Zeller said, also remembering when actor Clayton Moore  — The Lone Ranger – was on the Square and stopped by the Dairy Queen. “Noblesville was the hot spot for celebrities.”

She said there weren’t any businesses out there yet on 37. “Businesses were on this side, so we got all of the traffic. At that time, 10th Street was the main drag,” she said once more.

Zeller said she met Harvey Tunget first as a refrigeration man who did work at the original Dairy Queen when it was owned by Madinger.  Zeller said Tunget took a liking to the place. “He wanted it. The rest is history.” Tunget, a 1947 NHS grad and a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War, bought the Dairy Queen. A Ledger article on March 19, 1965,  reported on a “Dairy Queen Grand Opening,” with a photo showing “early customers” lining up for goodies.

Zeller said, “Harvey was great to be around. The people in town didn’t care for the way he conducted business, but he was so good to all of us.” 

Tunget had his employees weigh some of their ice cream specialties. “Things are weighed because sundaes are one of the Dairy Queen specialties,” Zeller said. “You don’t want to pay for a medium sundae which is supposed to be seven ounces and get six ounces of ice cream.”

Zeller looked across the street to the old Firehouse Pizza (which closed on June 25). “The original Dairy Queen, it was the very same building. It looked better than that,” she said pointing across the street. “And this (the current Dairy Queen location) was a gas station, and they added a car wash.”

 “After the gas station location was empty for a year or two, DQ owners Harvey and Ruby Tunget liked the location and bought the property and built the Dairy Queen where it is now (at 798 S. 10th St.).”

Zeller said, “Before we started the building, Harvey had the (original DQ) sign moved.” Ray Streib, The Ledger photographer at the time took a photo of Tunget “bent down at the base of the sign like he was going to lift it up and carry it across the street. …and that got a lot of attention,” she said.

The new Dairy Queen opened in 1975 in its current location, and a drive-thru was added. “People were excited about it because they knew we were going to have a dining room,” Zeller said. “The customers were so happy to be able to come in and sit down.” Capacity was the same then as it was today, at 20. “People had their seats when they came in. Mr. (Samuel) Weldy had the drugstore uptown. He came in every afternoon and got a strawberry sundae, and he had his seat. And if somebody was in his seat, he would come in and wait, because that’s where he was going to sit.”

The Tungets had a home built in 1977 on the southeast corner of the intersection. (I stood in the current Dairy Queen parking lot with Zeller, on July 13, sadly watching a bulldozer demolish that house at 808 S. 10th St., (which was most recently an insurance office). (Tunget died in 2014, at age 85, and wife, Ruby, died in 2008, at age 81.)

Zeller was a manager for Dairy Queen, under Tungets, 1984-89.

The Reasner family (J.D. Restaurants) bought the Noblesville Dairy Queen in 1989. (Harry Reasner, the founder of Jim Dandy, first started a restaurant business by purchasing a walk-up-style Polar Bear Frozen Custard in 1950, and later built and opened the Noblesville Jim Dandy in 1964.) J.D. Restaurants, operated by Harry Reasner’s sons, Dave and Brent Reasner, initiated a community involvement “Fundraiser Night” program, including at the Noblesville Dairy Queen, during which they have donated a portion of net sales to school groups, charities, church groups, and other local organizations.

Under the new Dairy Queen owners, Bill Grimes was a district manager for the Jim Dandy Restaurants, and his wife, Minnie Grimes, was general manager at Noblesville Dairy Queen and became part owner. The Grimes couple was involved 1989-2010. Zeller was moved to be general manager for Elwood Dairy Queen from 1991-94, then J.D. Restaurants bought the Greenfield Dairy Queen, where Zeller was there until 2010, when Minnie Grimes retired and Zeller returned to Noblesville Dairy Queen.

On Sunday at the Noblesville Dairy Queen, two of Zeller’s Noblesville employees worked with employees who traveled from other Dairy Queen stores.

All novelties were sold out. Buster Bars, Dilly Bars, ice-cream sandwiches, fudge-nut bars, DQ chipper sandwiches. Also, Zeller said at about 3 p.m., “We’re out of Cookie Dough, Cheesecake and Girl Scout Thin Mint.”

Zeller was expecting a Shelbyville DQ employee to bring cocoa. “We still have strawberries and chocolate syrup” and ingredients for banana splits, she said. “We can make most sundaes and have a few cakes left, and we have plenty of vanilla ice cream, but we’re out of chocolate ice cream.”

Originally, Zeller estimated that she would have enough supplies until 2 p.m.

But then said, “We’ll be here until we run out of ice cream.”

Earlier, at about 12:15 p.m., my daughter and theater friends gathered at the Dairy Queen, her dad bringing Rocky, our Golden Retriever, a boom box for music and a small pop-up tent to set over a picnic table and enjoyed hanging out in the shade for a while in the parking lot, consuming Dairy Queen treats.

When we arrived, Zeller was inside the dining room, laughing with NHS school friend Michael Lanning, about “the things that have happened since we were in high school together and the things that have happened in the city over the last 50 years.”

Zeller has known that the Reimagine Pleasant Street project – Noblesville Chris Jensen’s top priority for improving Noblesville infrastructure – was on its way.

Originally, she expected the Dairy Queen would stay open through September.

“When they first talked about it, Phase 1 was going to be the (Indiana) 37 intersection at Pleasant. We knew it would be a couple years. Then all of a sudden, Eighth Street to 11th street became Phase 1. We were hoping for the end of September.

I was blind-sighted by that. When I saw El Camino (Mexican restaurant at 797 S. 10th St., across the street) was going down, I thought, ‘Oh, we’re next.’ And we were next.”

She said, “We were told the same day … We were supposed to be out July 31, the same time as El Camino, but they extended us for two weeks.” Sunday was the last day for business because she and other employees will spend this week cleaning out the building. “I’ll be here until we get it emptied out.”

Heighway said, “There are probably a dozen houses from the 1870s-1890s that have come down and no one has said anything at all about that. Some of them belonged to longtime African-American families like the Averys and the Scotts.” He said, “There was plenty of discussion and warning that this would happen, but it still makes one pause. I’m not really sure what to think.”

What’s next for Zeller? “I’m going to take some time off. I’ve done this for so long, I need a break, but I’m not ready to quit working. I will stay with J.D. Restaurants in some capacity.”

She has shed a lot of tears over the past weeks after learning that the Dairy Queen would be demolished soon, along with the original Dairy Queen (where Firehouse Pizza was open until recently). Her daughter had been stopping by often and snapping photos. “We’ve had a really, really good relationship with the firefighters in town, who stop by to get treats.” She’s also getting photos with her old customers. A lot of Zeller’s former employees have been stopping in. Two employees met their husbands there. Addie Waterman and husband Eric Cunningham met in 1999 while working high school jobs when she was 15. They had to go one last time, with their family of four daughters, “to remember all of the good times,” she posted on Facebook. “I even got to make our order,” she said.

Bill and Carrie Prater sat in the corner of the Dairy Queen dining room with their daughter, April and her husband, Pete. “We were at El Camino’s the last day they were open, and we came in here the last day they’re open,” said Bill Prater, who retired this year after owning Kirk Hardware for 20 years. Bill has been going to the Dairy Queen since he was a kid and together since they were married with their own kids.

Zeller is sad to close the Noblesville Dairy Queen. Sunday afternoon, she said, “We’ve had so many loyal customers. Noblesville’s been so loyal to us.”

Contact Betsy Reason at betsy@thetimes24-7.com.