Valora's Ice Cream and a Girl Named Ann

My first job at Valora's not only satisfied my addiction to ice cream, it helped me right a wrong from clear back in grade school.

2890s ice cream parlor

My father got me hooked on ice ream when I was a child and may I never recover. At least once a week, he'd ask me and my sister if we'd like to go for "an I.C.E." After he calmed us down, we piled into the Chevy coupe and drove to a little place whose name I've forgotten.

Painted a wan shade of pink, its rounded windows and tarnished trims of chrome hinted of the arte deco diners of the 1920s. The luster and gleam of that era was long gone, but the ice cream still dazzled our taste buds. There was a long counter with stools that spun around taking up most of the space. No booths as I recall. No burgers and fries. Just ice cream served in a soda, sundae, or cone.

I explored many flavors, from chocolate to green pineapple to strawberry and back to chocolate. Dad's perennial favorite never changed: burgundy cherry. Whether it really had any burgundy in it, I'll never know. He never deviated from that flavor. Indeed, that generation believed that by the time one is twenty-four years old, all habits and preferences should be worked out and locked in stone.

Fast-forward to high school and my friend, Paula, whose brother purchased our neighborhood ice cream parlor, Valora's. While that childhood ice cream parlor was a pallid holdover from the Twenties, Valora's aspired to a cute Gay Nineties flair, 1890s that is. The main colors were pink and white. Several booths banked the outer walls while round tables with metal bistro chairs painted white with pink cushions filled in the floor space.

Pricilla curtains graced huge windows that showcased blown-glass figurines and examples of packaged candies sold from a counter near the door. The big seller was chocolate-mint squares. Many happy and calorie-rich hours were spent packing boxes of mints in the back room. It's a wonder the place made a profit at all.

Not only did Valora's scoop up a multitude of flavors, it served sandwiches, an awesome crab salad, and, my favorite decadence, scones. Not the crumbly, dry Scottish kind either.

Annie, the established cook and queen bee of the place, brought her old-country Danish deep-fried scones to the menu and taught us all how to cook them. The cut-out doughy circles were placed on trays to rise, then eased into the fryer. The cook flipped them over when the outer edge turned a toasty brown. We all became experts at this regardless of Annie's rigid standards.

We kids usually worked the evening shift until school let out for the summer and we could work plenty of daytime shifts. Sandwiches were top of the menu at lunchtime. Evenings, it was dessert. Customers delighted at reading our boss' literary attempts rewriting the menu. His descriptions of our sundaes inspired so many giggles, we had to wrest them away after taking orders.

Evening patrons often chose the scones and, by gosh and by golly, some scones just didn't turn out right. We were allowed to consume those after locking the doors. In fact, our supervisors, Beverly and Donna, instructed the cook to make a few mistakes as we cleaned up that night's wreckage. Sundays were slammed with people on their way home from church. We needed something to sustain us for the journey home after that long, tempestuous shift.

We would gather in one of the bigger booths with our mistakes and Beverly and Donna would hold court. As counselors and confidants, they confessed that working at Valora's was fun compared to their day jobs assisting dentists. Being new to employment, this daily grind wore on my devotedly lazy personality. I couldn't imagine anyone following a full day shift with another one as a waitress. They were on their feet all day.

Perhaps they enjoyed being around teenagers working our first jobs and hearing about our teenage shenanigans. We were all innocent Mormon kids living in a pre-drug, pre-teen-suicide world. Our life courses prescribed by the Church were set. We just had to go through the motions to attain the goal of happy families, productive communities, and ultimately, the Celestial Kingdom.

If a classmate suddenly disappeared from the roll call, she was presumed pregnant; although one teenaged mom returned to finish her class work and walk with her fellow graduates. The boys were destined for Vietnam and a different kind of disappearance. Only if they were called to go on missions were they spared from the war. Bishops sent as many nineteen-year-olds on missions as possible until the government instituted a quota of two per year. The calendar edges in those years wavered considerably.

Our world, however, was not pre-bullying. We'd all gone through some bullying in our school years. To my surprise and horror, though, I was not only bullied, but also a bully. My target was a girl named Ann. There was nothing really remarkable about her that inspired abuse. She and I were just unassuming girls hovering lower on the social scale than the girls who lived up on the Wasatch foothills.

While I don't remember being a relentless nemesis, I just followed the crowd and treated her like crap. One time, the teacher caught me behaving like a jerk and called me out in front of the class. I was properly chastened. After sixth grade, Ann and I attended different schools and didn't see each other until high school. We went about our business without much interaction at all. There were too many other distractions.

That first day working at Valora's slapped me with a well-deserved humiliation, though. Annie's granddaughter was Ann, my former victim. There she stood, greeting me with a mature smile and attitude. We worked together without malice for a few days before the comeuppance arrived.

She squared herself toward me, hands on hips. "You were so mean to me!"

I immediately apologized, telling her I was really stupid to follow the will of the mob. It amazed me how long the pain would last for her. Being the mild-mannered soul she was, she instantly calmed her anger and we became friends through that summer. When I quit to accept a full-time office job that autumn, life again took us in different directions.

girl bullying girl

It's a strange dynamic to bully someone and also to be bullied. Was my bullying because of the meanness both at home and at school? There was a group of girls who seemed to cut me out for special tormenting. Was I projecting my pain to compensate? I thought I was at the bottom of the pecking order until I discovered Ann. So, the abuse received rolled over to her. Gratefully, she forgave me upon hearing my sincere words, "I'm sorry." Amazing how that works.

I rarely heard "I'm sorry" from anyone, especially at home. Adults NEVER apologized to kids. It just wasn't done. A parent's authority was sacrosanct, even if they were spiteful or their reasoning was unfair. It was a huge surprise years later when I berated a kid in my daughter's third grade class. He told me that something I said to him really hurt his feelings. Instead of pulling the "sacred adult" trip, I apologized to him.

"I'm sorry, Nick, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

He was stunned. He wrapped his arms around me and for the rest of the year he always greeted me with a huge hug. The magic of that simple apology changed our relationship.

The resolution between Ann and I came at an opportune time as she, Paula, and I were all graduating together. To celebrate, we formed our own little wrecking crew, such as it was. How much mayhem can three naïve Mormon girls create anyway? Paula had a car to drive us around town, her family's old Henry J. Our goal was to stay up all night and greet the dawn as every other graduate was determined to do. Some of them undoubtedly achieved that goal. We didn't last much past midnight.

For those few hours, we tootled around Sugarhouse Park and along State Street with hundreds of other exuberant grads under the blazing light of our school's illuminated initial on the side of the mountain. And of course, sometime during the evening, we dropped by Valora's for a platter of celebratory scones. The twisted cinnamon scones with lots of honey and butter. At least, that seems like something we'd do.

For us, it was a wild night of freedom if not rebellion. Somewhat worthy of American Graffiti.

 I don't recall our parents even waiting up for us. I guess it was a tradition, a rite of passage that they understood. Unlike some of my other friends, Paula and Ann weren't inclined to pick up boys. They were just giggly girls opening up a new and adventurous chapter in the lives our culture already planned for us.

None of us had college in mind. Paula attended one quarter and quit. Ann never mentioned her after-high school plans. It took six years before I ventured to the ivy-covered walls of U. of Utah.

When Paula's brother sold Valora's and moved to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Paula soon followed and started her family up there. I visited her and met her very-welcoming group of Mormon friends, including a cute guy I wanted to know better. Alas, by the time I visited a year later, he had married and his wife was well into pregnancy.

I cast sights on California where all my cousins had migrated. It took a decade to finally pack the car and cross the desert to Santa Cruz, but in that time, I had accumulated all but fifty hours of college credits, more work experience, money in the bank, and a couple of stamps in my passport. Once in Santa Cruz and away from Zion, I had the courage to withdraw from the Church completely. I felt I had moved to a planet far, far away from Valora's.

In the early 1970s, I saw Ann one day in Dan's Drugs next door to Valora's. She dashed in and out after a quick 'hello' as her husband waited in the car. Her trim high school bob had grown to a long, thick braid down her back and her rumpled clothes indicated a more casual lifestyle. Waving as she clicked the seatbelt of a sporty convertible, they drove off, leaving me wishing for more time to catch up with her. Perhaps a little residue from the bullying remained and she didn't feel the need to include me in her life.

Decades later, searching Google for old friends, I found Ann's obituary. Her high school yearbook photo marked the article. It said she lived in Texas, but died in Orem, UT. Not a whole lot more about her. To my dismay, she was among those who have succumbed to the cancers or cardio-pulmonary ailments that plague Salt Lake residents. Nearly one third of my high school class had died by our Fiftieth reunion. In fact, our class president was buried the day of the Class of 68 dinner.

Not only is it sobering to read friends' obits when I'm barely out of my sixties, but I was pleased that I had atoned for my grade school sins. I was able to apologize to Ann and learn what a funny, delightful person she was. And how many of us get that opportunity?

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