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Another favorite ice cream bar that is no more
By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Staff Writer
POSTED: December 28, 1987
At a busy Cherry Hill intersection yesterday, another bit of roadside America succumbed to the inexorable advance of suburban development.
The Cowtail dairy bar, where fountain boys in white shirts and bow ties scooped out thousands of ice cream sundaes and milkshakes over the last 54 years, where victorious high school athletes were feted with cascades of whipped cream, where romance flourished in the knotty-pine booths, and where the faint aroma of hot fudge from the steamer assailed the willpower of uncountable dieters, shut down its refrigerators and locked its doors.
Soon the quirky, stucco-and-wood ice cream parlor at the intersection of Evesham Avenue and Springdale Road will be torn down and the spot where it stood paved over and turned into a commercial strip.
"This is progress, I guess," said Robert Gilmour, son of the dairy farmer who first began dishing out homemade ice cream there in 1933. "At what point do you stop it? If it were stopped 20 years ago, all right. But we're not in the country anymore. And who's to say we should be the last guy?"
A lot of customers and former employees would have, that's who.
All afternoon yesterday, dozens of people ignored the calendar and the thermometer to take their last licks at the dairy bar.
"There are enough strip stores already," declared Nellie Cohen, a Voorhees resident who had stopped by with her video camera to record the Cowtail's final moments.
Like Cohen, many arrived with cameras to record the last day of the wholesome relic. They posed in front of the Cowtail sign, before a heap of whipped cream or together with the Cowtail's founder, John Gilmour, 79. He stopped by each table to say, "Thank you for stopping in on our demise" and signed his name to dozens of souvenir menus.
Gilmour had to turn down requests for other memorabilia, at least until he goes to settlement with the shopping-center developer, Site Development Inc. of Marlton. People have already made offers for fountain glasses, Formica tables, pieces of the knotty-pine walls, the jukebox, two bubble-gum machines, dairy implements, the bovine-inspired wall decorations, and the goats and chickens housed in the Moo Zoo adjacent to the ice cream parlor.
"The goats, especially. Everyone wants a goat," he said. "I don't know where they're going to put them, but they're welcome to them."
When John Gilmour converted his front porch into an outlet for his excess milk production in 1933, Cherry Hill was called Delaware Township, Evesham Road was paved with gravel, and his herd of dairy cows grazed in bucolic splendor on 500 acres of sprawling pasture.
But today, Cherry Hill is a booming suburb with an insatiable appetite for open land. Gilmour said he grew tired of chasing errant cows through the paved streets of the Woodcrest housing development. And, what with good help hard to find and insurance costs rising faster than the price of milk, Gilmour decided to close the Cowtail and devote his time to raising Tennessee walking horses on his remaining 100 acres.
"When I heard this place was closing, I was in shock," said Bob Parisi, 35, now a resident of San Antonio, Texas. Raised in Voorhees, he spent the summer between high school and college running the Cowtail's electric ice cream maker. "This place is entrenched in my high school memories."
Back East for the holidays, Parisi bundled up his three young children for a farewell trip to his old haunt. He ordered sundaes for them, showed them the animals at the petting zoo and said he hoped that they would remember more about the place than the taste of walnut syrup.
The Cowtail's booths, shaped to look like horse stalls, seemed to remind nearly everyone who stopped by yesterday of their youth.
"It was in one of the booths back there that Jim proposed," said Terry Campbell of Voorhees, pointing to a darkened section of the restaurant where she and her husband had conferred quietly over a pair of milkshakes on May 15, 1953. "It was the night of the senior prom. We drove out in Jim's '49 Ford," she said. Nine months later they came back for sundaes and got officially engaged.
Charles Harris Jr., 42, a former dishwasher who used to devour quarts of ice cream behind the grain silo, also returned yesterday to help with the dishes, while his son, Charles Harris 3d, scooped out his last banana splits and brooded about where he might find another job. "I'll try one of the shopping centers. Maybe a Friendly's (restaurant)," the younger Harris said.
Toward 5 p.m., as the last customers wiped the sticky ice cream from their chins and shook John Gilmour's hand, a crowd of former employees gathered at the back of the fountain, talking about their favorite flavors and the job's occupational hazard: "dipper's wrist."
Rich Schweitzer, a Cherry Hill resident attending Georgetown University and a graduate of the "Class of '82" Cowtail staff, said that working at the dairy bar had been intertwined with growing up. "You went from high school to Cowtail to college," he explained.
No one called them soda jerks; fountain boy is the preferred term, said Howard Maisel, 17, the veteran member of the Cowtail's last crew. Maisel, a student at Cherry Hill East High School, said that working at the dairy bar had taught him more than how to balance two banana-split dishes in one hand. He can keep a straight face "while telling a customer that ice cream has no calories," he said.
"This was more than a job. You didn't do it for the money," said Rich Federman, who worked six years at the Cowtail before leaving to go to college at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. "This is family."
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