My father was raised Polish Catholic. My mom was Danish Lutheran. Her father was a Lutheran minister. My parents made an agreement that my sister and I would be raised Catholic.
Every Sunday, my dad, sister, and I would drive 7 miles north on Highway 35 to St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in Frederic, Wisconsin. The service ceremony was just a delay to the stop at Dairy Queen on the way home! It was a couple of blocks away from the church. We parked on the west side of the street and had to cross Highway 35 to the other side of the street to get to Dairy Queen. There were two windows to order from and the lines were usually not very long. After ordering we would eat our purchases in the car on the way back home.
The standard fare was a chocolate ‘Dilly Bar’. Imagine a tongue-depressor stuck into a disc-shaped glob of ice cream covered in a crunchy chocolate shell. Occasionally it was offered in a crunchy strawberry shell – an exciting upgrade to a kid. On special occasions, my dad would spring for a ‘Buster Bar’ that had more ice cream in it and embedded salty peanuts.
Toward the end of our regular weekly trips to church service, we went from ice cream to the “Mr. Misty” Kiss – plastic cylinder filled with frozen fruit juice that you would push up with a short straw. For years afterwards, we would create our own push-ups at home in the freezer by saving the old tubes.
