← Harold's Old Time Radio
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Now, the rest of the story. It was actually available in drugstores over the counter well over a century ago. You could just walk right in and buy it. And I'm thinking of one drugstore in particular, Garwood's Drugstore in Evanston, Illinois. Local church groups had long protested the products ready availability, and the Evanston Town council went along with the protest, banning its sale on the Sabbath. Well, that greatly upset Bill Garwood. He was the drugstore's owner and proprietor. Surely if what he was selling were immoral, then why didn't the town council outlaw it altogether? Otherwise they should just leave him alone. But the Evanston authorities did not leave Bill Garwood alone. Spies were sent to check up on him. The city ordinance was clear. If they could just. If they could just catch Bill in the act, if he were discovered, just wants to be pushing the stuff on the Sabbath, then they could lock him up and be done with it. Well, after a while, Bill understandably became paranoid. Even though he was complying with the ordinance by now, he found himself watching for anyone who might turn him in on some trumped up pretext. And I ought to mention at this point that the terrible something Bill could not sell on the Sabbath was. No, no, no, really. The ice cream soda. That's right. The ordinary, everyday drugstore ice cream soda was the bubbly band in Evanston. You know, Garwood's even then was a landmark of sorts. A place where the whole community just naturally gathered to meet and shoot the breeze, mostly two at a time. In some towns it was the courthouse or the barber shop, but in Evanston, it was Garwood's. Now, just outside on the corner was a fine big shade tree. Bill had rigged up a signal bell at the curb within reach of passing carriage drivers. That way, Bill's patrons could ring for service without getting out of their carriages. They could even ask for an ice cream soda to sip in the shade of that big old tree. A drive through drugstore curb service over a century ago. Much of Bill's income came from those sodas. In fact, he sold so many that they paid for his entire stock of drugs. And the sodas sold for only a nickel a piece. But then, in 1875, a wave of reform hit Evanston. That's when the city ordinance came into effect. The law which banned the sale of ice cream sodas on the Sabbath. For one thing, argued the moralists, it was a frivolous concoction, not the sort of thing decent folks would consume on the day of worship. The main objection, however, was to the soda water itself, the carbonated water that was the essentially evil element, they said. And so proprietor Bill Garwood, watching his drugstore business grind to a halt one day a week, conceived of a way to retaliate against the high minded Evanston Town Council. Now, the ultimate solution to Bill's dilemma has been claimed by a number of communities throughout the United States. But our research indicates that Bill Garwood was the first, the first man ever to take the soda water out of the soda and serve what was left on what Christians of that era called the Sabbath. He even named it after the day on which sodas could not be sold. And so forever after, it would be known as the ice cream sundae. So now you know the rest of the story.