On a recent Saturday night, as my wife, grandson, and I approached The Cup on Linden Street, we made our predictions as to how many people would be standing in line.
"10," said my grandson. "12," said my wife. "15," said I. There were 45.
Okay, it was Saturday night, but it wasn't the middle of summer, and it wasn't particularly hot. On any given night, there could be 45 people in line at this venerable ice cream establishment at 1430 Linden Street, with a branch on the south side of Bethlehem, near the Lehigh campus.
The enduring appeal of The Cup, also known as the Bethlehem Dairy Store, and to old-timers Mowrer's, has always fascinated me. It's not personal. I don't have money invested in it. I know one owner, though not all that well, and I'm not even really an ice cream freak. There's something about The Cup that is alluring, not least because somehow an ice cream dispensary in a town that gets cold in the winter and sometimes into spring and fall is able to thrive for 12 months a year.
The current owners, Bill Burkhardt and Rick Buckenmeyer, both local guys, bought it in 1983. Burkhardt thus became that rare educator who was always running into his students outside of school. He was an assistant principal at Freedom High when they bought the place in '83, and he became principal at Liberty High in 1990. Pity that when you got sent to the principal's office, you could not meet at The Cup.
B and B made a fateful decision soon after they bought The Cup. They would make their own ice cream instead of selling a product purchased from larger ice cream purveyors. They could save a little money, but it was just as much the desire to increase the flavor line, which these days rarely goes under 40. The flavor variety is, to my mind, a major factor of The Cup's success.
Burkhardt reports that a group of people come over from Phillipsburg around the holidays when The Cup makes bisque, a favorite of Italians, and also my oldest son, who loves getting out-of-the-mainstream flavors. Older folks favor butter pecan, an enduring mystery. No one in history has ever mentioned the two words butter and pecan together except at an ice cream store. Personally, I like staring at The Cup menu and being able to think, "Hey, there's chocolate raspberry truffle. Maybe someday I'll get that," even though there is absolutely no chance of that happening. I'm an incurably boring ice cream guy who gets vanilla or some form of it 90% of the time, but I like the fact that chocolate raspberry truffle is an option in the same way that skydiving is an option.
There's a level of efficiency at The Cup, too, even though high school kids appear to be running the show. "The first thing I ask a prospective worker in a hiring interview," says Burkhardt, "is, 'Do you like people?' You can teach them how to do the job, but the most important thing is dealing with the public."
There's something else going on at The Cup, too. I'm among the world's least patient people, disinclined to wait in any kind of line for anything. Yet I'll do it at The Cup because I enjoy staring at the variety of people who come in, sensing the continuum between past and present, the link between generations.
My neighbor, Kyle Rogers, a retired schoolteacher, worked at The Cup between the ages of 15 and 22. He calls Burkhardt one of his life mentors, and now he's back once a week making gallons of ice cream, and from time to time digging into the chocolate marshmallow banana and bourbon praline, his favorites.
I asked my grandson why he likes going to The Cup, which is a mandatory visit whenever he comes to our house. "It's just a nice place to go," he says, shrugging. In our eternally roiling culture, we need more nice places to go.
"Plus," he added, "there's ice cream."
