Ice cream outings aren't what they used to be

Over the last few months I have started having intentional one-on-one time with each of my boys--Bud, Walt, and West. For a lack of better terms, we have dubbed the time as 'dates-with-dad.' Each week during an afternoon and early evening, one of my boys gets to choose what he and I alone will do together--the only constraints being that it must meet a certain financial budget, it must allow us to return home by a reasonable hour (not for their sake, but for Mom and Dad's), and it must be legal.

Apparently, as I found out the other day doing some ancestral research, this is not too far removed from an early 20th century Storck tradition. In 1877, a German immigrant, H. Charles Storck and his close friend, William Hartig, purchased a brewery in Schlesingerville, Wisconsin (pictured above) and began a legacy of recognized beer brewing that lasted 3 generations and survived The Prohibition and World War II.

However, during The Prohibition, the Storck family, in order to avoid closing down the brewery and forfeiting their capital investment, decided to try their hand at making ice cream. Incredibly, it became such a success that it soon became a very popular outing destination for fathers and their young boys. It became quite common, in fact, to see the streets of Schlesingerville flooded with fathers and their sons walking and shootin' the breeze together in the late afternoons on their way to the creamery where the boys would eat ice cream and play together in the adjacent field. Perhaps you could say that it was a father/son relationship 'reawakening' of sorts--'dates-with-dads' if you will. What most didn't know at that time, was that the Storck family didn't completely halt their production of beer. Although the ice cream outings at that time certainly didn't break any family's budget (except for maybe the Storck family) and father and son generally returned to their homes at a reasonable hour, their outings were only mostly legal.

Author's Disclaimer: Although the author certainly and unhesitatingly encourages fathers to maximize the enjoyment of time wellspent with their boys, he does not in anyway condone the participation in activities that fall short of meeting legal standards.