By Barbara Hertenstein
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Printed July 15, 2002
First, you hear the ragtime music playing softly on the street. Then, from the porch, you feel the breeze from a white ceiling fan move slowly over the sidewalk. Just as you start inside, Paul Krumsieg pops out the front door to have a look around, wearing a brand new Dr. Jazz shirt and a big smile. He bends down to pick up a gum wrapper from the sidewalk.
"I've always wanted to do this, since I was a little kid," Krumsieg says of the neat, old-fashioned soda fountain he has created in a historic drugstore in Lebanon. It is just week two at Dr. Jazz, Soda Fountain and Grille, and things are hopping. At lunchtime, all the booths are full, with families, teens, and other customers digging into ice cream sundaes and sandwiches.
Krumsieg is teaching a teenage employee how to make a phosphate while others are scooping up vanilla ice for oversized specials. Krumsieg's brother, Tom, is making sure the Chicago-style hot dogs get into the red plastic baskets (yes they still make them) that are delivered to the booths and tables.
Steven Farrell, 14, is tackling a banana split.
"It's bigger than I thought!" says this Lebanon teen, here with his parents, as he digs into a melting scoop of strawberry. (He's slowing down a bit; he'd already polished off a cheeseburger.) Someday, Steven says he'd like to attempt The Ice Cream Overdose. Eat 12 scoops of ice cream (plus a hot fudge, caramel, and nuts) in 30 minutes and its free.
"Nobody has done it yet," says waitress Leanne Noland, on her way to another table with sandwiches. "One guy thought if he didn't eat at all the day before, he could do it, but ....well, it wasn't so good, all that ice cream on an empty stomach."
But it's just a matter of time, Krumsieg says "Then it will be more fun when the challenges come."
If you're not up to 12 scoops, the nostalgic ice cream specials should take you back a few years: The Bearcat (vanilla ice cream, chocolate and caramel topping), The Maple Leaf Rag (two scoops of maple nut ice cream, caramel topping with roasted pecans), and the George Bailey (named for the character from "It's a Wonderful Life," coconut joy ice cream, fudge and coconut). Or sip an old-fashioned phosphate (flavored syrup and soda water).
The special for July is a Firecracker Sundae: ice cream with pop rock-type candy in it.
"It's wonderful. I love the ice cream. It tastes like it did 40 years ago," says Sharon Cornell, having lunch with her husband, Jerry, and his brother Dave Cornell and his wife, Lynn, who retired in Lebanon. It reminds them of the old days.
"Doesn't that straw sound just the same?" says Jerry Cornell, drawing in the last bit of a soda with a grin.
"This is the best ice cream anywhere," Krumsieg insists o the Wisconsin-made Cedar Crest brand he serves. "I've never begged anybody for anything, but I did beg them to let me sell their ice cream," he says.
Flavors include chocolate chip cookie dough, peaches 'n cream, elephant tracks (chocolate with peanut butter) and red raspberry. Coconut joy is so popular, it's hard to keep it in stock, says Tom, who compares it to an Almond Joy candy bar.
"My earliest memories are being out having ice cream with my family at Greenwood Dairy when we lived in Pennsylvania," says Krumsieg, one of 11 children. So it's no surprise that he wanted to create memories along with ice cream, polishing the old drugstore cases, cleaning the tin ceiling and keeping the ceiling fan in place.
"About 70 percent of what looks old is original," he says. That includes old signs, a phone booth, and memorabilia in the cases, custom built for the store in about 1902.
Most important, six chrome stools form a neat line in front of the original Coca-Cola counter, scrubbed back to its bright red-red orange, the countertop slightly worn in spots from years of elbows.
But before all that could be put back in place, he gutted the building, tuckpointed and painted the exterior a deep brick red and opened several windows that had been filled in years ago. Now sunlight streams in from the west, where new tables with red-and-white Coca-Cola umbrellas seat about 35. inside booths, tables and the counter seat about 50.
When he scrubbed paint off the front of the store, he found old metal signs from the 1930s that say: "Fountain Service" and "Sundaes 10 cents." "I think they just painted over them when the prices went up," he says. He went on scrubbing inside and out. Everything gleams.
He and his father built the booths along one side and the tables in the center. He had the refrigeration compartments rewired so they still serve ice cream out of the original unit. (You can fix anything if you can pay for it," he says with a laugh.) It took a year and a half to get it just right.
Krumsieg's sister had lived in Lebanon years ago and loved it (it's the only town where she cried when she left, he says). She moved to California, but was planning to move back. Krumsieg was in Lebanon inspecting a house for her when he spotted the closed drugstore.
"When I saw it, I knew this was what I'd been looking for. It was just perfect timing," he says with a happy smile. "It was providence."
The building, built in 1848, has held a drugstore for a century, first owned by T.A. Wilson, then by the Freshour family. William Freshour closed the store several years ago.
"Paul did a great job," says Martha Korte, William Freshour's daughter. She and her daughter, Lauren, 18, were having lunch at Dr. Jazz the other day. "It's absolutely gorgeous. I'm so glad somebody kept it as it was." Lauren will be the fourth generation to work here, says her mother who occasionally worked at the family drugstore in the summertime.
Most daytime customers are out-of-town visitors, but evening customers are regulars, Krumsieg says. "It's nice - they come in and sit and talk."
Courtney Belcher, 8, of Lebanon has been in every day for chocolate ice cream. Her considered opinion: MMmmm!
