Ice Cream so Amazing it Gives you the Chills

Ice Cream so Amazing that it Gives you the Chills

©Copyright 2012: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

I grew up in a household where we were expected to do our best all the time.  My mother and father were both over-achievers and were propelled by this do-best philosophy all through their lives.  My father graduated from Stanford with a 4.0 GPA in 1924 and became a doctor, a pharmacist and the owner of an ambulance company all at the same time.  My mother started out as a stenographer at North American Aviation Company and worked her way up to become the confidential secretary of the president of Rockwell.  I felt like there was always something pushing me along to keep making things right and it was many years before this became part of my character rather than a force I tried to resist.

I have a radar for this personality type and appreciate those who strive to achieve greatness.  Perhaps this explains why my first trip to a new business in my town of Sebastopol was so deeply gratifying.  On the corner of the two highways that criss-cross each other in the center of our little town, where there used to be a T-shirt shop called Gone Tropo, one day in 2005, as I passed along I saw a sign on the building that said Screamin’ Mimi’s and wondered what on earth that might be.  I parked the car, walked back to the intersection and saw it was an ice cream store, an exciting find indeed.

Years before, when on a selling trip in my colored gemstone business to central California, I had stumbled across SLO Maid, a gourmet ice cream shop on the main drag of San Luis Obispo.  Ice cream stores are tough for me to not go into.  I was amply rewarded by a quality of ice cream I had not tasted since I was a little boy.  I made it a point to go to this particular store every time I was selling gems on the central coast until one day something happened to the quality and the ice cream seemed watered down, perhaps to increase profits.  I am not sure what it was, but whatever it was caused the death of the business and SLO Maid shut its doors.

I remember wishing we had something similar to SLO Maid here in Sonoma County.

And there was the jewel I had been dreaming of, right there in my little town.  Fearing yet another disillusion, I asked for a sample of chocolate chip ice cream. “We call our chocolate chip ‘Galaxy’”, I was told by the proprietress who had only recently opened her door. Skeptically I put the tasting spoon into my mouth and…..WOW!!!!!!   This was the real thing, the best I had ever tasted, bar none.

I asked Maraline Olson, that proprietress, (Mimi) how she had come to bring everybody’s ice cream dream to our little town.  The way she told it, she had come here from New York wanting to settle and was studying business at Santa Rosa Junior College when a professor advised his students who wondered what business to go into to delve into something they loved and felt passion for.  When Maraline heard those words, ice cream came to mind.

The recipes available for home-made ice cream exist in the thousands, perhaps the tens of thousands and they mostly lead you to duplicates of mediocrity ubiquitously available all over our planet.  Maraline had to rise far above mediocrity to make something special happen in her world, and she set about to create her own recipes.

I will never forget the look on her face when I asked her what her formula consisted of.  Her warm and knowing smile disappeared from her face to be replaced with a look you would expect to see on the countenance of an agent of the National Security Agency who had just been asked about America’s most guarded nuclear secrets.  She did not ask me to leave, but had I pursued it further, my guess is that she would have turned away and left me standing there.  Instead we both smiled at each other and I ordered the biggest milk shake she could make me out of Galaxy ice cream.

I owned a diamond factory in the county seat (Santa Rosa) at the time.  My drive home took me by, you guessed it, Screamin’ Mimi’s every day of the week and I took full advantage of my new find and repeated my Galaxy treat daily.  I could not believe how perfect and smooth that ice cream was, how awesome the taste, texture, richness.  It was one of those experiences that make your senses report to you that you are experiencing something world-class, something that is the product of another human’s passion to achieve greatness.

Slowly but surely people began to flock to Mimi’s from Sebastopol, from other Sonoma County towns, then other states and other countries.  Maraline put a map up on the wall along which the line forms to order up your treats.  She provided little colored push pins for customers to insert on the map indicating where they came from.  I am including a photograph of that map, still there, showing that Mimi’s fame now reaches around the world.

Hats off to anybody with that special, highly revered quality that puts him or her on a path to greatness fueled by the kind of passion we all admire.  Hats off to the business professor who pointed to that path and suggested Marline follow her passion.  By doing so, Maraline Olson has become a pillar of our community, inflexible in the quest for quality, forever devoted to the highest standards there are.  If you like ice cream, you will be floored by the Screamin’ Mimi’s experience.  Trust me.

Here is how she puts it:

Our Purpose at Screamin' Mimi's . . .

      Ice cream is fun, but we take it seriously! Our passion is to make the very best ice cream and sorbet in the world. We feature the finest, all natural ingredients from all over the world including fresh products from Sonoma County. We can taste the difference and we think you will too.

Richard von Sternberg

September 27, 2012