You Scream, I Scream

Sixty years ago, the Baskin-Robbins chain began... around the corner from our house in Glendale.



These days, most mornings the owner of the building sells coffee and danishes out of the spot... but the birthplace of Baskin-Robbins sits mostly empty.

I think it's time for Baskin-Robbins owner Dunkin' Brands (which also owns Dunkin' Donuts and Togo's) to bring the ice cream chain back to its original home. I'm not sure the building's current owner would agree... but the history buff in me would love to buy a cone in the same spot that Irv Robbins first got into the ice cream biz, 60 years ago.

Darleene at the Glendale News-Press shares the story of how the global ice cream franchise began life as a single scoop shop, right in Glendale's Adams Hill neighborhood:

Irv Robbins opened his first ice cream shop, called Snowbird, on Dec. 1, 1945, at the corner of Adams Street and Palmer Avenue in south Glendale. Robbins' brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, opened Burton's in Pasadena the next year. Eventually, the two teamed up to create Baskin-Robbins and established its corporate headquarters, plant and storage facilities in Burbank and Glendale along Victory Boulevard.

"The first store to carry the name opened in 1953 in Pasadena," said John Carlson, director of the company's franchise services in the West, who started at the company as a 16-year-old ice cream scooper. "Then, over time, Irv converted the Snowbirds to Baskin-Robbins."

The duo sold its first licensing agreement in 1948, the same year they introduced the 31st flavor, chocolate mint, the forerunner of mint chocolate chip. The company was part of the Southern California landscape, even introducing a "baseball nut" flavor to commemorate the Dodgers move to Los Angeles from Brooklyn in 1958. The flavor was changed in 1962 -- the peanuts replaced by cashews -- to welcome the Los Angeles Angels to the American League.

The ice cream shop that began as a Snowbird in Glendale is now a franchise operation with more than 5,400 retail shops throughout the world.