Lyons
The year was 1921.
The first cross-country airline flight arrived in Florida after a hopscotching, 24-hour journey. Passengers marked the historic occasion by trying to guess where the heck their luggage might be.
In New York, Albert Einstein delivered a fascinating lecture on his breathtaking new theory of relativity.
And in a remote frontier outpost at an elevation of 5,362 feet in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, the Lyons Soda Fountain and Bakery served up its first ice cream malt. The delightful concoction was so thick customers didn’t know which would collapse first – the straw or the East Coast tourist gasping for air in the corner and whining about his chest.
But this past year, it appeared the soda fountain, a business that has survived a frightening fire and even more frightening diet fads, was in its final chapter. Owners John and Darlene Chilson had run out of energy. They wanted to spend more time with their nine grandchildren. The shop that began serving travelers on their way to 6-year-old Rocky Mountain National Park would close this Friday. The Chilsons would auction off every item in the store.
But a few days ago, the god of all things sweet and creamy stepped in.
The shop, on the market for 18 months with no takers, was sold. Next Monday the Chilsons will hand over the keys to Lyons businessman James Morton, owner of the Cilantro Mary restaurant on the next block. Sometime in November, the place will once again echo with loud sucking noises through a straw.
“A part of our history was about to disappear,” Morton said Monday. “My restaurant is in an 1881 building. Lyons has history. We have to preserve what’s left.”
And the secret will live, too.
“Since it opened, the malts have been made with hard ice cream, syrup and a secret ingredient,” said John Chilson, 65, who has been behind the counter for about six years.
The secret, he said, has been whispered in the malt business since the early 1900s. But today, he said, most ice cream shops neglect the secret ingredient, which he would not reveal because, well, it’s a secret.
“Ice cream shop owners today say it’s too small a detail and it’s not important,” Chilson said. “To me it’s like saying a quart of oil in a car isn’t important.”
(Chilson, of course, was just making an analogy. You don’t earn Food Network’s coveted “Best Malts and Shakes in Colorado” award, as the Lyons Soda Fountain and Bakery did in 2005, by putting motor oil in somebody’s chocolate shake.)
In its infancy, according to yellowed newspaper clippings, the place was owned by Roy and Maudie Messick. That era apparently ended with some type of a rash.
“In 1931,” according to an article written by Maudie, “Roy got ‘itchy feet’ and wanted to get back to the bright lights of Kansas City.”
Thus began the longest tenure of any owners, the 40-year era of Glenn “Doc” Jernigan and his wife, Mabel, who fattened people up in the shop from 1931 to 1971.
Several owners came and went – as did the 1967 fire that forced the shop to relocate to the other side of Main Street – until the Chilson family took over in 2001.
And while the secret ingredient in the malts remains just that, John Chilson is more than happy to discuss an important non-secret of the shop’s equally famous ice cream sodas.
That would be the moosh.
“You start with the syrup, one scoop of ice cream and a shot of carbonated water and then you moosh ’em all up,” he said, a laugh escaping from his gray beard. “Mooshing is a science. Most places today don’t moosh. It takes too much time.”
On most days, as John worked the fountain, Darlene baked. She arrived by 6 a.m. and turned out cookies, breads and cinnamon rolls. She said she’ll miss it. “I’d turn on the radio, have the place to myself, and I’d do my thing,” she said. “And every morning I had something to show for my work. I’d actually made something.”
In the background, behind the same counter where owners and their hired soda jerks have worked for more than eight decades, John Chilson smiled.
And mooshed.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
