His ice cream made folks smile during depression
S. Prestley Blake, the elder of two brothers who co-founded the Friendly’s ice cream chain in 1935, parlaying the profits from five-cent double-dip cones into a sprawling empire of eateries, died Feb. 11 at a hospital in Stuart, Fla. He was 106.
The cause was a gastric blockage, said his wife, Helen Blake.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was still a first-term president when Blake, then 20, and his brother Curtis, 18 at the time, opened up shop in Springfield, Mass., in the summer of 1935.
They opened their ice cream parlor with a $547 loan from their parents — who wagered that with some industriousness and ingenuity the two young men could see themselves through the Great Depression — and the conviction that cheap sweets and cheerful service would keep the customers coming.
Taking stock of their competition, which sold a double-dip cone for a dime, the Blake brothers decided to offer the same treat for a nickel. The gambit worked: Their first evening in business, according to the Springfield Republican, the line out the door kept them open until midnight, racking up sales of 552 cones for $27, plus change, in profits.
It was gruelling work, with one brother making ice cream by night and the other scooping it by day. But if the stress wore on them, they aimed never to let it show, promising customers service worthy of the restaurant’s name. (At the time it was known as Friendly; the “’s” was added in 1989, by which time the chain was on its second corporate owner.)
“We were friendly guys,” Blake once told the Palm Beach Post. “We wanted to give the ice cream parlor a happy connotation to it.”
In 1940, they opened a second shop in West Springfield, Mass., adding diner food — hamburgers to start, as well as grilled cheese sandwiches.
By the next year, the Blakes had 10 restaurants in Massachusetts and Connecticut, according to company history, and by 1974 there were 500 locations.
In 1979, the Blakes sold their chain for more than $160 million to Hershey. In 1988, Hershey sold it for $375 million to the Tennessee Restaurant Company, which took Friendly’s public in 1997.
Last month, Friendly’s and its remaining 130 locations were sold to Amici Partners Group for a reported $1.9 million.