August came in with full force this week; it's been in the mid-90's all week, and next week they're calling for a few days over 100. What a better way to cool off in this heat than to eat ice cream. Unfortunately, at the grocery stores where I shop, they don't use the very cool (pun intended) heavy paper bags made just for cartons of ice cream.
I've talked to a few people, and we all agree that they were called cool-pak bags. They were basically thick small paper bags, and the extra layers of paper helped keep the ice cream cool till you got it home and could put it in the freezer. One of the people I talked with about the cool-pak bags is a friend of the family who worked in a grocery store back in the day. She said that they were instructed to put only ice cream in the bags - not even boxes or bags of frozen foods - just ice cream. She said that if shoppers would ask that she put their frozen foods in the cool-pak bags, she would do it, but she only would if the customers asked. Yes, it was their store policy to put only ice cream in the sacred bags.
And sacred those cool-pak bags were. At home, we had a hall closet where we kept the grocery bags. Note I didn't specify and say "paper bags" because back in the day, paper was all we had. It was my job to fold and put the bags in their spots in the closet - the big bags went on one side, while the smaller sized bags went on a shelf. The cold-pak bags had their own special spot on the closet. And woe be unto me if I gragged a cold-pak bag and started to pack my lunch in it. Grandma would empty the lunch out into a regular paper bag and put the cold-pak bag back in the closet.
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